The Poetry of Shirley Allard
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RIGHT ANSWER, WRONG QUESTION
by Shirley Whiting Allard

Once upon a midnight star
The moon reflected from afar
Great pyramids rose up from earth
Symbolic of wisdom and its worth

Kingdoms built, would rise and fall
Remains entombed in vaulted walls
Our probing minds and spades prevail
Their trials and errors to unveil.

Great scholars stop and wander in
And marvel at their mastering
What price, their immortality
A quandary we're still pondering.

What haunting tales their bones now tell
And if we listened half as well
The secret itself lies self-contained
Mortality: the message of immortal remains




IMMACULATE DECEPTION
by Shirley Allard

Two eggs, resting side by side
One shell,in which two chicks reside.
One grew strong, as cells divided,
The other disappeared inside it.

Together they grew, as one, these two
Now so conjoined that no one knew.
The innocent victims of nature's flair
United, yet perfectly unaware,
That when they reached maturity
The one inside, would grow to be
An equal but opposite identity.

Now the one we see, in reality,
Unknown to us, would share
With one inside, who's been denied.
The 'one' who isn't there.

Might every rooster in life's pen
Have inside himself, a hen?
Or an evil other, awaiting the chance
The proper time and circumstance
To 'come out' from within?

When examined with an open mind
More of us, I'm sure would find
A truth that others simply won't
In what we see, and what we don't.

Copyright © 2006












































QUANTITATIVE INHERITANCE
by Shirley Whiting Allard

Like fish, we swim against life's stream
Distracted by our hopes and dreams
Blind to innate memories –
passed through time, genetically.
We stake our claims, prophetically,
as the masters of our destiny.

Unlike the fish, the upward slopes,
that drain their spirits; fuel our hopes.
The visions, omens, instinctual signs
that sneak into our idle minds
are disregarded, we’re more inclined
to believe we’ve lived a thousand times.

Nature's wisdom seems very clear–
We live just once; but while we're here,
we add our scrap of brilliancy
to the cache of familial memory.
A thousand years of history
Passed through time, genetically.