The Orphanage Poetry Page ... But, soft, what rock through yonder window breaks!  This page of words of the soul would be edited by long-time, but unfortunately no longer employed, Oregonian book reviewer, Paul Pintarach, if it were not for the fact that when it comes to computers, he is illiterate.  We have tried to coax, shove and even threaten him on to the net, but he steadfastly sticks to his seventeenth century mode of thinking and refuses to learn how.  So, until he plugs in, we'll have to do the best we can with our own meager resources.  All poems are, of course, the copyrighted property of the author, and may not be reproduced for sale by anyone else.
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Short Poems by LL (Scroll down the page a bit.  A link to a few more below the last.)
The Banquet of the Waste  (a link to a very long poem in progress by LL)

I'm still
remembering you

compelling
me to follow too.

Trudging
away and beyond.  The fern and frond

calling
us down. Your hair light brown

shining
edges gold. You were so bold

searching
not fearing.  Tall grasses clearing,

looking
what is it, what does it do?

You always knew.
 

Ahead, a white house

The eagle’s last flight, its eyes downcast with grief,
The wind now as dirt beneath its great wings.
Landforms once a part of a story of glory
Now spike toward the heart, or stink of decay.
The eagle is searching for someplace to die.

Ahead, a white house, snow-capped eyrie, appears,
But dotted with droppings of carrion waste.
The bird turns away from the filth and disgrace
To find a dark crag to make a gray grave
For all that was hopeful, all that’s now lost,
And lands there and folds for the last time the spread
That once bore the greatest of hopes for the world.

And there, in the gloom as the shoulders now slump,
A tear in the dull golden eye glistens bright,
The planet’s last light, the end of the fight,
Then falls to the stone, and runs down toward the fens
From which came the stench that corrupted the heights.
 

          --- Larry Leonard
                   At the cabin, winter of 1998
 
 

Where once played the band

One yellow apple on  trees without leaves;
Poisonous red berry fruit on a bush;
Cloud countries floating, cocooning the world …
         An Oregon winter lies soft on the land.

A young Douglas fir, restless in a wet wind,
Dark in a daylight that colors not eyes;
Gray geese on  gray ponds floating through the gray reeds…
         A monochromatic, sad time is at hand.

Rivers with standing waves locked into place,
Flooding the lowlands with long muddy lakes
While billions of raindrops drift down from the skies…
         Politically neutral to hill, vale and sand.

Moments of summer behind and in front
Pointillistically dot the blue skies of the mind:
Surreal warm landscapes so pregnant with life …
         The stage is now empty where once played the band.

                           --- copyright 1998, Larry Leonard
 
 
 

Other winter windows
 

          Midnight, I write old friends, recalling
            other winter windows
          and those other days beyond
            the dust of distant snows.
 
          I hear the calls of wolves in winds
            on wastes of worlds around
          the cold and lonely stars
            and wonder if the windows there
               reflect with dreams or tears.

          A pattern, I suppose, a gift or
            troubled drift of mind, or
          something missing, something found
            about this thing with prose.

          It looks behind the firs for warmth;
            behind the winter stars
          to reaches swept by winds,
            the calls of wolves,
               the dust of distant years.

                           --- Copyright 1998, Larry Leonard
 
 

Distant friends of Immediate men
(dedicated to Dr. John Learned of the University of Hawaii)
 

The wind is cold and angular even in summer
On the edge of the ocean at the top of the world.
It is lean and bony; its skin pulled tight
Over a framework of echoes
Of memories of loss.

Time is immediate in your islands,
A now fruity with life.
Time is distant in my arctic --
A place of long shadows
And lean, ancient strife.

You don’t find many bones in the islands.
Bones are everywhere in the arctic
So, you are an immediate man, new life without sin,
And I am a distant man, a walking shadow
                Of a late autumn wind

Our souls are in their proper places,
Distant and different friend.

¨ Larry Leonard (copyright 1989)

Other poems by LL
 

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I want to send you some of my poetry! (In "subject" box, type poems.)
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