The Prism

 

Don’t serenade my tombstone

with your sobbing violins, or play

a sombre requiem

for my God-forsaken soul.

 

Laugh out loud in lieu,

not in metaphor but for real—

I’m just beyond your touch

but not the still of a subtle

prayer. See me in the spectrum

as the glass breaks down the colours:

 

sweating, pitching haggard baseballs

in a lot in Tennessee,

quarrelling with the ump,

hurling spitters past the plate;

 

and on days I’m feeling calmer,

serving ice cream cones to children

beneath our Sol at Stanley Park;

 

and just beyond the tree line

in the north, when I’m a little more

daring, forging a trail like

Robert Frost—a little less

worn than most, bones I will inter in

frozen ground.

 

On a clear & sable night near

Santiago, I’m mapping out the stars,

decrypting radio

waves, sending signals of my own:

 

that I was never

lost but never found,

that I’m more than just a body

and the sum of all its parts,

that my words can really breathe

out on their own—

for all our benefit—

 

yours, mine, and the cross-

eyed baby girl in

Lisbon.

 

Dial proper frequencies

for pick-up.

Hear me sing a lullaby,

softly, in Portuguese.

 

 

 

©Andreas Gripp

Pining for St. Patrick

 

Maybe I’m making assumptions,

but I’m guessing folks

at O’Malley’s Pub

won’t exactly be pondering

the Trinity.

 

Sure, clovers are a-plenty.

Irish brews are green.

Every drunken lout

has been screeching Molly Malone.

 

If there was ever a White

Man’s Day then this is it.

Socks up to the knees.

The vacant, bloodshot eyes.

No one in line at the restroom

to simply rest.

 

It really doesn’t matter if

the snow won’t deliquesce.

If icicles mimic stilettos

over every Kelly’s head.

 

Yet if that had been the

case, in 433

AD, I’d imagine a

squat St. Paddy

taking a shovel to winter’s

end, its final belch of flakes,

hunting for a

shamrock that’s been

sober enough to stand.

Or maybe slouch and

a little tipsy. The weight of

a three-headed god.

Like Cerberus without the

drool. Never having to fetch

3 sticks at once. Something the

saint could carry in

his palm:

 

the Father is

the Son is the

Holy Ghost,

 

stupor on the face of

Danny Boy, who’s upchucked

his Kilkenny, unwilling to give it a

single rumination,

engrossed with having the

time of his miserable life.

 

 

 

 

Andreas Gripp

March 17, 2026

After the Applause

 

We assumed that he was

rude when he never clapped.

Even the maestro

glared his way.

A handshake never proffered.

Flowers never jutting

from his fingers. Fingers

never peeking from his sleeve—

a brood of stunted pupae—

shy kids much too scared

to step on stage.

 

Some surmised thalidomide.

Or he’d never found the right

prosthetic. Possibly the

left. Even from the start he’d

push the abacus with his nose.

Olly Olly Oxen

never freed. Unable to

tag another. Scribe that

you were loved.

Thumbed the doorbell

with his ear. Chimed

your valentine.

 

You say you saw him naked

by mistake. But nothing’s

done in err

when it comes to that—

he wanted you to

see what wasn’t lost. To watch

him on the roof. Squawking

he can fly without a feather.

Shoulders miming elbows

miming wings. Talons

for his toes. Our dearest

Daedalus. The guise of

Cupid’s ghost—

 

as if we’d somehow catch him

in the fullness

of our arms. As if he

wouldn’t sever into

jetsam, adding to the

infinity of his puzzle.

A single piece for

you; two for every

wonder of his world.

 

 

 

 

Andreas Gripp

March 15, 2026

Visiting My Mother at St. Leo’s Cemetery

We discern the milky

seeds

of dying dandelions,

afloat in

mid-June zephyr,

 

and I tell you

as I boy I saw them

through my bedroom window,

wondering how it snowed

when it was sultry

beneath the sun.

It was only after that

 

when my mother

spoke of wishes,

I should run into the

yard and pluck a stem,

blow my breath

in yearning, seeing

what might come true.

 

I asked her if

this weed was King

of Flowers,

if our cat

was a distant cousin,

if a wish was

better than a prayer

(the latter gone unanswered

in her days of sick & blood);

 

if it mattered

if my eyes were

closed or open;

and if I peeked, was it

critical if I witnessed

where they landed, like

bowing my head

at grace, glancing at

the others when I shouldn’t—

thanking their fickle God

who’d take offense

if He ever caught me,

make me go to

bed without my dinner,

 

my litanies

unheeded as she passed,

drifting off my tongue,

 

useless as a cloud

that gives no rain when it is

begged, a winter-hearted

genie in the wind.

 

 

 

©Andreas Gripp

The Beholder

 

The adage goes the beholder

will determine

what is glorious.

 

The line of shine/penumbra 

on our evening’s ghostly orb;

how the craters take on depth we

never notice in the day. Everyone else

is focused on the stop

of clotted red.

 

Your eyes are never more lovely

as when they’re fastened.

Spirited, stirring worlds

beneath your lids

while you are dreaming.

 

I tell the tour guide that

Rodin was overrated. The

rock had been the master

throughout his chiselling of The Kiss.

Just ask Camille Claudel.

A straitjacket in

the end her magnum opus.

His gasp when I leave the

group to gaze at rusted

bathroom fixtures.

The scrawling on the stalls.

 

A daisy’s more alluring

once it’s plucked. What else has

the answer to love?

 

Then the daughter whose limbs

are severed after shelling, ferried

by her mother who is scaling

newborn crags in her chador,

brushed the hue of blood that’s not

her own, the way it mimics Gaugin

when in the light.

How she wails when they are

laid beside the torso. An aria

that evokes

Maria Callas. If the dead

can not have beauty

then who can?

 

 

 

 

©2026 Andreas Gripp

Magic

 

The final line of this

poem no longer

exists. It was surely there

for the taking , its fingernails

clutching rock, at the

top of a ragged cliff

from which it hung ,

a Wile E. Coyote

in the making.

 

This poem’s closing line

is a bar of soap 

in a steamy shower,

pushed away from my

hand by its slime,

ready to trip me up 

the moment it falls,

my eyes shut tightly

from the suds of cheap

shampoo, its lie of

no more tears.

 

The final line of this

poem is a cheeky kid 

playing hide-and-seek,

concealed behind the

curtains, waiting for me

to open—                  

 

then disappear

like David Blaine.

 

Dear darling of a

brat, I promise not to

harm, will only borrow

what I need to make this

grand, let you vanish

in the air

 

once I’ve wrenched you

from my hat

by your fluffy ears.

 

 

 

©Andreas Gripp

Embryonics, or The Prophet

An acorn in the ocean

doesn’t sprout. I only say it

once you’ve flung

it from the shore—like a bottle

with a missive

yet conceived—thinking a tree

could never rise

up from the sand.

 

Which is the preferable

death? Being stomped on by a

child’s fleeing heel?

Left in a stranded castle

awaiting waves?

Everything’s tsunami

when you’re small.

 

You’ll say potential

opted to float its years

away. The sanctity of

seed. Something that the

seagulls leave alone.

 

I wonder if it’s you

of whom you speak.

You with your desert

womb. Setting it a sail—

 

like baby Moses

in a basket

by the reeds.

One day to be

struck by the sight of God;

 

countenance aflame,

a chisel in need of

stone, declaring what is holy

and what is not.

 

 

 

©2026 Andreas Gripp