Category: Poem

Dad: A poem by Mike Cole

I hope you’re proud of all that I’ve done

It hasn’t been easy, this road that I’m on

And I keep walking, hoping the snow will clear

A ship without a sail, no rudder to steer

It’s been two years since you’ve been gone and that’s not a lot of time

Yet I persevere in the new winds and know you guide me to calmer shores.

To wrap up National Poetry Month, I wanted to close with a poem about my dad. I did this last year and it only seems fitting that I do it again this year. For those that don’t know, he passed away in October 2019. I haven’t talked about it much since his death and poetry to me has always been a form of expression, a way to put to words topics that have been too difficult to talk about. As we head into Mental Health Awareness Month, I want to open up more and talk about his death as I think it’ll help heal the soul.

My father was a sailor for my entire life so with poems about him I want to capture that essence. There’s a lot I could have learned about sailing from him but it’s only been since his passing that I’ve found interest in it. Writing about it is a way to feel close to what has been lost.

That’s it! National Poetry Month is officially over (on this blog). We covered Nature, Love, and Lost this month. The Month of May is dedicated to Mental Health. The articles have been drafted and I’m adding the finishing touches. It’ll be a range of topics and I think I’ve struck a good balance for next month. See you then!

Ruined Garden: A Poem by Mike Cole

He Walked through a garden he used to know

Whose beds took many months to sow.

The garden had been overgrown by weeds

Left untended and unwanted.

And so he walked those haunted grounds,

Not a crop left to be found.

He walked among the trellises,

Whose vines had long not bore a seed.

Crooked and bent they stood,

With splintered and hollowed wood.

So he sat in the garden a while,

waiting in the cold.

It’s National Poetry Month! This will be the second annual National Poetry Month series! For this month I am breaking down my poems and discussing the meaning behind each. To kick things off, we have ‘Ruined Garden’. The idea came about when I visited my old High School. Years ago I had planted a garden with other students as part of a club. Every so often we would harvest the vegetables, some we ate, the rest we’d donate to the local food bank. To my surprise, when I visited this year, the garden was decrepit. An overgrown relic of a bygone era. As with most of my poetry I like to make it a blend of experiences, a reflection of both reality while also keeping a certain magic to the poem itself. This poem I tried to reflect the magic of what the garden once was while also emphasizing what it had become. This poem leans on the more literal and I thought it’d be a good way to start off the month. It is Free Verse, as has become common with most of my poetry. I am a fan of couplets and having the poem continually rhyme throughout. Over the years, I have experimented more with adding imperfection to my poems and typically use it to emphasis poems that should be broken. When you have a rhyme, everything is neat and clean. People love it, I love it. When you add a sentence structure that does not have that perfect rhyme, you notice it, such as in line four. There are many words that rhyme with weeds, but by choosing not to, it simply stops and you have to jump to the next rhyme. This was repeated in the end of the poem to add a sense of finality and to reiterate that all is not well in the garden. There is a lingering sense of open-endedness as you do not know what happens to the man in the garden.

Hope you enjoyed! There’ll be two more poems this month, so stay tuned and as always, thanks for reading!

A flip of the coin: A poem by Mike Cole

He flipped a coin, wondering where it’d land.

Heads or tails he pondered, mulling the coin in his hand.

Would he flip again should the coin land wrong?

He had done this dance before, he had sung this song.

The coin glinted in the fading sun.

One last flip, before the day was done…

Without You: A poem by Mike Cole

You were the tide as the waves came to shore

And as the waves lapse, it makes me sad that I can’t see you anymore.

Your ship is now far out at sea

No lighthouse to guide you, no place to be.

Perhaps there is land beyond my horizon,

But for now, I must wait, on this sandy shore.

To end the month of April, a poem about my father. Here, I conjure up images of a life that was never meant to be, of a past best left forgotten. My father was a sailor for most of his life, taking to the sea to escape the realities of everyday life. I never was one much for sailing but can understand why my father loved it so much. There is something freeing about being on the open water, an experience I yearn for as I try not to be trapped by the mundane. My father passed away in 2019 so this is my ode to him. It is a poem about longing for what cannot be, as I stand on sandy shores looking out to sea. It speaks to my admiration of my father as a child, what now seems so distant a memory. Lighthouses guide lost ships that cannot find harbor, and the tragedy lies in that my father drifted too far out to sea.

%d bloggers like this: