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My road, with the dawn of a beautiful golden sun, took me to a little rural Taranaki town called Opunaki.
There my bride and I took part in an emotional, short ANZAC Day ceremony....where in an ancient clifftop cemetary, against the backdrop of a raging ocean surf, thirty souls and two dogs remembered the troopers who sacrificed for their country in two great world wars.
The New Zealand flag flew hard and the words of the old Priest were lost in the gale... but the tears ran freely down every cheek as the little transistor radio played the military horn's Last Post at full volume.

It was a slice of old Taranaki and a comemoration of the ANZAC DAY of years gone by.

LEST WE FORGET
April 25 2024
A response to Phillip Kurt Behm's emotional poem, "The Road (unedited)"
<>>
Jan. 13, 2014
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a  flawless poem

if such there were,
will always be,
the next one

my poor soul,
my rag tag heart
has no censor,
so careless, reckless,
as if words were but
frivolous treasures,
easy spent, easy get

if only, how I wish I
could harvest my best,
with golden cutlery excise
the single flawless poem,
that I know is in my possess

lay down this hand so weary
from cupping tears,
be satisfied at long last,
so much so,
that when my casket lowered,
hands in repose companioned,
clutching his best, easing his rest,
a paper record to join his dust
with ash,
his flawless poem,

at longest last
Nothing is there to see in the sea
except waves after rolling waves
breaking with monotony on the shore
swelling and succumbing to sands.

Nothing is there to see in the sea
except the colour of the water
ever changing in harmony with the sky
and the lives that come ashore alive or dead.

Nothing is there to see in the sea
except the thunderous silence of night
teeming with silvery moon's glow
and the sprays that kiss like a lover.

Nothing is there to see in the sea
except the one eternal picture of life
birthing in aggression and dying in submission
afloat on the waves of transitory desires.
Tajpur by the sea, days and nights, April 11-13, 2024
A sparrow sang for breakfast
the robin sang for tea
Death by misadventure
the magpie holds the key

The jackdaw sang for supper
the nightjar at midnight
The major sips his sherry
as the conscripts fight the fight

Then as the sun rises
and the day begins again
The salmon swims the river
and the deer runs the glen

So, the fisherman packs his tackle
and his glasses for the sun
While the hunter wore his stalker
and loads bullets for his gun

Then we ponder at life's menu
as we drink a glass of wine
Whose time will it be tomorrow
it could be yours it could be mine
In the end we are the sum
total of the effort we invested,
or conversely our failed deficiency
in that regard. With no one to
appreciate or blame, but ourselves.
~for all the old poets,
especially one so denominated, my old faithful friend…~
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the
THEY,
emboldened and italicized,

are whispering and whimpering,
even
whining
that I’ve gone
wimpy,
lost possess of mine
facilities and faculties,
no longer able and capable
to command, demand, in hand,
import
a decent poem
from & in the English language(s) to
purport,

lost my edges,
hide behind the hedges
of inconsequential ancestral
and incestual rhymes,

these
THEY
do oft appear as voices in my
now emptied and unemployed head,
but familiarity breeds contemporary
contretemps of contempt,
for they are remiss,
in dismiss when the eyelids
flutter,
the noble temporal lobes
mutter,
’tis thy~thyme ole man,
for spillage of your

FPOTD
(first poem of the day)
thus kneecapping the cancer
of a restless dark hour period
where failures and faults,
of lines
crossed and uncrossed,
bear you to pieces,
bare your lifetime
laundry list
of pulsing, palpable,
fulminating and always ruminating faults
of which penance cannot be bought
by the bags of pennies and sordid assorted coins
that THEY
will find in the back bottom of thine closets,
along with the manuscripts
of the discarded and forlorn,
unloved and unpublished poems that you chose
to have buried with you,

lest you think that
eternal rest
will best
them voices,
they will accompany you
to permafrost of forever dark,
their once and future demise,
a travesty of
justice…

enough.

lists of to do’s;
the exercise of delaying death
for one more day,
by trodding on the treadmill
that postpones the inevitable
that can
always tun longer and faster
and cannot be outdone, outrun,
but
this poem
disgorged and disbanded,
it’s bytes,
will not bite mark me
in the forever future
their bytes are alive now,
free to be chomped and well chewed,
and once fully digested,
be return to our Mother
Earth

where some disclaimed poems
go to be buried
within it’s eternity
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