Putin, Our Savior and Dear Friend
Putin, you are our savior and friend, You bring joy to children and adults. Oh, your laurels of fame and success, You give wise guidance to everyone. Great leader of our wretched people, Your shoulders bear the burden of fatherly care. You led our country to peace and prosperity, So, we have become a […]
The Kingfisher poem – Amy Clampitt poems | Poems and Poetry
In a year the nightingales were said to be so loud they drowned out slumber, and peafowl strolled screaming beside the ruined nunnery, through the long evening of a dazzled pub crawl, the halcyon color, portholed by those eye-spots’ stunning tapestry, unsettled the pastoral nightfall with amazements opening. Months later, intermission in a […]
The Cooling Tower poem – Amy Clampitt poems | Poems and Poetry
By night a laddered diagram seen from the windows of this bedroom town-rayflowcrs of dread ascending and descending- identifies the cooling tower, insomniac vision revealed by day as a grayed obese archangel, its twiddled dirk of ash and rhinestone a metronomic rerun of some half obliterated last nightmare of Eden in the West: […]
Stacking The Straw poem – Amy Clampitt poems | Poems and Poetry
In those days the oatfields’ fenced-in vats of running platinum, the yellower alloy of wheat and barley, whose end, however gorgeous all that trammeled rippling in the wind, came down to toaster-fodder, cereal as a commodity, were a rebuke to permanence-to bronze or any metal less utilitarian than the barbed braids that marked […]
Stacking The Straw poem – Amy Clampitt poems | Poems and Poetry
In those days the oatfields’ fenced-in vats of running platinum, the yellower alloy of wheat and barley, whose end, however gorgeous all that trammeled rippling in the wind, came down to toaster-fodder, cereal as a commodity, were a rebuke to permanence-to bronze or any metal less utilitarian than the barbed braids that marked […]
Gradual Clearing poem – Amy Clampitt poems | Poems and Poetry
Late in the day the fog wrung itself out like a sponge in glades of rain, sieving the half-invisible cove with speartips; then, in a lifting of wisps and scarves, of smoke-rings from about the islands, disclosing what had been wavering fishnet plissé as a smoothness of peau-de-soie or just-ironed percale, with a […]
Brought From Beyond poem – Amy Clampitt poems | Poems and Poetry
The magpie and the bowerbird, its odd predilection unheard of by Marco Polo when he came upon, high in Badakhshan, that blue stone’s embedded glint of pyrites, like the dance of light on water, or of angels (the surface tension of the Absolute) on nothing, turned, by processes already ancient, into pigment: ultramarine, […]
A Hairline Fracture poem – Amy Clampitt poems | Poems and Poetry
Whatever went wrong, that week, was more than weather: a shoddy streak in the fabric of the air of London that disintegrated into pollen and came charging down by the bushelful, an abrasive the color of gold dust, eroding the tearducts and littering the sidewalks in the neighborhood of Sloane Square, where the […]
A Cure At Porlock poem – Amy Clampitt poems | Poems and Poetry
For whatever did it-the cider at the Ship Inn, where the crowd from the bar that night had overflowed singing into Southey’s Corner, or an early warning of appendicitis- the remedy the chemist in the High Street purveyed was still a dose of kaopectate in morphine-the bane and the afflatus of S.T.C. when […]
Vacant Lot With Pokeweed poem – Amy Clampitt poems | Poems and Poetry
Tufts, follicles, grubstake biennial rosettes, a low- life beach-blond scruff of couch grass: notwithstanding the interglinting dregs of wholesale upheaval and dismemberment, weeds do not hesitate, the wheeling rise of the ailanthus halts at nothing—and look! here’s a pokeweed, sprung up from seed dropped by some vagrant, that’s seized a foothold: a magenta- […]
The Sun Underfoot Among The Sundews poem – Amy Clampitt poems | Poems and Poetry
An ingenuity too astonishing to be quite fortuitous is this bog full of sundews, sphagnum- lined and shaped like a teacup. A step down and you’re into it; a wilderness swallows you up: ankle-, then knee-, then midriff- to-shoulder-deep in wetfooted understory, an overhead spruce-tamarack horizon hinting you’ll never get out of here. But […]
Syrinx poem – Amy Clampitt poems | Poems and Poetry
Like the foghorn that’s all lung, the wind chime that’s all percussion, like the wind itself, that’s merely air in a terrible fret, without so much as a finger to articulate what ails it, the aeolian syrinx, that reed in the throat of a bird, when it comes to the shaping of what we […]
Salvage poem – Amy Clampitt poems | Poems and Poetry
Daily the cortege of crumpled defunct cars goes by by the lasagna- layered flatbed truckload: hardtop reverting to tar smudge, wax shine antiqued to crusted winepress smear, windshield battered to intact ice-tint, a rarity fresh from the Pleistocene. I like it; privately I find esthetic satisfaction in these ceremonial removals from the […]
On The Disadvantages Of Central Heating poem – Amy Clampitt poems | Poems and Poetry
cold nights on the farm, a sock-shod stove-warmed flatiron slid under the covers, mornings a damascene- sealed bizarrerie of fernwork decades ago now waking in northwest London, tea brought up steaming, a Peak Frean biscuit alongside to be nibbled as blue gas leaps up singing decades ago now damp sheets in Dorset, fog-hung […]
Nothing Stays Put poem – Amy Clampitt poems | Poems and Poetry
In memory of Father Flye, 1884-1985 The strange and wonderful are too much with us. The protea of the antipodes—a great, globed, blazing honeybee of a bloom— for sale in the supermarket! We are in our decadence, we are not entitled. What have we done to deserve all the produce of the tropics— this fiery […]
Fog poem – Amy Clampitt poems | Poems and Poetry
A vagueness comes over everything, as though proving color and contour alike dispensable: the lighthouse extinct, the islands’ spruce-tips drunk up like milk in the universal emulsion; houses reverting into the lost and forgotten; granite subsumed, a rumor in a mumble of ocean. Tactile definition, however, has not been totally banished: hanging tassel by […]
Exmoor poem – Amy Clampitt poems | Poems and Poetry
Lost aboard the roll of Kodac- olor that was to have super- seded all need to remember Somerset were: a large flock of winter-bedcover-thick- pelted sheep up on the moor; a stile, a church spire, and an excess, at Porlock, of tenderly barbarous antique thatch in tandem with flower- beds, relentlessly pictur- esque, […]
Vacant Lot With Pokeweed poem – Amy Clampitt poems | Poems and Poetry
Tufts, follicles, grubstake biennial rosettes, a low- life beach-blond scruff of couch grass: notwithstanding the interglinting dregs of wholesale upheaval and dismemberment, weeds do not hesitate, the wheeling rise of the ailanthus halts at nothing—and look! here’s a pokeweed, sprung up from seed dropped by some vagrant, that’s seized a foothold: a magenta- […]
Easter Morning poem – Amy Clampitt poems | Poems and Poetry
a stone at dawn cold water in the basin these walls’ rough plaster imageless after the hammering of so much insistence on the need for naming after the travesties that passed as faces, grace: the unction of sheer nonexistence upwelling in this hyacinthine freshet of the unnamed the faceless Amy ClampittAmy Clampitt, […]
Beach Glass poem – Amy Clampitt poems | Poems and Poetry
While you walk the water’s edge, turning over concepts I can’t envision, the honking buoy serves notice that at any time the wind may change, the reef-bell clatters its treble monotone, deaf as Cassandra to any note but warning. The ocean, cumbered by no business more urgent than keeping open old accounts that never […]
The Sun Underfoot Among The Sundews poem – Amy Clampitt poems | Poems and Poetry
An ingenuity too astonishing to be quite fortuitous is this bog full of sundews, sphagnum- lined and shaped like a teacup. A step down and you’re into it; a wilderness swallows you up: ankle-, then knee-, then midriff- to-shoulder-deep in wetfooted understory, an overhead spruce-tamarack horizon hinting you’ll never get out of here. But […]
A Silence poem – Amy Clampitt poems | Poems and Poetry
past parentage or gender beyond sung vocables the slipped-between the so infinitesimal fault line a limitless interiority beyond the woven unicorn the maiden (man-carved worm-eaten) God at her hip incipient the untransfigured cottontail bluebell and primrose growing wild a strawberry chagrin night terrors past the earthlit unearthly masquerade (we shall be changed) […]
Syrinx poem – Amy Clampitt poems | Poems and Poetry
Like the foghorn that’s all lung, the wind chime that’s all percussion, like the wind itself, that’s merely air in a terrible fret, without so much as a finger to articulate what ails it, the aeolian syrinx, that reed in the throat of a bird, when it comes to the shaping of what we […]
Salvage poem – Amy Clampitt poems | Poems and Poetry
Daily the cortege of crumpled defunct cars goes by by the lasagna- layered flatbed truckload: hardtop reverting to tar smudge, wax shine antiqued to crusted winepress smear, windshield battered to intact ice-tint, a rarity fresh from the Pleistocene. I like it; privately I find esthetic satisfaction in these ceremonial removals from the […]
A Hermit Thrush poem – Amy Clampitt poems | Poems and Poetry
Nothing’s certain. Crossing, on this longest day, the low-tide-uncovered isthmus, scrambling up the scree-slope of what at high tide will be again an island, to where, a decade since well-being staked the slender, unpremeditated claim that brings us back, year after year, lugging the makings of another picnic— the cucumber sandwiches, the sea-air-sanctified […]
A Hedge Of Rubber Trees poem – Amy Clampitt poems | Poems and Poetry
The West Village by then was changing; before long the rundown brownstones at its farthest edge would have slipped into trendier hands. She lived, impervious to trends, behind a potted hedge of rubber trees, with three cats, a canary—refuse from whose cage kept sifting down and then germinating, a yearning seedling choir, around the […]
On The Disadvantages Of Central Heating poem – Amy Clampitt poems | Poems and Poetry
cold nights on the farm, a sock-shod stove-warmed flatiron slid under the covers, mornings a damascene- sealed bizarrerie of fernwork decades ago now waking in northwest London, tea brought up steaming, a Peak Frean biscuit alongside to be nibbled as blue gas leaps up singing decades ago now damp sheets in Dorset, fog-hung […]
A Catalpa Tree On West Twelfth Street poem – Amy Clampitt poems | Poems and Poetry
While the sun stops, or seems to, to define a term for the indeterminable, the human aspect, here in the West Village, spindles to a mutilated dazzle— niched shards of solitude embedded in these brownstone walkups such that the Hudson at the foot of Twelfth Street might be a thing that’s done with mirrors: […]
Nothing Stays Put poem – Amy Clampitt poems | Poems and Poetry
In memory of Father Flye, 1884-1985 The strange and wonderful are too much with us. The protea of the antipodes—a great, globed, blazing honeybee of a bloom— for sale in the supermarket! We are in our decadence, we are not entitled. What have we done to deserve all the produce of the tropics— this […]
Fog poem – Amy Clampitt poems | Poems and Poetry
A vagueness comes over everything, as though proving color and contour alike dispensable: the lighthouse extinct, the islands’ spruce-tips drunk up like milk in the universal emulsion; houses reverting into the lost and forgotten; granite subsumed, a rumor in a mumble of ocean. Tactile definition, however, has not been totally banished: hanging tassel by […]
Exmoor poem – Amy Clampitt poems | Poems and Poetry
Lost aboard the roll of Kodac- olor that was to have super- seded all need to remember Somerset were: a large flock of winter-bedcover-thick- pelted sheep up on the moor; a stile, a church spire, and an excess, at Porlock, of tenderly barbarous antique thatch in tandem with flower- beds, relentlessly pictur- esque, […]
Easter Morning poem – Amy Clampitt poems | Poems and Poetry
a stone at dawn cold water in the basin these walls’ rough plaster imageless after the hammering of so much insistence on the need for naming after the travesties that passed as faces, grace: the unction of sheer nonexistence upwelling in this hyacinthine freshet of the unnamed the faceless Amy ClampittAmy Clampitt, […]
Beach Glass poem – Amy Clampitt poems | Poems and Poetry
While you walk the water’s edge, turning over concepts I can’t envision, the honking buoy serves notice that at any time the wind may change, the reef-bell clatters its treble monotone, deaf as Cassandra to any note but warning. The ocean, cumbered by no business more urgent than keeping open old accounts that never […]
A Silence poem – Amy Clampitt poems | Poems and Poetry
past parentage or gender beyond sung vocables the slipped-between the so infinitesimal fault line a limitless interiority beyond the woven unicorn the maiden (man-carved worm-eaten) God at her hip incipient the untransfigured cottontail bluebell and primrose growing wild a strawberry chagrin night terrors past the earthlit unearthly masquerade (we shall be changed) […]
A Hermit Thrush poem – Amy Clampitt poems | Poems and Poetry
Nothing’s certain. Crossing, on this longest day, the low-tide-uncovered isthmus, scrambling up the scree-slope of what at high tide will be again an island, to where, a decade since well-being staked the slender, unpremeditated claim that brings us back, year after year, lugging the makings of another picnic— the cucumber sandwiches, the sea-air-sanctified […]
A Hedge Of Rubber Trees poem – Amy Clampitt poems | Poems and Poetry
The West Village by then was changing; before long the rundown brownstones at its farthest edge would have slipped into trendier hands. She lived, impervious to trends, behind a potted hedge of rubber trees, with three cats, a canary—refuse from whose cage kept sifting down and then germinating, a yearning seedling choir, around the […]
A Catalpa Tree On West Twelfth Street poem – Amy Clampitt poems | Poems and Poetry
While the sun stops, or seems to, to define a term for the indeterminable, the human aspect, here in the West Village, spindles to a mutilated dazzle— niched shards of solitude embedded in these brownstone walkups such that the Hudson at the foot of Twelfth Street might be a thing that’s done with mirrors: […]
Soliloquy In A Tub poem – Amy Cavanaugh poems | Poems and Poetry
Tonight I possess the gliding tides of water: Translucent and true. Their perfect perfumes Foam and bubble To coat the surface. Beneath the surface The wondrous water Knows no streak of daylight. Diligently Like a drink It hydrates My awakening face My brown curls And that intangible wonder Dubbed ‘a mind.’ Like a sun of […]
Reviving My Feminity poem – Amy Cavanaugh poems | Poems and Poetry
Lifeless – she lies on the cold-blooded floor Like a rug without its warmth and comfort. Nothing but an old ceiling fan gladly stirs the air And lets it tap the ends of her still soft hair. Creaking – the wooden floor beneath my Chilled feet smells of old tradition. I creep – tip-toeing in […]
Portrait of Rage and Age poem – Amy Cavanaugh poems | Poems and Poetry
The couple stands still – Hand-drawn And perky like dawn. Femininity had silently signed The brown paper-like frame Into her own – Using her signature Nail-polish-painted red rose And almost cherry lipstick. Age has her black hair Up in twin buns – Almost a couple themselves. Rage manages – Somehow To sneak no peek at […]