Every port is open to the universe. We accept submissions of poetry to Herb Port of Poets from anywhere in the world. As a rule, all the submitted poems will appear in this blog. For guidelines, please click the link below.
Oh, Guitar
On a trash-collecting handcart lies a wornout acoustic guitar.
This was someone’s song, in those days, words hovering nearest to a heart.
No matter what, the wheels roll on.
With every rattle, moans ooze out, hitting offbeat with no score.
A song is not salvation, not eternity.
A song is not a song, is nothing.
Dead Slow
Great love comes in dead slow
like a great ship putting into port.
Little body, please guide me.
Just as a great ship following a tugboat
surrenders the power of its whole body,
great love comes in so mild and cautious,
comes in at a speed close to death.
Diary
In the morning, I cut the scrawny, overgrown eyebrows of chrysanthemum flowers with scissors.
In the afternoon, I wrote and mailed off a postcard to the stag beetle that visited the edge of the porch last summer.
I also asked the doctor who came to mend the broken persimmon tree to repair its shade, too.
The Sea
The sea is a nomad
Wandering from land to land
Destined never to rest in pools
Or to find eternal calm.
The sea is pushed and pulled
By the moon, the wind and sun
Unseen forces that drag
Saltwater onto terra firma.
Mountain Mist
The mist clings to me as I walk,
dotting my skin with gems of cold.
To left and right
there should be peaks and plunging valleys,
but I see nothing that I cannot touch.
Upon this open mountainside
By the Itterbeek
a slow weedy stream
a heron rises
crosses my gravelly path
flies through leaning oaks
to land
steps through green pasture
Soul Diver
I dive into the human sea-bottom
I search for a soul like a clear pearl
An extraordinary secretion inside the shell-body
Guarded by the hands of a water nymph
Distorted yet brilliant
Resembling the softness of white flesh
Its core the trematode in ancient darkness
Its kernel a nothing grain of sand
Once Again
A person full of hope
is already hope.
A person seeking the way
is already a new way.
A truly good person
is already a good world.
untitled
after we met
i turned
into a moth
approached the light
and burned up
you were worth it
No-tell hotel
As Sunday comes to close
I open the curtains in the south-facing room
From my chair
I can watch the no-tell hotel on the beach
Against a backdrop of darkness
Stirred by the heat
