New Poetry by Vladimir Swirynsky

11:15 AM GREEN THEATER

- for Barbara

Her name is Elizabeth Bishop,
bare footed and tipsy toe hanging
a picture on the wall, afternoon
peaking with the wrap-around-drama
of heavy drinking.
Half finished poem
in the typewriter reaches
out for the moon, for Lota
Lota de Macedo Soares.

I find myself with a tear in my eye,
the Cleveland International Film
Festival ushering me to love’s
doorstep, a hundred paces from
the House of Blues.

I needed this, the profane energy
of the Portuguese Romance language,
a chance encounter, the stop-motion
of happiness that keeps betraying me.

You—
lover of stone steps, the painter
of beauty, give me the empty hours
of mood indigo, the things the heart
has forgotten, the shoestring
of a sunset.


- Vladimir Swirynsky 2014


 Vladimir Swirynsky survived school and went on to serve and survive in Vietnam. In time he got married, but unfortunately, they didn’t live happily ever after. The marriage died, but a poet was born.