Ashes of Verses: Poems Burned but Not Forgotten spans 30 years (1976-2006), reflecting on love, faith, loss, and the search for meaning. This collection features personal and spiritual theme with poems like “My Father’s Voiceless Gesture” capturing personal memories. This collection symbolizes both an end and a new beginning, aiming to spark connection and thought.
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This collection, Ashes of Verses: Poems Burned but Not Forgotten, spans three decades of my life, from 1976 to 2006. Each poem is a reflection of the times, places, and emotional landscapes I found myself navigating during those years. These poems—once held closely, now released into the world—touch on love, faith, loss, and the search for meaning.
Titles like My Father’s Voiceless Gesture and The Twin Towers of Love hold personal memories, while poems such as The Life and Death of Jesus and The Pendulum of Christ delve into spiritual exploration. When I Die and Our Final Sunset are meditations on mortality, the fragility of life, and the inevitable passage of time. Others, like Toy Wonderland and A Leaf in Winter – Part 1, reach for simplicity and innocence, contrasting with the more complex reflections in Writing is a Sentence or Reading Dead Poets.
Though some of these poems may feel like fragments of the past, I hope the fire that once inspired them continues to burn within each reader. This collection signifies both a closing and an opening- a burning away of old works to make space for new ones, yet leaving behind the embers of these verses for reflection.
Whether you find yourself caught in the city streets of Fog in the City of Lights or lost in the philosophical musings of Nothing – The Perfect Poem, I hope these works ignite a sense of connection, thought, and perhaps even renewal.
As the title suggests, though these words are metaphorically burned, their essence remains eternal- alive in the minds of those who read them.
-Alex
Sample
My Father’s Voiceless Gesture
I remember the voiceless gesture
of a father who did not
have to speak;
a glance,
a look,
a probing into my
sub-consciousness that turned
flesh into a robotic predictable response.
Clinging to this glance was a choice-less longing
to please, an overwhelming desire to be recognized
and acknowledged.
It never worked.
He was reach-less,
master of a kingdom reaching the farthest corners
of my young mind-
a kingdom now grown old with years
but still surrendering to that voiceless gesture-
he too is old,
a withered tree wilting in an abstract landscape
but his gesture never grew old,
will never die
as will my response never fade-
and I see that gesture in so many people now
that I can no longer
resist it
devouring my mind;
and my mind finds
reach-less
so many people.
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Tho Time Passes Gently
(inspired by Louise Shellshear)
Tho time passes gently,
it blindly sparks unrequited memories
that still tremble tremble tremble hot,
tho resemble nothing the person I was.
A true heart can never be unmoved,
and melancholy fires of frailty are resigned
to humanity’s wretched waters;
sculpting earthly moans,
the groans of half-forgotten loves
become memories of half-forgotten truths,
fading gently like dying embers,
cracking to the beat
of a heart ache.