Poetry by Jack D. Harvey

BIO

Jack D. Harvey’s poetry has appeared in Scrivener, The Comstock Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Typishly Literary Magazine, The Antioch Review, The Piedmont Poetry Journal and elsewhere. The author has been a Pushcart nominee and over the years has been published in a few anthologies.

The author has been writing poetry since he was sixteen and lives in a small town near Albany, New York. He is presently retired.

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Ann

Come to me, Ann,
put on your old brown shoes
button up your coat
close up the house
and come to me, Ann.

Suns can rise and set
Catullus said;
that same old wonderful line
comes back
one way or another,
time after time;
we know it to
be true and don’t care,
don’t pay it no mind,
share and share alike
that wretched wisdom.

The weather changes,
the king dies, the tyrant deposed,
revolution, fire, burning,
the comings and goings,
but we don’t care,
not for a moment, not now,
for now is our only island,
our rock, our well of hope.

Come to me, Ann;
you may as well
leave it all behind,
let it all go and
take your chance;
we can love, can lose,
will lose it all
to the brigand time,
lose it all in the end,
our lives, too,
but for now
take my hand, my heart;
forget the final pitiful loss
of everything and let us
kiss the sacred crown
of flowering May,
make our vows,
and be here now.

Guernica at the Prado

For a year or more
I looked and looked at it,
in my soul,
lived under the spell
of Picasso’s baleful
grey and black fandango
of a bombed town,
a farrago of agonies
of bull and horse,
parts of people
caught and displayed
|in sharp outline;
then it became too fine,
too perfect in its kind,
too much to take
and I had to turn away,
turn my mind and eye,
try to isolate and
banish the pieces,
try to burn away the vision
of that monstrous canvas,
bury a pretense, a practice,
a sacrifice of time;

none of it worked.

Never forgotten

that huge ghastly swipe
of paint haunts me still,
hurts me and will
until the end of its world,
ending as it did,
and the end of mine.  ‘

Featured picture, Picasso, public domain

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