Towards Unbuilt Places

poems by

Louis Efron

CANCELED

Louis Efron is a Pushcart Prize nominated and award-winning writer and poet whose work has appeared in distinguished publications around the world. He is also the author of five books, including The Unempty Spaces Between (NYC Big Book Award for poetry), How to Find a Job, Career and Life You Love; Purpose Meets Execution; Beyond the Ink; as well as the children’s book What Kind of Bee Can I Be?

These sensual, elegiac poems celebrate nature and humanness, delving into the inevitable interaction between them, with all its
colorful, messy splendor. The language is alive and in motion. This is a book to be savored. ~Alexis Rhone Fancher, author of Sinkhole, Brazen, &11 other collections

Towards Unbuilt Places is a rare collection of beauty and wound, of personal vulnerability and social consciousness, of emotional depth and insatiable observation. Efron’s poems embrace our own responsibilities to the world . . . and each other. His sharp metaphors paint such richness to the world he builds for us, both defining and pushing against the edges of our shared human experience. These poems choose to both celebrate and mourn everything they touch. ~John Sibley Williams

Louis Efron’s startling new collection has a strong Romantic bent, seeking the spiritual “in a world without sacred ground.” His poems defend innocence and question the self-destructive aspects of modernity that create human suffering. Whether it’s school shootings, pollution, poverty, political dissidents, or the epidemic of modern loneliness, these fine poems ask us to take back what is sacred by remembering what beauty is still available here on earth, “a place where no keys go unplayed.” ~Max Heinegg, author of Good Harbor, Going There, and Keepers of the House

Beautiful Trees

Petrified roots cemented deep
In the rigid jaws of Earth

Arms struggling against another storm
Fruit and leaves dead yet unfallen

Thrust to crack
Crack to break

Limb to limb, serpentine rain
Fills the spaces between

Two imposing figures nestled in a wood
Crowded with figures and their long shadows

One, shades of aged grey and rippled bronze

The other, pinkish amber bleeding into raspberry veins

Both broad bodies of grit and thirst
Stamping tainted legacies into the yielding earth

Vying forever for a bit more sunlight, reaching
Down through their cracks for where shared roots

Lovingly break open the earth

Oh, Father

Adrift on lamenting clouds, an ephemeral tune
A father that no longer answers
All doors in this long hallway of doors, closed
Shadows flicker in a reflective pool of cancer

A father that cannot answer
Fingers stretch and slip, an unstoppable ascent to heaven
Shadows flicker over the skin like cancer
Eyes shut, translucent marbles in the sand

Fingers swiftly curling back, recoiling
Celluloid faces melt in the fire inside
His eyes, lost marbles in the sand
A stained vessel descends into earthly dreams

Frozen light sealed beneath undying screens
Open doors, memorials to intoxicating laughter, bittersweet tears
A bright light extinguished under a blanket of glistening mist
Floating on lamenting clouds, the briefest tune

A New Home

Unbreathable air, spoiled soil, cancerous streams
A death march of lambs to yet another slaughter

Carelessness, disease, hate, and violence
Bodies in the streets, crimson rose stained pavement

Turning away from indiscretions, mistakes
A merry-go-round of toxic horses, civil unrest

The simplest empathy like misplaced keys
A home with locked doors, window slivers void of light

A white robed preacher, a sold-out sermon with a pulpit queue
Flailing and accusatory hands, dark eyes piercing pews of repentant souls

A failed Earth, a time to discard
Another world, our new home

Your golden lottery ticket to escape the raped and pillaged
A stem pushing through the dirt to prove its worth