Jim Keller Verse-Virtual 2016 December

December 2016

I'm a chemical engineer who recently retired and now have more time to read and write poetry. Over the last twenty or so years, I've been involved with a group of local poets that try to meet monthly; one of them suggested I join your site. I haven't really attempted to submit much work over the years. Some of my poems were last published about ten years ago in Mad Blood, an excellent little magazine, that like so many expired after a run of 7 or 8 years.

Silk Road

Come now to
the Han Dynasty
where wriggling worms
feast on mulberry leaves
producing thin threads
that women weave
into fabulous fabrics
folded into packs on
two –humped Bactrians
assembled in caravans and driven
plodding across scalding sands
of the Gobi
and then north of the Pamir
to beckoning Uzbekistan
Tashkent and Samarkand
and thence to Persia and Italy
for Roman women of
classic Italic voluptuousness
draped in the clinging silk
viewed hungrily by virile gladiators
in the Coliseum before
they clash and die

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