Showing posts with label Michael E. Stone. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Michael E. Stone. Show all posts

Friday, December 01, 2023

Michael E. Stone: Ambert’s Soft succor


Ambert, round towers
black fortress remains
battlements cast down
dressed stones scattered
chunks broken off walls


    gaping breaches
And parts still standing.

And she
helped me softly,
down to there,
by there,
beyond there,
and back.



September 2021

Wednesday, June 09, 2021

Michael Stone: Six Glimpses

Entering the Arpa Valley


A faded sign “BISTRO”


Comley with thick shins and petite feet in blue shoes
She was selling white yoghurt by the road.


A poplar in a roadside meadow,
its leaves straining south to follow the wind,
Like a girl's long hair.


An old car picking its way down a very steep track,
all ruts and roots and rocks.


Billows of hill and deep gulches cleavage,
hills smoothed into green-yellow waves,
lakes of light green in the valleys,
houses below, monopoly pieces.


A village drowning in greenery
Yellow humps of harvested hay rolled up
Ingathered fields inlaid into the hills




Michael E. Stone, Vayots Dzor 2016






Wednesday, June 10, 2020

Michael Stone's contribution to our Call for Poems on the topic of epidemics, illness, medicine, death and healing

Michael E. Stone, an emeritus professor of Armenology in Jerusalem, Israel, has shared this original work. APP thanks him.

Cedared Memory

Do ancient dryads
still live, that knew
the cedars of Lebanon
three millennia gone?

In Solomon’s kingdom
Hiram’s craftsmen helped
fashion the great beams
for his House of Cedar.

My mother had a cedar chest,
wooden, red, deep polished,
its top swung on brass hinges.

She kept the woolen blankets
folded deep in it, for cedar
stops mold, kills moths.

“it’s worth cedaring.”
they would declare,
of a poet’s pleasing work,
in ancient Rome.

ephemeral beside
ancient cedars,
our memories,
live on and on,

enshrined in flesh,
on stone and on clay,
on leather and paper,
in minds and in souls,

carry us back to before
that small seedling cedar
peeped through the topsoil.

”And you shall tell your child,”
the ancient words demand.
Be links in the chain,
write, remember, retell.

Monday, July 31, 2017

Michael Stone: Halcyon Days

Halcyon days,
purple days,
with blue
days of my woe.

Chalk cliffs
fruit trees,
church on a hill.
Neolithic stone fire circle,
Hrazdan gorge.
           Kotayk.
Cows
yellow grassed hills
villages
stone formations.


Michael E. Stone, Aghveran, Fall 2012






Wednesday, July 13, 2016

Michael E. Stone: In a Bower

Poets once wrote
about bowers.

I don't believe
we ever sat in one
except in Armenia
at the foot of Mt. Aragatz.

That bower needed a coat of paint,
but there vines twined overhead
in the midst of
a half dried up orchard
at the tail end of summer
of our visit

We ate there.
The food was fresh,
and we drank Armenian beer.

A time of ending
that included
a starched cloth,
a gleaming white canvas for
a feast of colours —

eggplant purple
salad green and red
white cheese and
watermelon's sweet heart,

That summer ended
in that bower.

Summer 2015


Sunday, January 03, 2016

Michael E. Stone: Winter in Armenia


The land has put on winter.
The poplars are naked.
Rounded mountain tops
snow white,
peek above
black ploughed fields
on rolling hills.

Scattered obsidian glints
catch the low western sun,
sparkle like Christmas lights,
on and off, on and off,
as the road winds.

The spirit of mist
descends
far off.


Michael E. Stone


Thursday, October 01, 2015

Michael E. Stone: April 2015 in Yerevan

It was a mixed grill of
Genocide centennial,
manuscripts, friends,
my glad thanks to those
lovers of the treasures
that are hand-written
painted manuscripts, 
who welcomed
me from the first day 
for I share that love.

Those treasures of beauty,
of language, art, and craft
enfold within the power 
for a mighty transmutation
of victims into the bearers,
witnesses and lovers
of that history and beauty,
those songs and tales,
that the singers of this time
and the next will turn 
from unbearable pain 
into the imperative of life, 
of living, of breathing,

The pain of the past,
demands life, 
new birth.

Tuesday, September 23, 2014

Michael Stone: Day’s Start in Yerevan


The pavement is wet from the hose
The sun gets through the barriers
outer window, bars, inner window
The day’s potential is
the day’s being in
those morning hours
when the odd car fumes by
the neighbour’s dog barks,
a father upbraids a little girl,
and the made-up pretty girls
mince by on heels
too high for human feet.

Fall 2010

Monday, November 18, 2013

Michael E. Stone: Massis

On the peak of Massis,
Under snow, cloud-crowned,
since antiquity
sits a spirit of past-present,
guarding the gopher wood,
and pitch of the Ark.

Life savers, life givers
Noah and his unnamed wife,
Mother of Seed, to plant
at its foot, in Ararat plain.

Massis was clear this morning
Yesterday clouds garlanded it,

The poet speaks of a cart,
Sailing down from its peak
to Jerusalem, bearing
salvation.

Symbols well-worn
for good reason.
Revived life givers,
Always majesty.


September 2013

Tuesday, October 08, 2013

Michael E. Stone: In Dilijan

Do I have anything to say
these days?
Long together and
now apart, gone.

My state so common
that each lives it
yet mine is unique -- it’s mine,
and worthy of  a poem
or like a stye in the eye,
mine and commonplace,
but mine.

I eat
dark red royal basilicum,
regal leaves, kingly flavor,
morosely.

In Dilijan

21-22 September, 2013


Monday, January 07, 2013

Michael E. Stone: BLACK MOUNTAINS

Here we go round the mulberry bush
So quoth T.S. Eliot
but it's a tree, not a bush,
grand, spreading, broad-leafed.

At the bottom of the garden
the neighbours' mulberry tree
could be climbed from our side
and we did. It had

broad silk-worm leaves,
thick trunk and branches
and small purple berries
that stained us
black as the mountains
of Karabakh.*


*Named “black mountains” for the abundant mulberry trees.

Saturday, December 08, 2012

Michael E. Stone: Birds of Paradise


A parchment lampshade,
adorned with a peacock
preening between
two fruit trees
as in the Garden.

Immortality's symbol,
Paradise bird,
tail fanned, with Cherub eyes,
God's eyes over all the earth.

The vine meanders through the mosaic,
tracing medallions, embracing
birds in its grape-heavy branches,
around pomegranates—Eden's fruit.

At the vine's stock a bird in a cage,
wings flutter in body's prison.
Two peacock fans frame the base
eying the blind soul’s struggle.

Will the soul learn it's caged?
Will it break free, soar,
wing up away on high,
through the spheres and
beyond the heavens?

Michael E. Stone

This poem is inspired by the Bird Mosaic in Jerusalem