Michael Maxwell Steer Poems

Could I but spin a golden melody
from myself as a spider draws
her silken web, whose very flaws
make perfect records of her busy body.
...

When the everyday miracle, love, strikes
all the resonant chords within us chime
and even the tawdry ruts of likes and dislikes
dissolve into harmonies of rhyme.
...

Hey howya doin' St Peter?
I got better gates than that.
Pearl's such a mess,
You need gold to impress -
...

To whom I cry I know not:
yet into that echoing dark
I raise my voice, asking
only for shelter against the
...

Night words fill the silent air
and hang like predawn mists, drifting
lazily across the fields
of consciousness. Blown gently by
...

The anguish, also, is god -
the desire for transcendence.
The search for unity
of experience
...

When you first start to walk the road, when you first start to roam,
you have no destination and no way home;
but as time and chance occur to each man,
so soon you develop some kind of a plan.
...

I am sitting, here, in this room
where the energy of our love-making remains constant,
distant echo from a galaxy traveling away at the speed of lies -
the red-green shift of passion barely detectible as radio-waves -
...

What did I think when I knew you had gone there?
I thought of the space between us -
the radio channel once filled with chatter,
now stilled with the atmospherics of cosmic silence.
...

In this corner of Oxford it was always Sunday morning -
the silent chimneys once bustling with the kitchen smoke
of a hundred dead cooks sending their burnt offerings
swirling like incense above the respectable tall red roofs:
...