Ten Days From Home

Worrisome travel adrift at sea
  Weather bitten, torn from doubt
Of returning to my home
  Where Penelope waits for me.

Isles of the western wind
  Broken ship have left null
Of promise and hope
  Of sailing homeward again.

Captain assures as Polaris' dome
  That shines brightly
In the Northern sky
  We're only ten days from home.

Ten years have passed
  Since my eyes have held
My beloved and her soil
  That lies upon the darken cast.

Many isles and ports we shall roam
  While waiting for her wind
To free us from this spell
  For we're only ten days from home.

* The great Odysseus reputedly said to his crew(for whom all would succumb to the sea, save
Odysseus), before the god Poseidon released him from his treacherous trek.

- John Hardesty 

Spectators(Haiku)

The bloodiest war
in Gettysburg, nursing crows
consoled the dying.


by John Hardesty 

The Giant Killer(Haiku)

Beyond Nephilim
in the land of giants and kings
Joshua obeyed.


* King Og of Bashan and Raphaim(his bed was 9 cubits long,
   equivalent to 13 feet) were giants, God told Joshua to destroy
   the whole race of giants, and he did. Isaac Asimov and Gene
   Roddenberry entertained these stories, once on an episode of 
   Star Trek and through Asimov's stories as well. Giants once
   walked and ruled our planet, the Bible documents this as well.

Impasse

When you come to a wall,
you scale it,

When you come to a mountain,
you climb it,

When you come to an ocean,
you sail it,

When you come to a jungle,
you explore it,

When you come to a forest,
you level it,

When you come to a universe,
you trek it,

When you come to a war,
you conquer it,

When you come to death's impasse,
you do not pass beyond it.

- John Hardesty 

Anomalies

The commodities of oddities
And the ledger of life's anomalies,
The expression, fish out of the water,
Or calling a shark a martyr,
Never saw a bird afraid of heights,
Or a blind hawk that missed its swipe,
Never saw a cowardly lion,
Or a gazelle just give up without trying,
Never saw a deaf squirrel,
Or a groundhog that wouldn't burrow,
Never saw a dog that didn't bark,
Or a featherless meadowlark,
Never saw a cat that didn't nap,
Or a flounder that wasn't flat,
The commodities of oddities,
And the ledger of life's anomalies. 


- John Hardesty 

The New Baal-Berith

They hold their high council in secrecy,
For they have no regard for the helpless and poor,
Show no compassion or decency
Only incentives that shower to the rich that pass upon the floor;
For they downtrodden the middle class like squashed grapes,
Squeezing them until they ooze blood,
Their laissez-faire policies openly agape,
Nail the plebian upon the rood;
Glory held her days,
When America stood for all,
Now, battle-worn veterans are badly betrayed,
Who made the ultimate sacrifice only to be named upon some wall,
These crooked politicians never work for the people,
They stomp and pomp their tirades upon their sacred floor,
Who are they kidding, their allegiance is to a higher steeple,
A golden pair of vile demigods who spread propaganda upon every door,
They're evil in every sense of the word,
For whom hide behind a veil,
And kill every living thing leaving only a trail of salt upon this earth,
Sending America all the way to Hell.


-  John Hardesty 

Reassurance

When the spoils of night's passing
impart love's merciless fire,
when eyes veer beyond the vow of trust, 
heighten spirits, lust invoked through 
a wine glass kill and deaden senses,
when flies have lit upon forbidden fruit
all righteousness falls, stale and addled
temptation, discard motive,
folly to melancholy-
the descent to sin,
how warming the pleasure of another's touch,
for we must sometimes make love to another
to prove to ourselves we're still in love
with only one.

- John Hardesty