Sample Poems by Allen West

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Lies


In the dying light, Jane Austen
and May Sarton keep tomorrow

at bay, Jane's comforting stories
of happy endings after trouble,

May talking with passion
of independence. The walls

are full of faded forbears
and family smiles. From a shelf

Pueblo baskets' zigzag
lightning warms your bed.

On it a black address book,
full of phantoms, lies.

---

The Waves


I stand chest-deep. A breaker lifts me
into a slap,
sea that fills my ears, my mouth
with salt and sand.
It's hard to know where's up. I push back
at the world
that curbs me, itself out of control,
come up
bobbing, and the fuming waves throw me
down. I try to stay
below the curling foam, using my arms
and hands
like turtle flippers, but mine don't work
that way,
and then the rip-tide sweeps me out to
where its surge
may let me go, and though I'm strong,
willing to wait,
still it judges me - and I judge myself,
angry at my anger.

---

Finding an Unused Calendar from Last Year

Nothing but empty days
yellow with dandelions,

May, the month of our three
children's birth, the month

when you will die. Think
of unbought others, decades

in dusty remainder bins.
What if they flipped open,

turned, month by month
until December was done?

Would every flip slow
the celestial clock

for a single tic? Time
reined in? The days

turned back? All of us
reborn into a future

to come that was
beautiful and known.

---

Gerundive


Skin
thinning
easily
to tears
thinning
as easily

as mist
raveling
molecules
sifting
the pines
past

tense
bruising
present
vanishing
future
imperfect