Two Poems

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Impression, Sunrise by Claude Monet, 1872

by Romain P.-A. Delpeuch (March 2022)

 

SILENCE

Machines unsting the real, remake our dreams in shapes

I’m not able to feel. Outside, our time escapes.

Let’s seek the ways of old, may they dispel the fear

long cast on souls unbold, and sharpen all the blear,

incentive glimpses of immaculate despair

extruded from above, narrating primal scare.

 

Believe the night’s soft song, peruse its glyphs in stars;

observe them well: they long and crave for blood and scars

behind their hypocrite, deceptive brightness, fake

benignity. The pit eternal, wakeless lake

you sense and feel in you, lies at our being’s core.

 

Below, remain the few pristine delights of yore,

remains a speck of hope entwined in the old roots

of trees blooming up slope. Under, rot other fruits

writhing and stinking high, ceaselessly, to our heads.

Now, I’ll rest on your thigh. Hold me. Bind us with threads.

 

 

SWEET NOTHINGS

I love the girl you were,

the girl I’ll never meet,

the girl who now is dead.

I only know defeat,

I’m late and you can’t stir

my sorrow still unread.

 

There’s no remembrance of

the silly boy I was

when you already rose

amidst the crowd’s applause

(a fickle kind of love).

The course of life so goes.

 

You keep your sadness in

when joy you spread around.

I wonder what you do

when you can’t hear a sound

and all that’s left within

is silence, gone, gone through

 

the tears you didn’t shed.

Does perfect mastery

of the deceiving art

pay for their flattery,

for truths you keep unsaid

and hidden in your heart?

 

Don’t fear to please them not,

those people who you think

have power upon you.

How all their soft words stink!

They’re stale and sour. They plot

to use and misshape you.

 

They sully what they touch

and spit corrosive lies.

How can you be so sure

they haven’t spoiled your eyes,

corrupted, as they clutch

your soul, that was still pure,

 

your first impulse, when still

you could tell right from wrong

and weren’t rebuked for it?

May you remain that strong,

and never bend your will,

your sense, your reason: never quit.

 

Table of Contents

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Romain P.-A. Delpeuch was born in south-west France, where he still lives. His poetry and short fiction have appeared in New English Review, Terror House Magazine, The Ekphrastic Review, Apocalypse Confidential and Ekstasis.

Follow NER on Twitter @NERIconoclast

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                              — Bruce Bawer

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