PoetryByARA

Book Review: Georg Trakl, The Last Gold of Expired Stars: Complete Poems 1908-1914.

It isn't exactly published poetry by me, but I did produce the book review.

My review of Georg Trakl's Complete Poems can be found at the Loch Raven Review Web site.

A Shorthand Note for Alex

My poem, "A Shorthand Note for Alex," has been published by the Maryland Writers Association (MWA) in its anthology, Life in Me Like Grass on Fire, edited by Laura Shovan and released on April 2, 2011, at the association's annual conference in Baltimore.

A Shorthand Note for Alex

Dear Sir:  this steno’s shibboleth
retrieves his brief, slender form;
Alex, my friend ripped from studies

in the banter years of boys confused
but captive to coy female eyes.
We entered class in perfumed air

as naive males, two isolated boys
growing in stature, growing familiar
with 15 girls decoding Gregg

and framing flirtatious gambits.
Alex died, and left me shorthand notes,
graceful curves he’d chased in class.

Could I revise, I’d frame a “Dear Sir” plea
to have him live my trials of afternoons
in shorthand stalled, in ecstasies begun.

 

The anthology can be ordered at the Maryland Writers Web site, www.marylandwriters.org/publications.html 

In addition, I have been awarded both first and second place in the MWA's Short Works Poetry contest for 2011.  "Elegy for a Newfoundland Cousin"  won first prize, and "Boys Learning to Swim Naked," was awarded second prize.  These two poems have not yet been published.

Coaching Young Leapers

By Allan Roy Andrews

Young females dig, bump, set, spike,
Learning a child’s game,
Yearning to leap to womanly skills.

I enmesh their aerial pursuit,
Forge their passionate leaps
At a white sphere above a net;

I deny too-early competition,
Require they control selfish steps,
Demand shared and arduous hustling.

But they leap too quickly
To ardor without instruction;
They grow fat with child

And hustle into motherhood,
Wearing their talent below their breasts
With the roundness of a volleyball.

They serve in carpeted courts
Without coaching, without scoreboards
Or applause, longing to leap once more.

 

*Originally published in Aethlon:  The Journal of Sport Literature, Vol. X, No. 2, Spring, 1993, page 76

 

 

Donor

By ALLAN ROY ANDREWS

Theology’s laboratory gathers dust,
its data, scientists say, contaminated,
its ethereal results suspicious.
Yet, it probes compounds where bodies
fall to their knees.

I’ll donate my organs to theology,
request an autopsy on my soul.
Medicine has sliced me, and psychology
undressed why I sneeze, scratch
and masturbate.

Could theology use my cadaver?
Incarnate precedent affirms
history’s dissecting martyrs who followed
God’s lead of donating his body
for our understanding.

My body hides no sacred catacomb.
Grown secular and Mosaic with years,
having bypassed flagellation
to holiness, it may find healing
in hermeneutics.

 

Originally published online by Theology Today, volume 63, number 1, April 2006.

New Quadrivium

By Allan Roy Andrews

Science begins in brain;
Philosophy begins in mind;
Poetry begins in ear and mouth;
Religion begins in breath.

For science to say anything about life, it must experiment;
for philosophy to say anything about life, it must exhaust words;
for poetry to say anything about life, it must listen;
for religion to say anything about life, it must fall on its face.

Where science ends, philosophy begins;
where philosophy ends, poetry begins;
where poetry ends, death begins;
where death ends, religion begins.

*Originally appeared in Voice, a newsletter of St. Martin's-in-the-Field Episcopal Church, Severna Park, Md., February 2002.

Propitiation

   By Allan Roy Andrews
 

Four laws of ecology:
 1) Everything is connected to everything else.
 2) Everything must go somewhere.
 3) Nature knows best.
 4) There is no such thing as a free lunch.

--Barry Commoner The Closing Circle.

Eradicated molecules obey
the laws of nature's faith
and go somewhere,
affecting something else,
living their amnesiac lives
disguised as foods or poisons--
reincarnated polymorphously;
eternal matter.

Someone or something pays
for every advance or growth;
for every giant mankind step,
mankind is expended.
Germs hosted by man
are devoured by sewer worms
who lose, obeying rules
of icthyology.
Fish, in turn, on mankind's plate
are a truly unfree lunch.

There is no death;
there is no end to Hell.
Eradicated molecules obey
and go somewhere.
Someone pays for every death;
a price is recorded
for every redemption.
There is no inexpensive grace,
only a resurrection--
for which One has paid.

 

*Originally published in The Journal of the American Scientific Affiliation, March 1977, Vol. 29, No. 1, page 45.

One of Their Kind (My Cowboys Have Always Been Singers)

           By Allan Roy Andrews

My cowboys have always been singers,
totin' guitars and not forty-fours,
and they'd never demand sarsaparilla
as they strode through those carved, swinging doors.
They'd more likely ride on the airwaves
than on stallions with saddles that shine,
and they seem to talk more about women
than cactus or sagebrush and pine.

They sing about ramblin', gamblin' and sin,
and moan about troubles in mind,
but whenever I'm caught in their long-playing spin,
I know that I'm one of their kind.

I don't wear a Stetson or spurs on my boots,
and I don't favor riding a horse,
but give me a girl in a honky-tonk bar,
and I'll sing her a sad song, of course.
If I seem an urbane contradiction,
mixing cowboys and hot city streets,
just remember, Roy Rogers and Trigger
came to life in old theater seats.

They sing about drinkin', thinkin' and sin,
and moan about troubles in mind,
and whenever I'm caught in their long-playing spin,
I know that I'm one of their kind.

I've never been west of New Jersey.
I can't rope and never roll smokes.
I'm known to sip vodka and whiskey
and in turn relate off-color jokes.
But when I'm alone in my pondering,
two friends seem to always belong:
One is my champion, Jesus,
and the other's a cowboy in song.

 

They sing about playin', prayin' and sin,
and moan about troubles in mind.
But whenever I'm caught in their long-playing spin,
I know that I'm one of their kind.

 

*This song was posted to The American Reporter [http://www.american-reporter.com]
as a tribute to Roy Rogers and singing cowboys on the occasion of Rogers' death in July, 1998.

When Mary Frye Was Dying

   (In memoriam:  Mary Frye Hatcher, 1948-2003)

   BY ALLAN ROY ANDREWS

When Mary Frye was dying, friends at church knelt longer,
but she shied from broadcast, asked no pulpit declaration;
she had rather let word trickle through the pews.

Mary Frye sat wearied from her battle with a cancer
forging veins where working vessels should not go;
yet, she lifted hands like ferns at sun’s forced leaving.

And while she smiled and kissed us, we hugged her
cautiously, reluctantly preparing for our grieving.
Mary Frye played tunes to calm her friends for dying,

and she danced amid our wonder as we turned aside
from mourning and from trembling and from wailing.
Mary Frye delivered us our mirror of mortality.

Mary Frye died teaching.  God had used her as a glance
of victory in Christ.  Oh, Jesus, grant your mercy to we who
kneel with death and cower in our tears for Mary Frye.

Published in the June, 2003, edition of "Voice," a newsletter of St. Martin's in the Field Episcopal Church, Severna Park, Maryland, where Mary Frye Hatcher was a parishioner.

Racer

By Allan Roy Andrews

Slender, thinner than one ought,
Her thighs taut, her back sloped
To drive body-force into revolutions,
She conquers nature, a captain
At the helm, married to the wind
And snarling at her upstream cruise.
A jogger on jagged steel;
A devotee to the derailleur; a lover
Lashed to drooping handlebars,
She gloats in unstepped speed,
And the sprocketed ticking
Of her spoked feet rises and fades,
A hissing siren kissing asphalt,
Luring my legs to her ways.

  *Originally published in Aethlon: The Journal of Sport Literature.  Vol. X, No. 2, Spring, 1993, page 60

 

Faith Quandary

By Allan Roy Andrews

Peter repented and received
keys to the kingdom;
Thomas believed when offered
the test of wounded flesh;
But Judas stands abandoned, left
holding the accusing sop.

He threw a silver bribe
at the feet of murderers,
and they laughed at him.
I hear even disciples
laughing at Iscariot as well
(and he about to hang himself).

Don't bedazzle me
with manifest theory
or predestiny doubletalk.
A disciple has fallen;
a believer turned traitor;
a lamb is lost and never found.

I know of cowardice
in discipleship.  I'm craven
when it comes to following.
I like to think Jesus
had forgiven Judas
when he hanged himself.

 

*Originally published in Theology Today, January 2002, Vol. 58, No. 4., page 573.

Death of The Lone Ranger

By Allan Roy Andrews

He galloped to an era unmasking
foibles in electronic heroes and
tarnishing spangles with slick songs.

His tacky mask, a harlequin's ploy,
coyly hid his love-need; he misplaced
his loins on a pale Arabian stallion.

His magnanimity with silver bullets,
squandering precious metal,
sullied his ride into radio's West.

Beside him, Tonto:  A little lower than
the Ranger; a sidekick, a faithful companion,
a bit of a bloodhound, but not a brother.

I query my mirror of age:  "Who is he,
this masked stranger?"  It ciphers my years
and replies:  "He died in this decade."

A finale.  Rossini's "Overture"
succumbs to synthesizers, and I must
conquer desperadoes without him.

 

 

 

*This is a slightly revised version of a poem I posted online at

The American Reporter [http://www.american-reporter.com] in a column I wrote dated Dec. 30, 1999. 

 

Adoption

                By Allan Roy Andrews

Geese screech southward in boomerang families,
chasing the brightening horizon.
Phalanxes against a gunmetal sky,
they bend to no wind or word
save the Master’s and bear down the cloud-pocked
boulevard of heaven their servant songs.

Lone stragglers trail in the East, widows, spinsters
or orphans whose undisclosed sin left them adrift.
Darting, swirling, they chase the winging wedge,
dancing like gypsies behind a royal caravan.

Suddenly, catching a cross-wind or zephyr,
one alone streaks into the flock and quietly --
without ceremony or celestial explanation --
flies wedded to the winged oneness.
 

 

*Originally published in Theology Today, Vol. 58, No. 2, July 2001, page 222.
Also reprinted with permission in Connections, Vol. 3, No. 4, Autumn 2001, page 21.  (Publication of Annapolis Area Christian School, Annapolis, Md.)

Singing From a Crouch

*By Allan Roy Andrews

 

I am of a line of catchers
whose knees creak at the bend
and whose cheeks protrude
from their embrace of ’baccy.
Even my mother’s smile shows
the legacy:  a chipped tooth
smashed by a bat that swung,
missed, and slid through
the cross-bars of her mask.
And she recalls in her telling,
“I held the third strike.”

My father beat death in Korea
with baseball, plucked from
a platoon of gunners who died
on an Osan hill and shipped
to special services to catch
the professional offerings of
Curt Simmons, ex-Cardinal,
ex-Phillie, and to tour
the spas of Switzerland
and the baths of Russia
between ballgames.

His father before him
made it to Double-A and
dirtied his Raleigh-Durham
uniform and the spikes of
opposing batters with wads
of Red Man expectoration
just before each pitch, or
so my father tells it
in boyish admiration that
I cannot mimic, as I cannot
hold his pitches.

Dad speaks from a crouch,
lowering himself to
Little League level
and acting out memories
of the diamond, skipping
the dead boot-camp buddies,
lily-white locker rooms,
brawls with German teams,
and Curt Simmons cutting
the big toe off his foot
with a lawnmower.

I pitch him hints
that a singer roars in
my breast, not a catcher,
and no chest protector can
keep it from getting out
and hurting in its hatred
of a boys’ game for men.
He sees me behind my guitar
and tells me I look like
a catcher with an oversized
mitt for knuckleballs.

“From behind the plate” --
his favorite entree to a story --
“you look into the faces
of all your teammates.”
And, yes, one thousand
times he reminds anyone
that a catcher squats legally and
of the nine waits alone
in foul ground.  I fouled
his ground as this poem
swelled in my hands and mouth.

“My Daddy -- your Granddad --
was a singer,” he told me,
and I was captive to surprise.
“He loved to sing old hymns.”
(My father’s faith died
with a letter from Korea:
“God,” he insists, “throws
nothing but curve balls.”)
“And your Grandmother
played the organ,” he added.
“She loved to play ‘Largo.’ ”

When I hungered for more,
he sang me ingrained lines
from “Abide With Me,” and
“Will the Circle Be Unbroken.”
And when I was vulnerable, bent
in the heart’s probe for details,
he told me Granddad stopped
singing when Grandmom died
young.  “I guess,” my father
concluded, “he discovered
you can't sing from a crouch.” 

*Published in Aethlon:  The Journal of Sport Literature, Vol. XIX, No. 2, Spring, 2002, page 111.