Tag: Liliane Richman

Love (On a Theme by Carlos Saura): by Liliane Richman

Francisco Goya as you reach

the end of your days

self exiled in Bordeaux

Filled with memories

of passionate dalliance

       La Maja Desnuda

when the frisson of love was love

Recollecting your oeuvres

.

and the flash of death

.

the deeds of rapacious tyrants

.

The penumbra of reason

.

the multitudinously murdered

Now glad to be in this city of fine wines

how good it feels to be secure among friends

who praise your genius and sing songs about you

Beloved of a young daughter

who is who she is because you’re her father

And a wife who retrieves you from streets filled with goblins

and smoothes your wrinkles and tucks you in her bed

 

To find more poetry by Liliane Richman on this blog, click HERE.

50 rue des Francs-Bourgeois: by Liliane Richman

Mr. Soulié made pommes frites twice a day

in a kitchen full of books that overtook his flat

gathered on tables shelves and dressers

on fine furniture with pearly inlay

My brother was friendly with the literary gentleman

who confided he’d written a famous book

for a well-known West African writer

Then adopted a son

Kelefa Keita who came from Conakry Guinea

with a whole collection of African art

masks and gourds and staffs and wooden sculptures

ornate with bone and shells

You need to clean these things they give you asthma

all that dust old books yellowed paper remonstrated

my unimpressed mother who rang his bell

for conversation on her way up to our flat

But Monsieur Soulié laughed wide mouthed and ah ah  ah

until he choked three full minutes and laboriously began

breathing again while my mother fretted – Didn’t I tell you? –

And then he  recovered and began ah ah ah again

.

.

.

.

 

To find more poetry by Liliane Richman on this blog, click HERE.

To Carmen, 1913-1992: by Liliane Richman

The car is a menace tonight
steering me to the edge
Bony hands my skinny companions
take me to solid ground run me to the kitchen
for a fat red cabbage
to shred against the pain of forgetting
for no matter how many times
I try replaying your death I lose it
your face and eyes staring above the hospital bed
beyond a sea of relatives’ faces
Of course it wasn’t sudden
but hadn’t you always recovered from worse?
Typhus anorexia a stroke three days in a coma

The surgeons scraped blood from your brain
and said you’d never be the same
Indeed your vision and hearing progressively failed
together with ambulatory motion,
as family members helpless but habituated
wished you a Hollywood ending
better luck better health
God didn’t you deserve them
after the concentration camp
four children five daily flights of stairs?

Pinch me harder this scene is in a play
written by a sadist
She lay sheet up to her neck
breathing hard no rehearsal this
and the gauze with water on her lips no relief
Still she didn’t convince me
Were I Moses in spite of God’s bidding
I’d say no it’s unfair I cannot accept this
No death for me nor can I believe yours despite the evidence
your face stonewashed cleansed of sorrows
draped in the bed’s whiteness
ogival memory receding vertiginously

 

Copyright 2013 Liliane Richman, all rights reserved

To find more poems by Liliane Richman, click HERE.

Tous les Matins du Monde: by Liliane Richman

The day is dense humid and gray
everything else black and green
touched with a sheen

The stark trunks the branches the leaves

bustle of people honking of automobiles
children bursting out
of Dealy Elementary
flaming with cool energy
Girls on the verge of teen hood

holding an upturned umbrella
struggling with the wind
squealing
Boisterous boys their swagger
fresh as Vienna choir boys
The sumptuous life force brings me back to you
I slip in easily
as we do

.

.

Copyright 2013 Liliane Richman, all rights reserved
To find more poems by Liliane Richman, click HERE.

Don’t Count on Heaven: by Liliane Richman

“Don’t count on Heaven, or on Hell.
You’re dead. That’s it. Adieu. Farewell.” – Sherwin Stephen

In that heady perseverance of the renascent day
she worshipped every morning of the world
outlawing death and the untenable eclipse of the sun

Until midlife struck and she began entertaining
the inevitable sojourn into nothingness
dreaming its space and shape and speed
for a perfect exit out of the world

She thought without fear
comfortable as a woman who has taken
her clothes off for her lover a thousand and one nights
narrowed her selection to eight felicitous departures
each an epiphany as rich as dark chocolate

Falling in her flower bed as she pulls a last weed
Wrapped in the big screen of a movie theater
On the phone during long dissertations
with that one prized friend

In a restaurant among clatter and laughter
At a table set with sparkling china
With Merlot served in Baccarat

On an overstuffed sofa with this or that brother
and their wives reminiscing about our intertwined lives
Sipping a Proustian sentence and a cup of tea

Stretched out on thick green St. Augustine grass
Contemplating two lovely loved daughters

Making love in the crook of his bed

Copyright 2013 Liliane Richman, all rights reserved

To hear more poems by Liliane Richman, click HERE.

“La Joie Venait Toujours Après la Peine” : by Liliane Richman

This poem in its written form has disappeared. If you want to know why, click HERE.

To hear a reading of this poem, click on the player below:

Copyright 2013 Liliane Richman, all rights reserved

To hear more poems by Liliane Richman, click HERE.

A Canto For Carmen, Eugene, All the Others: by Liliane Richman

This poem in its written form has disappeared. If you want to know why, click HERE.

Copyright 2013 Liliane Richman, all rights reserved

to listen to a reading of this poem, click on the player below:

To hear more poems by Liliane Richman, click HERE.

Window With a View: by Liliane Richman

This poem in its written form has disappeared. If you want to know why, click HERE.

To listen to a reading of this poem, click on the arrow below:

Copyright 2013 Liliane Richman, all rights reserved

To hear more poems by Liliane Richman, click HERE.

Where are they now?

“It is this gesture towards real communication, offered in the midst of the flash-flood of information that our culture deluges us with every morning as soon as we open our eyes, that is being offered by the poets who will be presented over the next 29 days. An arbitrary flower in the midst of chaos for you, the reader.”

I hope that you’ve all enjoyed the 29 flowers that were offered from Australia, Brazil, Denmark, France, Italy, the United States, and Wales by way of Budapest.

International Poetry Month 2012 is over. The marauding hordes have left the library ablaze, the flood has washed away the ashes, the caravan carrying the last copy of the precious poetry collection has vanished in the desert; at least that’s what it feels like to me as I hit the delete key and erase the written versions of the poems.

Now what?

What remains is the oral tradition; I have made audio files of each poem available where the poem used to be posted when permitted by the poet.  When the poems can be found elsewhere on the web I’ve left a link. Anyone who is on my mailing list has a ‘fragment’ of each work. Perhaps, like the poems of Sappho, this is all that will remain.

I would like to extend my profound thanks to the following guest poets for their contributions:

Anonymous 2oth Cent. Poet

Matthew Broussard

Gilles-Marie Chenot

Maxine Beneba Clarke

Lee Elsesser

Chris Fillebrown

Brad Frederiksen

Giacomo Gusmeroli

Michelle Lee Houghton

Christian Stokbro Karlsen

Helen Martin

Tom McClellan

Benjamin Norris

Angel Raiter

Adina Richman

Liliane Richman

Tim Seibles

Octavio Solis


Some of these poets have blogs or websites where intriguing writing, images, or biographical information may be encountered. I encourage anyone suffering from poetry withdrawal to visit these sites by clicking on any of the names that appear in color. Others are tantalizingly unavailable, if you want to see more of their work you’ll have to hope that they come back next year. Of course my work that is or has been posted throughout the rest of the year is still here.

Thanks as well to everyone who has stopped by to read and comment on the poems either here or on Facebook. It has been a real joy to present so much fine poetry again this year. Now I have to start thinking about next year and get back to writing.

A presto!

The scent of her gloves: by Liliane Richman

The written version of this poem has disappeared from this blog. 

To listen to a reading of this poem, click on the player below:

Copyright 2011 Liliane Richman, all rights reserved

To hear more poems by Liliane Richman, click HERE.