A Path To Second Troy

Thank you for visiting my poem, “A Path to Second Troy…..”

This poem is a personal tribute to William Butler Yeats, who in a moment of human weakness attempted to display the human-ness and emotion surrounding the final realization of  lost love, something that is as relevant to our own lives today as it would have been 100 years ago, or 100 years from now.  The mind grows through time and wisdom, technology continues to astound and exceed expectations……  but the heart never changes.

I hope that you will enjoy my poem….

….Click above to listen along if your browser permits…

A silent tear fell upon the crushed gravel…
A stone’s grating jostle marred by loneliness.
A step forward, a step toward a falling sky.
A soured horizon, a path to somewhere unfresh…

And yet there are the steps.
There are the steps.

The flickering in the distance is my eyes desire….
The distant shimmering cloud proof that she once loved.
The grasp of nature’s claw ripping me away from that fire.
The desperation to save innocence no longer there.

And yet my steps continue on….
There are the steps.

This lone path, this path of mine alone…
shall I follow in the midst of an Angel’s chorus?
“Troy burns yet again!”  And it does…..

Steps draw me nearer, flickering clouds taking
shape of God’s Love….
When I arrive upon the gate of that fiery city
shall I lay my heart upon it’s cornerstone
and pray that the solitude of this path is a lie?

Shall my heart lay upon the warmth of that fire….

Troy is life, a being itself, a fuel for wrath…
It lives, it breathes, it burns, it topples….
But its cornerstone is cold and lonely.
Because the journey is only an illusion…..
And her path should lay barren forever.

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“Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.”

― W.B. Yeats

© 2011 John Richter

Sylvia’s True Gift to the World: Frieda

Silent stars
Setting suns
Stolen screams….

A child thrived,
your love survived
the wafting gas of that chilly, chilly morning…

An inheritance fell upon your heart
the day your mother fell upon the floor….
Her tortured soul …… no more…

Life marches on.
Your Mother’s gone.

Her bequest speckled your Father’s shelves….
A beckoning tempest of death’s notebooks calling –
calling your young eyes to find her soul within …

But she wasn’t there, was she?
Atwixt those words, those lines of Collected Poems?

Where is she now?
Do you find her in the streaking world that blasts by your Hyabusa?
And what of I?  Or us?
Are we but pixels in this wash of color that
now wallpapers your periphery?

When the whirlwind stops,
when the chase ends
and the dizziness of motion fades
you will find us all here,
the world,
loving you desperately………

I will be the sparkling pixel, dear Frieda…
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“My problem is that I am the daughter of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath,
but I wanted to be an individual. But we are, of course, a product of
our parents. In denying them, you deny part of who you are. It’s taken
me years to be ­comfortable with that”

…..Frieda Hughes

© 2011 John Richter