TRAVEL POEM

Bright Red Flowers

By

 

 

Our resident poet took a train from Avignon to Monte Carlo. The route is beautiful and the flowers, especially at this time of year, are very bright and red.

 

Ricky is not a boy who stands still though. International fame as WONDERLUST’s Poet Laureate you think would be enough for any man, but he kept his day job as an award winning composer and, when asked casually, “what are you up to lately?”, told us: “I am writing an opera of Driving Miss Daisy for Atlanta Opera, to open their new theater in 2028, preparing a new recording of my opera “The Tibetan Book of the Dead” for Blue Griffin Records, and publishing five new songbooks with Presser Music and Just Theory Press.

 

“And I nearly forgot! I am doing a concert for the Cincinnati Symphony on May 17th featuring my setting of Langston Hughes’ poems, and my opera Orpheus and Euridice will be done at Cincinnati Opera this July.”

 

So, quiet summer, then?

 

 

 

 

 

Bright Red Flowers

 

(On the train from Avignon to Monte Carlo)

 

All the pretty fields are full

Of bright red flowers,

Staring out the window’s pane 

For miles and hours.

Somewhere you were rude to me

And then,

I took back my heart from you

Again. 

 

Lawns erupt with widows’s weeds

And blue bells ringing.

Drying on a clothesline there

Is laundry singing.

Night will fall,

You’ll ask me for it back.

Now my train goes whizzing

Down this track.

 

All along the landscape, signs

Of ancient sorrows.

Long forgotten yesterdays

And worse tomorrows.

You were in my dream,

I couldn’t sleep.

Ghosts arise from graves

No longer deep.

 

I will shut my talent in

A soul that’s hollowed.

False it is, and relative,

And three parts borrowed.

Now I’m blaming you

And then, at ten,

I will blame myself 

And back again.

 

All the pretty fields are full

Of thorns and roses.

Children who are crying stop

To wipe their noses.

Rude you were you turned

Your head away.

Morning floods but yet

Another day.