Dust, Dreams and Desert

Poetry by Michael Burch

DUST

Flame within flame,
  we burned and burned relentlessly
    till there was nothing left to be consumed.
    Only ash remained, the smoke plumed
  like a spirit leaving its corpse, and we
were left with only a name
ever common between us.
  We had thought to love “eternally,”
    but the wick sputtered, the candle swooned,
    the flame subsided, the smoke ballooned,
  and our communal thought was: flee, flee, flee
the choking dust.


EVERY MAN HAS A DREAM 

Every man has a dream that he cannot quite touch ...
a dream of contentment, of soft, starlit rain,
of a breeze in the evening that, rising again,
reminds him of something that cannot have been,
and he calls this dream love.

And each man has a dream that he fears to let live,
for he knows: to succumb is to throw away all.
So he curses, denies it and locks it within
the cells of his heart and he calls it a sin,
this madness, this love.

But each man in his living falls prey to his dreams,
and he struggles, but so he ensures that he falls,
and he finds in the end that he cannot deny
the joy that he feels or the tears that he cries
in the darkness of night for this light he calls love.


IMPRESSIONS OF A DESERT

a sulphuric
wasteland

seethes and glows

as from the sky 
strange brightness flows

to heat, 
congeal

oases vanish

or waver
,unreal,

even scorpions
languish

~~~~~~

sombre mountains
shift and merge

bonedry oceans
at the verge

of the horizon
stretch, converge

the sky is poison
sand storms
surge

~~~~

lizards, whining,
curse the skies

squinting fire
from burnt eyes

slipping, squirming
rattlesnakes

quench awful yearning
for moisture

and hate

~~~~~~

a flower
fated soon to die

rustles, crinkles
worn and dry

Michael R. Burch’s poems have been published by hundreds of literary journals, taught in high schools and colleges, translated into fourteen languages, incorporated into three plays and two operas, and set to music by seventeen composers.

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