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Best Poems Written by Agona Apell

Below are the all-time best Agona Apell poems as chosen by PoetrySoup members

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The Proposal

We are all born angels but gradually grow
into men;
A few of us though do angels remain,
And you, golden you, are the like of them:
You whom Paradise led me to
And who leads me each day to Paradise;
Whom Fortune fished from my dreams to
lay by my side...
If you wish me love, wish me you,
And if I should make you happy, make me
hubby!

Then for a day you’ll be my bride
And forever my pride.
And side by side with hearts, sweat, & tears
entwined
We’ll each day labour at the blessed wheel
By whose fateful spins our home shall be 
steered
Towards destinies atop golden hills
That Heaven wills as our dwelling place.

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Pissful Religion

God sometimes does pray to man;
Quite often we hear him not.
But once above the din of earthly prayer 
I did hear his voice;
Through the dizzying whir of angels' wings 
His prayer came loud and clear;
A prayer in a tongue I can scarce recall 
But which I did to English render.

Priests of the faiths, shepherds of my flock: 
Shall you like the devil not hear my prayer?
My words find room in your ears but none 
in your hearts,
And so the faithful wander astray from holy 
to hollow creed—
The hollow creed of pissful religion.
I can nowhere look and not meet their flights 
of insanity;
And nowhere go and not leave un-torn by 
their evil ways:
From crimes against humanity,
To drives against womanity--
All wrought in the name of Heaven.

In prayer I now command:
Reach out your staff each day and by its crook 
draw the flock near.
Teach them that to answer my prayers is the
highest form of worship
And that man is borne to me not by the things 
he drives but by the things that drive him.
Hand them the one compass of golden truth
Whose artless needle ever swings with passion 
away from their crooked altars 
To point fixedly at my eternal word as to 
conscience revealed.
If these words still shall not bend them to the 
light
Then, perhaps, my wrath will
When upon their heads it descends
Like a whip of lightning cracking on earth's 
bare back.

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The Law and the Low

The low suffer most the blow of the law 
And no better do they fare with its flow:
From injustice to injustice it carries them
But none ever calls this a flaw.
For like that, perhaps, she can’t help to be,
Born of the mighty as she is.

Once, though, every eternity the cords of 
patience snap:
Justice is demanded and swiftly she comes.
It's time for revolution, the clash unto ash 
between the classes.
By saw and seesaw there'll be newness abroad:
The old system teeters as its sinews are severed
And from cakes of blood springs another;
That long denied by law is now seized by claw,
And from star to tar the mighty tumble
As their thrones are lowered for dwarfs to 
mount.
Upwards go the erstwhile low 
To be class dwarfs no more 
But the mighty of the land.

Amidst this newness, though, an old song 
soon intrudes:
In voices faint and mournful we hear it sung
By those from star to lowly tar fallen.
In fields and taverns, at work and at play,
It dwells on lips bright and sullen;
But up above behind stately walls where
stands the palace 
None but the children dare sing it—
The song they once heard old papa sing,
Which loosened his lips like a wicked brew
But now binds them shut like a glue. 
When from frolics they break
In their playfields green
And in palace parlors
At once warm chants from their breasts erupt
Which with glee and charm they long sustain
Till every soul feel their lips beguiled
To render accompaniment in a whistled melody.

Then swirls the music about every ear, and all can 
hear the palace ring: 
“The low suffer most the blow of the law 
And no better do they fare with its flow:
From injustice to injustice it carries them
But none ever calls this a flaw.
For like that, perhaps, she can’t help to be,
Born of the mighty as she is.”

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A Bad Guy With a Gun

"Only a good guy with a gun can stop a bad guy with a gun."
So says the gun lobby—the bad guy with a gun!
School, shop, and street wax wet with blood,
But the hum of the gun works drowns out their cry.
Their tears, still, run deep in our ears 
Sweeping away old lies about guns 
That gun shop bums so glibly put forth.

By caskets in a ditch, they make their pitch
To conjure gun sales out of every shooting.
"Strap a mop to a gun butt to blot the blood," they'll say 
Knowing that in our fright they can fly us like a kite
And lead us by a string to gun shops and the like.
Soon, though, we see not more sales alone
But in their red wake more hells too.

By right we arm but by love disarm.
Now is the nation called to love:
By gun control we challenge not your rights 
But your heart to sacrifice that love entails.
So give me not a reading of the law
But tales of love's deeds in hearts and homes—
How racks have shed arms like autumn leaves 
And turned the land from red to gold.

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My Horse For a Kingdom

I rode to power on a Midwest horse, 
Bearing amongst the feathers in my cap this terse brief 
from my broken people:
To lay waste to the irksome order
That home and abroad now prevails.
Strained voices break out in the valley below 
And many more in the world across the seas
Bidding me to dismount at once 
And move to saddle the global kingdom 
Of Reagan, Roosevelt, Clinton, ...
That now is mine to ride.

Yet this very kingdom I came to crush;
My Midwest horse, I wouldn't trade for it!
In her neighs, I hear a nay
Forbidding me to consider the bargain.
Her counsel I think I'll heed
For between the two, she's the easier to ride.
A horse that trots on cheap lies
Or a kingdom that floats on costly allies--
That's the question I now confront.

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Black Lives

When a man stepped out his childhood home,
Planting a brave foot in the open world
Not an age, not a generation, not a world ago,
There breathed and burned in him hope
Shared with mama's receding figure
Frozen in prayer by the doorpost to his back 
That his way he would make through this mild wild
That law and claw both make the world 
With flesh unmarred by scratch or patch.

"You'll keep out of trouble if you behave yourself," 
she would advise.
That, sure, was the wisdom of her world,
Her old world now long gone,
When the law was still a genuine ass,
Not a chameleon in ass skin
That turns deathly black when around blacks
And pristine white when around whites.

Black or white, all will rue the loss of that world
When a man was safe if he behaved himself.
Now he keeps out of trouble
Only if he behaves himself,
The police behave themselves,
And court behaves itself.

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Favour Turned Sour

A frequent favor is soon a debt:
It makes cupped hands close into fists.
Now that my hands are empty,
I see your breast heave with cold dark clouds—
A sure sign of the storm to come.
A pool of slime gathers in your eyes 
That just yesterday were wide and glad
But now both narrow, each to a slit. 
The fault, I know, is that a favor has gone missing,
So I the giver must hear the hissing.

Each time my favors to mist dissolve, 
Your inner angels and demons to fists come.
Whom you cheer tells me focus:
Whether you dwell on scores or dwell on sores.
I see you cheer the angels 
When it's my scores that you recall,
Scores that I gained whilst my favors flowed;
But it's demons that you cheer 
When all you see are sores
That now hurt you where lost favors once soothed.

I feel your pain, so this much I’ll say:
In the hands of the clock is a mighty broom:
Of the plumes of angels' wings are its bristles made.
When time beats the past to dust,
It’s all soon wafted to heaven
As the clock each day fields its fabled broom.
Out of that dust, as at the beginning of time,
The Lord ever forms new worlds and fortunes 
In which by his grace 
Things now lost and missed may yet be reborn—
But only to those that stand with the angels.

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Nelson Mandela: Many Stumbles, No Mumbles

Each time I raise my gaze to the night sky,
A million stars stare back, shedding happy tears of light.
And I cannot but stare back in delight,
Wondering which one of them holds your great soul.
Tell me, Old Nelson, do they--these stars--still shine upon 
you?

Heaven should grant that they do,
For like them your example still shines upon us, pointing 
to us the true north of life--
And, oh yes, this one great lesson: that life's struggles will 
endure our stumbles but never our mumbles.
Yes! Our hopes may fall and our fortunes dip, but on their 
feet our voices must keep.
Twenty-seven years did rough chains bind your feet,
And twenty-seven years did they girdle your breast,
But not once--never--did they bind your voice.

"Only free men can negotiate," you scoffed at your jailers, 
scorning to barter your ideals for your freedom;
And to that crooked Boer court: "A free South Africa is the 
great ideal for which I live, and if need be it is the one ideal 
for which I will die."
Then to a bleeding, seething nation: "Let's break with the past."

From the flesh of these words a new nation was carved for 
white, brown, and black alike.
Twinkle for twinkle it matches the skies,
And in its bosom you now rest forever: quiet, contented, 
victorious!

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Tales of a Worn Shoe

At the end of life, in a worn shoe lies the story of 
a man's life written by foot:
At its tip we see lashings of the million journeys 
he attempted, 
And in its emptiness the stinging image of loss.
Its fine style recalls the happy eyes that once shone 
upon it, 
And from its stillness memories of a journey cut 
short erupt.
Beneath the shoe lie the harsh strokes of the road 
he trod—here a gaping sole and there a tilted heel—
And on its wavy skin we see the rise and fall of 
bygone fortune.
In its general look we see the stamp of the wearer's 
character: here his caring side & there his daring side.  
And so at death we learn that a foot is too small a thing 
to fill a worn shoe.

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Anti-War Correspondent

At the start of the next war,
While the headlines scream "war, war, war",
Go fit a lens to your gun's barrel
And a reel of film in its magazine.
It would be a better war—don't you agree?—
If all the innocents soon to face your gun
Froze in a pose
Anticipating the shots to come:
Shots of them, I mean,
Not shots at them!

When the order comes to open fire
That'll be the time to peer through your gun sight
Ready to take to the field of battle
And go clicking away 
At the follies of men in war,
The corporate vultures circling above,
And all the lies, lies, lies about the war.
For where blood spills,
There truth must spill too;
But oft in war, it's the pills we get
To cloud our eyes and dim our minds.

Then, perhaps, we'll someday learn
Why our boys and girls who march forth to war
Never do really as of old return.
The heroes of a thousand battles
Retreat to a thousand bottles
At the doctor's and the barman's.
Who we call survivors
And whom we call casualties
Their fates ultimately come equal:
One falls in the battlefield,
The other in the bottle-field—
But fall they all do, they all do, O lord!