Empty Mirror

a literary magazine

  • About
    • About Empty Mirror
    • Get in Touch
    • Support EM
    • Colophon
  • Submit
  • Contributors
  • Essays
  • On Literature
  • Reviews
  • Poetry
  • Art
  • Interviews
  • Beat
    • Beat Generation
    • Ted Joans Lives!
  • +
    • Fiction
    • Music & Film
    • News
    • On Writing
    • Book Collecting

4 spring poems

Sam Silva

Scudder Pond in Early Spring - Denise Enck
Scudder Pond in Early Spring – Denise Enck

Ache Awakening

In a moment where the yard explodes
in air about infested with sky blue expanse
in twigs straining to bud
near left over winter mud
and cars rip by in dense exhaust
…mirrored exhalation of our chants.

April’s murder on the way
…there is a cost
for such sudden exuberance
of days which grow quite warm.

I am an elf on this Spring day!
I am a tiny passionate dance
holding to my music
like a charm…!

Poetry

For a few days now it’ll rain and ice
this wild yard,
these streets away
down toward a circular park. The bard
becomes a soul like icy rain
when someone like you is gone

…the heart in a vice!
…the brain at bay!
Until like laughter you come home
…like a muse…like a song
when I’m all alone.

Fear of God and the Devil

I have a hard time sleeping late at night
try to calm the heat
with the cold glow of stellar space
with the spirits above
and their music.

Against the piano concerto on computer radio
…piped through wires from three thousand miles away

…the dove of my brain is likewise dancing on hot wire!
I am now craven and utterly peaceable…a pacifism of nature
not will.

Absolutists are tearing at their guns
burning heretics alive
raising money for holy munitions

if one of them corners me where I can no longer run
I am quite sure that he will make my brain
and mouth and stomach
fluent in loud support.

I do not understand what has become of these people
…nor even…quite…why I ended up this way.

What the Ego Means

In late hours
…the only happy solitude
comes drunk with night
…and the mind wanders
in such a happy ambivalence
in dreams and memories
thick with meaning
in their frozen ice cream cloud.

And those thoughts most poignant
are of abuse and terror
which came and then was buried
…so that we bury them again!

Or in that other moral juncture
where a sad light meets
our own dark acts

and we wish and pray so purely
for the good in others which we misunderstood
in the folly of our youth
or our shallow disappointment.

Friends in purgatory! We, who burn
a sorry candle down to love
so that when the flame is snuffed

we are ready
for our dreams
and our awakening.

TwitterFacebook

Sam Silva

Sam Silva has published over 150 poems in print magazines, including Sow's Ear, The ECU Rebel, Pembroke Magazine, Samisdat, St. Andrew's Review, Charlotte Poetry Review, Main Street Rag and others. Has published at least 300 poems in online journals including Jack Magazine, Comrades, Megaera, Poetry Super Highway, physik garden, Ken again, -30-, Fairfield Review, Foliate Oak, and dozens of others. He is a frequent contributor to Empty Mirror.

His chapbooks have been published by three small presses, and his work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize seven times. Bright Spark Creative of Wilimington published his first full-length book, EATING AND DRINKING.

He now has many books and chapbooks available at lulu.comsamsilva54 and as books available at Amazon. His spoken word poetry is available at the major digital markets such as Apple iTunes. Follow him on Twitter @samsilva1954.

Author: Sam Silva Tags: poetry Category: Poetry April 17, 2015

You might also like:

Two poems by Katherine Fallon
San Francisco
David Gitin: 5 From San Francisco in the Sixties
Everything All at Once - Natalie Wright
Everything All at Once: A Short Story
trailing / credit: de
Three poems by Taylor Byas

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

I accept the Privacy Policy

 

DONATE TO BLACK LIVES MATTER

BLACK LIVES MATTER

The EM newsletter

Receive fresh poetry, reviews, essays, art, and literary news every Wednesday!

R.I.P. Michael McClure 1932-2020

Empty Mirror

Established in 2000 and edited by Denise Enck, Empty Mirror is an online literary magazine that publishes new work each Friday.

Each week EM features several poems each by one or two poets; reviews; critical essays; visual art; and personal essays.

Subscribe Submissions Support

Recent features

  • My Father’s Map
  • On Waiting
  • Seeing Las Meninas in Madrid, 1994
  • Visual poems from 23 Bodhisattvas by Chris Stephenson
  • Historical Punctum: Reading Natasha Trethewey’s Bellocq’s Ophelia and Native Guard Through the Lens of Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida
  • Panic In The Rear-View Mirror: Exploring The Work of Richard Siken and Ann Gale
  • “Art has side effects,” I said.

Books

Biblio
© 2000–2021 D. Enck / Empty Mirror.
Copyright of all content remains with its authors.
Privacy Policy · Privacy Tools · FTC disclosures