Stephen Sutherlin - Poet | Designer

Many words for love

Post author By Makar
Post date September 16, 2019

My father used to preach a sermon every year about Love. From an early age, I understood that love (like myriad words for ICE in Inuit) has many words and many subtle meanings. The sermon covered and explored the Greek words, plural, for love. Eros – Erotic, sexual love. Philos – Friendship, brotherly love. Agape – Self-sacrificial love. His conclusion was that Christ became the ultimate expression of Human Love by sacrificing his Human Being. The love of a parent to a child, believer and God.

I have added Psychí. Psyche, wife to Eros and goddess of the Soul. My granny used to say that her and my papaw believed they had a psychic connection and that they would try to see if they could connect their thoughts while he was away at work. Building on this idea, I am exploring a transcendental love of the married. Beyond finishing each other’s sentences, life-long couples can explore and develop a quantum entanglement that is connected beyond the other forms of love. This life energy that the two share leads to wordless exchanges and un-spoken understandings.

American Place Garden Psalms

Dead Horse

Post author By Makar
Post date September 15, 2019
Sticky post

The Skull
from The Mountains
Bullet Hole
between the eyes
Whole body
puzzle of bones

Bone broken
on winter’s pass
Burden taken
under human foot
Friend fallen
Last farewell

Friends taken
to the woods
Too early
for human foot
Skull‘s burden
Taken home

To rest

Poems Road Less Travelled

I was a child

Post author By Makar
Post date September 15, 2019

My early poems were childish.
Then again I was a child.

Ars Poetica Footnotes Why

Making of Americans

…I write for myself and strangers.

Mostly everyone dislikes to hear it. I love it and I write it. Mostly no one knowing me can like it that I love it that every one is of a kind of men and women, that always I am looking and comparing and classifying of them, always I am seeing their repeating. More and more I love it of them, the being in them, the mixing in them, the repeating in them, the deciding the kind of them every one is who has human being.

From the Making of Americans – Gertrude Stein

It is my underlying interest in musical meter and repetition and the idea that repetition brings with it a primal sense of comfort in our brains that has taken hold in my current writing. It is the spiral that binds us to the galaxy destined to return over and over again but never to the same place you started repeating your ritual your habit day after day sunset after sunrise your repetition creating your human being.

Garden Psalms

Zinnia

Post author By Makar
Post date September 15, 2019

Zinnias
illuminated
near-
neon
incendiary
accents

Ars Poetica Footnotes

Twice

Post author By Makar
Post date September 12, 2019

You can write the same poem more than once.

American Place Ars Poetica Garden Psalms

It speaks to you

Post author By Makar
Post date September 12, 2019
1 Comment on It speaks to you
Sticky post

I went to buy a book of poems
Hearts, identities, wants, failures
Scattered across pages, books, shelves of books, shelves of
poetic thrashings

Awaking from the same bad dream, writing the same bad poetry
that releases your free will to subjugation and lies
dormant in the pithy pulp, poet after poet
screaming unto no one, until

“I’ll take this one”

Ars Philosophica Ars Poetica Footnotes

Hubris

Post author By Makar
Post date September 12, 2019

I don’t care what you think the meaning of your own work may be. The listener will be moved by their own experience or you aren’t doing a very good job as a poet. This is not to say that you should not know what your own work means (to you). Don’t expect the same from the user.