To The Nines
Sleek as an otter, your curves, my breathless beauty nine.
Flirtatious, feminine, feline, glancing over your shoulder.
Sublime when in rows, like the Rockettes of Rockefeller Center.
Or paired, a queen to that numerical monarch the ten,
demure in your place in procession, walking a step behind.
Oft times a monarch yourself, an empress, a royal score.
Dressed to the nines on cloud nine, nine times out of ten,
you dare, you go for it, gaining the whole nine yards.
You frame the very day for workers to toil, nine-to-five,
grant cats to possess nine lives, and possession to be nine-tenths
of the law. Best of all, keeping time, baby is born in month nine!
Oh beautiful Nine, a beauty in youth and at nine hundred, nine
thousand, a million, a billion, and ninety-nine.
99999999
First published, Reach Poetry, UK
© 2009 Leland James
Sleek as an otter, your curves, my breathless beauty nine.
Flirtatious, feminine, feline, glancing over your shoulder.
Sublime when in rows, like the Rockettes of Rockefeller Center.
Or paired, a queen to that numerical monarch the ten,
demure in your place in procession, walking a step behind.
Oft times a monarch yourself, an empress, a royal score.
Dressed to the nines on cloud nine, nine times out of ten,
you dare, you go for it, gaining the whole nine yards.
You frame the very day for workers to toil, nine-to-five,
grant cats to possess nine lives, and possession to be nine-tenths
of the law. Best of all, keeping time, baby is born in month nine!
Oh beautiful Nine, a beauty in youth and at nine hundred, nine
thousand, a million, a billion, and ninety-nine.
99999999
First published, Reach Poetry, UK
© 2009 Leland James
Rendering Ruins A barn abandoned, left to drift alone, wind torn and breached upon the reef of time, in fields, now dust, where summer wheat was sewn: the wagons heaped with grain stood long in line to fill the grange of this once mighty ship; now but a shadow, listing, ghostly gray. Raw winds and pelts of rain how cruelly whip the wounded roof and soak the rotted hay —the roof, an April green in days before, a farmer’s name upon it stitched in white. This ark of kittens, bawling calves, no more. A rat gnaws on a crib, the final rite. Yet on this easel, raised by bardic hand, forgotten barns, forgotten not, still stand. First published, The Society of Classical Poets, US © 2012 Leland James |
Ghost Riders Wild horses on the moon, great silver beasts 18 hands high, hooves of steel, breath white as snow-- Gone. Wiped out by rocket men who never knew —did not believe, did not imagine— they were there: rocket men, whose forebears riding silver horses (on the covers of slick magazines) now haunt the silent moon. First published,Vallum New International Poetics, Canada © 2011 Leland James |
|