When You Have Reached the Bottom
By R. Lee Ubicwedas
When you have hit rock bottom, you have nothing left to lose.
You gain experience and wisdom that you now can use.
You have a choice how to react when you have fallen down.
Forced to confront the hard things, you can get up off the ground.
You’ll learn such things you never thought existed in your life,
and you’ll appreciate the goodness coming with the strife.
It’s true the best things found in life are free from money’s debt.
When you have reached the bottom, it’s a chance to reconnect.
Remember it’s okay to be uneasy, or abrupt;
but when you’re at the bottom, know the only way is up.
Quatrain
By Ercules Edibwa
You are heading in for very bad weather,
a real storm. There will certainly be strife.
Fasten your seat belts, for you are in for
the ride of your life. It’s what they call life.
On Shakespeare
By Wilude Scabere
He built a livelong monument without a solid tomb,
Soul of his Age, his easy numbers roamed time’s spatial room.
The flowing utterance upon his leaves, a growing tree,
revealed subtle flowers in his prose and poetry.
Through weightless words, he wrought a beautiful complexity,
and simultaneously, pure, refined simplicity.
Remarkable effects occur so frequently, it seems,
his language has the magic power only found in dreams.
He left a fortune to us that, long after he has gone,
continues giving pleasure, as unmeasurable as dawn.
Tanka
By “Wired Clues” Abe
White sparkling stars in
evening’s twinkling waters at
Kamakura Beach;
five men drag a jet boat from
the shallow, blue, foamy waves.
The Man Behind a Leafy Camo Screen
By War di Belecuse
I sat upon a long and mossy log. My lips closed tight.
I thought I heard a man in boots come by. I stood still—quite—
and quiet as the grassy hills where I was hiding at.
I also heard another man shoot rat-a-tat-tat-tat.
I tried to keep a low profile on my hands and knees.
I hid behind a bush. I sought a leafy camo screen.
I sucked my stomach in and breathed through nostrils silently.
I did not want to end up badly, battered vi’lently.
But though they came so close to me, they did not hear me gasp.
I clasped the moment perfectly. I wanted it to last.
Bruce Dale Wise is a poet living in Washington State who often writes under anagrammatic pseudonyms.
Featured Image: “Sunset in the Yosemite Valley, 1869” by Albert Bierstadt.
The Sun Sets in Yosemite 1869 by Albert Bierstadt
The Sun sets in Yosemite. It looks like one is on
the threshold of eternity, some cataclysmic dawn.
The golden light gleams brilliantly, like steel at God’s forge;
steep slopes rise sheer along the contours of the winding gorge.
The stark, rough, stone cliffs hang like curtains on the massive stage
of Nature as it is revealed in an antique Age.
All brown and dark the coming Eve topped by a puff of clouds;
the whole, theatrical and grand, a sweeping cape of shrouds.
One looks in vain for anybody in that empty scene,
in which the footlights on the shiny stream are lined in green.