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Post by noasinger on Nov 10, 2006 8:54:05 GMT -5
Here in Katmandu
We have climbed the mountain, There's nothing more to do. It is terrible to come down To the valley Where, amidst many flowers, One thinks of snow,
As, formerly, amidst snow, Climbing the mountain, One thought of flowers, Tremulous, ruddy with dew, In the valley. One caught their scent coming down.
It is difficult to adjust, once down, To the absence of snow. Clear days, from the valley, One looks up at the mountain. What else is there to do? Prayerwheels, flowers!
Let the flowers Fade, the prayerwheels run down. What have these to do With us who have stood atop the snow Atop the mountain, Flags seen from the valley?
It might be possible to live in the valley, To bury oneself among flowers, If once could forget the mountain, How, setting out before dawn, Blinded with snow, One knew what to do.
Meanwhile it is not easy here in Katmandu, Especially when to the valley That wind which means snow Elsewhere, but here means flowers, Comes down, As soon it must, from the mountain.
Donald Justice, 1956
Okay, so, wtf? Comment.
The grass is always greener....
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Post by wednesday on Nov 13, 2006 3:05:59 GMT -5
The grass is always greener....It reads like longing to me...that terrible lover longing. The grass is always greener because we can never truly know anything, and hence we can never be anywhere. Leaning Into The Afternoons
Leaning into the afternoons I cast my sad nets towards your oceanic eyes.
There in the highest blaze my solitude lengthens and flames, its arms turning like a drowning man's.
I send out red signals across your absent eyes that move like the sea near a lighthouse.
You keep only darkness, my distant female, from your regard sometimes the coast of dread emerges.
Leaning into the afternoons I fling my sad nets to that sea that beats on your marine eyes.
The birds of night peck at the first stars that flash like my soul when I love you.
The night gallops on its shadowy mare shedding blue tassels over the land.--Pablo Neruda (translated by WS Merwin) Or perhaps the grass is always greener because time is so fleeting. We can never capture it and hold it in our hands, so we look away from it, where there is only memory. We Have Lost Even
We have lost even this twilight. No one saw us this evening hand in hand while the blue night dropped on the world.
I have seen from my window the fiesta of sunset in the distant mountain tops.
Sometimes a piece of sun burned like a coin between my hands.
I remembered you with my soul clenched in that sadness of mine that you know.
Where were you then? Who else was there? Saying what? Why will the whole of love come on me suddenly when I am sad and feel you are far away?
The book fell that is always turned to at twilight and my cape rolled like a hurt dog at my feet.
Always, always you recede through the evenings towards where the twilight goes erasing statues.--Pablo Neruda (translated by WS Merwin) The grass is always greener...I wish I knew Spanish.
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Post by noasinger on Nov 13, 2006 8:28:39 GMT -5
Let's continue the "air movement at exotic locations" theme (Pablo Neruda counts!), because I need a vacation:
A Letter from the Caribbean
Breezeways in the tropics winnow the air, Are ajar to its last breath But hold back, in a feint of architecture, The boisterous sun Pouring down upon
The island like a cloudburst. They Slant to loft air, they curve, they screen The wind's wild gaiety Which tosses palm Branches about like a marshal's plumes.
Within this filtered, latticed World, where pools of shadow Form, lift and change, The triumph of incoming air Is that it is there,
Cooling and salving us. Louvers, Trellises, vines--music also-- Shape the arboreal wind, make skeins Of it, and a maze To catch shade. The days
Are all variety, blowing; Aswirl in a perpetual current Of wind, shadow, sun, I marvel at the capacity Of memory
Which, in some deep pocket Of my mind, preserves you whole-- As wind is wind, as the lion-taming Sun is sun, you are, you stay: Nothing is lost, nothing has blown away.
Barbara Howes, 1966
mmm, now I want someone to take me to feel those cooling breezes.....
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Post by noasinger on Nov 14, 2006 12:42:18 GMT -5
Moving air in exotic locations has sounded so blissful so far, hasn't it? But at times it's not.
Harsh and powerful, one of my favorite anti-war poems. Much of the very best anti-war material was written during and following World War I (cf Dalton Trumbo's Johnny Got His Gun)
Dulce Et Decorum Est
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks, Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge, Till on the haunting flares we turned out backs, And towards our distant rest began to trudge. Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots, But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame, all blind; Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots of gas-shells dropping softly behind.
Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!--An ecstasy of fumbling, Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time, But someone still was yelling out and stumbling And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime.-- Dim through the misty panes and thick green light, As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams before my helpless sight He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace behind the wagon that we flung him in, And watch the white eyes writing in his face, His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin, If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood Come gargling form the froth-corrupted lungs Bitter as the cud Of vile, incurable sores on inncoent tongues,-- My friend, you would not tell with such high zest To children ardent for some desperate glory, The old lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori. *
Wilfred Owen, (1893-1918) the poet died a week before the armistice
Latin quotation from Horace: "It is sweet and becoming to die for one's country."
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Post by noasinger on Nov 15, 2006 22:00:29 GMT -5
May you awaken to the mystery of being here and enter the quiet immensity of your own presence. May you have joy and peace in the temple of your senses. May you receive great encouragement when new frontiers beckon. May you respond to the call of your gift and find the courage to follow its path. May the flame of anger free you from falsity. May warmth of heart keep your presence aflame and may anxiety never linger about you. May your outer dignity mirror an inner dignity of soul. May you take time to celebrate the quiet miracles that seek no attention. May you be consoled in the secret symmetry of your soul. May you experience each day as a sacred gift woven around the heart of wonder.
~ John O'Donohue ~ (Anam Cara)
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Post by noasinger on Nov 16, 2006 22:40:30 GMT -5
Some wonderful poetry is actually masquerading as prose. Here is a set from Cuban-American poet Dionisio D. Martinez
Some Prodigal Son poems
The Prodigal Son deconstructs the origami language
that informs the syntax of his limbs. Beginning with the enormous, delicate wingspan—long, webbed digits fanning out majestically from his spine like a brittle cape. It is this version of himself that troubles him most deeply. It is this freedom that weighs him down, this hell-bent mythlike flightless self. Fortunately, this is his paper self, which folds like a row of lawn chairs at the end of summer, like summer itself under an onslaught of elms and sycamores. Each moment is carefully packed and put away and in each move at least one box is forgotten, but the future he leaves behind has nothing to do with the days that await him. The roads are lined with other creatures trying to sort themselves out—endangered on one side, extinct on the other; distaff on the left, spindle on the right. It makes the ride seem a little less hopeless. A tire blows out and the Falcon skids, stopping finally in the middle—exactly in the middle—of the road. He steps out to take a look at the flat, to see what he does not believe, and to discover in the process that there is symmetry even in an accident. He steps back, looks down and sees a nearly ordinary man looking up through the wing motif of the hubcap.
The Prodigal Son, for whom summer is a verb
in the off-season, accidentally comes to grips with the largely incoherent letter of resignation signed by so many of his contemporaries. The names gather and sweep across the bottom of the page like a flock of small birds groomed by the thermal they ride. How can he question the signatures' authenticity when they are the only legible words in the letter? The birds are determined in their formation—a battalion charging with purpose; the impetus of a relentless world reaching into its own axis like Adam into the recesses of his imperfect rib cage, the maneuver performed for its own sake though from other worlds other Adams are most likely watching and taking notes and feeling for gaps between their own unfinished ribs which they read as their gods' ultimate disclaimer: perfection is attainable but unnecessary. There is often a single leaf—half green, half decomposed, and no sign of transition between one state and the other—left behind as proof or token. It is far more reliable than a feather, more likely to point to the arc of events, the sequence, whatever they call it nowadays, whatever leads birds out of their eggs and into the randomness that precedes the communal geometry of the flock, its skywriting abilities, the sky itself.
The Prodigal Son, accompanied by the ideogram
for instead, attends the performance of a Cantonese opera. If there is no such symbol, he carves one in his arm. If the knife is blunt or the skin unyielding, he goes alone. If there is no opera, he sings to himself though the song of the goldfinch nesting in his one good lung is only a melodious cough. In the opera, a magician makes a fist and covers it with a scarf he has been waving very slowly. He lifts the scarf and produces a hypothesis. The vanished fist, still attached—hypothetically—to the magician's arm, will only return to the song of a goldfinch. The director insists on using a real bird. It dies just before making its entrance. The magician, oblivious to this, waves the scarf again. His disembodied fist materializes, clutching some feathers, in a birdcage carried by a peasant in another opera.
The Prodigal Son as understudy
The pomegranate bites back. More than anthropomorphism, this is a ludicrous interpretation of what is commonly known as passive resistance. He lives in the attic and fasts before each performance though his part, for which he has yet to be called, is anything but crucial. He argues, nonetheless, that the play is driven by background tension and without so-called minor characters the whole thing might as well take place backstage. The pomegranate is invisible. It is difficult to tell our teachers from the agents of misinformation. This is Beethoven's "Fleur-de-lis," someone says, pulling the record carelessly from the sleeve and making a story to support the title, something about Ludwig and the French Foreign Legion. It is only by some slip of the tongue, years later, that he begins to say "Für Elise," and years after that realizes he has accidentally made a small correction with unfathomable repercussions. One must make adjustments. Leap years come to mind—every calendar at the mercy of February, the pendulums of Greenwich plotting a silent protest; one thinks of floodgates along the canal, their movements synchronized to keep the ocean on one side of the isthmus from spilling into the sea on the other side. He knows the drought and the law, keeps to himself during the state of emergency though he knows the bark of authority is only that; and there is little anyone can do to stop him should he decide to have company, cook indoors. They lift the ban as if it were a bandage and it rains pomegranates. He is secretly aware that the unfinished century is far from over.
The Prodigal Son locates the epicenter
It's always better to forget. When the voice says coordinates he doesn't know if the news is about fashion or warfare, he's not even sure that it's news; it could be interference, unclaimed freight, the last word of an ecumenical hermit, a game of hopscotch without numbers, his hand, his other hand clutching dice in his pocket. There must be something palpable that separates incidental from accidental; otherwise, the suicide is mistakenly filed under wrongful death and life goes on as if this were the curtain, this the proscenium, this the cue to burst into the scene with an unintentional soliloquy.
The Prodigal Son: Temporary trains
Some transgressions are not forgivable. If that's not the case, our stay here is a horrible mistake. An inconsistency must've tipped them off at passport control—a tiny mole, a secret history of what they used to call incidents. The delegation arrives on schedule, but the interpreters have been delayed, reportedly detained for failing to carry their share of contraband. The word on the street is that they're being charged with numerous counts of attempting to obstruct a literal translation. A reasonable man may very well throw up his hands long before the skirmish escalates. The danger is that the hands often end up in the face of reason, right up against the eyes. One assumes. One starts to depend on assumptions. Here's the picture. This is how he looks when he's not looking.
The Prodigal Son confronting Zeno's paradoxes
Ten years from today, in either direction, he is running toward himself. In both simultaneous instances, he carries an arrow. One version of him is building up speed to throw the arrow at some unsuspecting target, the other is being propelled by an arrow caught in midflight. To the one in the middle, the two runners appear as frozen images (or would appear as such if peripheral vision had no limits) and he feels himself expanding toward both of them, like a series of points along a line. To him, everything is in the plotting: there is no line without points, no surface without a line. Reason precedes existence. Why argue the matter? The line is not chalk on a sidewalk or a crack along the chalk mark; it is not the imprint of a fallen reed swallowed by wet sand—the explicitly sexual mouthful of water waiting to follow the sunken reed. Reason is the self-sufficient animal that devours itself in order to survive. The line is not a rope or a string or a section of barbed wire cut for the escape. He is running against the generally accepted notion that sees lines as the envoys of abstract distance. His dismantled agenda sets the pace.
The Prodigal Son in his own words: Rhetorical answers
Under conditions that are only possible elsewhere, I tend to feel much better though I'm beginning to get the impression that things are improving locally. It hasn't been that long: I remember the road years, itineraries clouding my eyes. Time goes south when it's not in a hurry; it repeats itself in fragments. I'd have to be standing there, awake, to know how well or how miserably I sleep on any given night. Those few times I witness the dark dissolving into morning, the whole incredible thing is an afterthought revisting itself. There is more to this than this, like the series of expectations in the case of the child who raises an arm, as if to pat herself on the head, and says, "I'm this tall," the hand still hovering inches above the uneven part in her hair. There is a partial end to everything. Each day, a different stranger passes for me; they differ from one another as much as I resemble every one of them.
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Post by noasinger on Nov 29, 2006 15:36:51 GMT -5
Christina Rossetti (1830–1894)
A Daughter of Eve
A fool I was to sleep at noon, And wake when night is chilly Beneath the comfortless cold moon; A fool to pluck my rose too soon, A fool to snap my lily.
My garden-plot I have not kept; Faded and all-forsaken, I weep as I have never wept: Oh it was summer when I slept, It's winter now I waken.
Talk what you please of future spring And sun-warm'd sweet to-morrow:— Stripp'd bare of hope and everything, No more to laugh, no more to sing, I sit alone with sorrow.
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gemma
Cove Investigator
Non-Breeniverse Gemma
Posts: 157
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Post by gemma on Nov 29, 2006 15:51:29 GMT -5
Sorry to interrupt your thread, but my boyfriend runs a poetry night in London, and is the co-founder of a website www.openned.com if you wanted to check it out Noa. Some of the stuff is too modern for his liking (and mine) but they accept contributions from people and are trying to open up the poetry scene in London a little bit. It might be worth a look!
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Post by noasinger on Nov 29, 2006 18:02:52 GMT -5
Ah, no discussion of poetry is an interruption on this thread -- it's what I made it for! Thanks for the link; I'll go take a look right away.
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Post by noasinger on Nov 30, 2006 15:39:51 GMT -5
Permanently Kenneth Koch, 1956
One day the Nouns were clustered in the street. An Adjective walked by, with her dark beauty. The Nouns were stuck, moved, changed. The next day a Verb drove up, and created the Sentence.
Each Sentence says one thing -- for example, "Although it was a dark rainy day when the Adjective walked by, I shall remember the pure and sweet expression on her face until the day I perish from the green, effective earth." Or, "Will you please close the window, Andrew?" Or, for example, "Thank you, the pink pot of flowers on the window sill has changed color recently to a light yellow, due to the heat from the boiler factory which exists nearby."
In the springtime the Sentences and the Nouns lay silently on the grass. A lonely Conjunction here adn there would call, "And! But!" But the Adjective did not emerge.
As the adjective is lost in the sentence, So I am lost in your eyes, ears, nose, and throat -- You have enchanted me with a single kiss Which can never be undone Until the destruction of language.
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Post by noasinger on Dec 4, 2006 6:37:53 GMT -5
that voice is full of lazy, broad vowels
broad, falling, calm ah, that sound in every word
that's an early saturday morning voice and a late sunday afternoon voice
that's a voice that makes a lost person dig through the soil and plant wisteria to boil over with riotous blue clusters in due time
that's a voice to make someone wonder what excitement is in store for next week, what mischief she can make, what words would sound like put together,
that's a voice that makes makes a person buy honey and then just drip it into her mouth off a fingertip
it's a voice full of warm and lazy sounds that drives her laziness away
(2006)
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Post by noasinger on Dec 6, 2006 12:45:18 GMT -5
The Art of Poetry Jorge Luis Borges
To gaze at a river made of time and water And remember Time is another river. To know we stray like a river and our faces vanish like water.
To feel that waking is another dream that dreams of not dreaming and that the death we fear in our bones is the death that every night we call a dream.
To see in every day and year a symbol of all the days of man and his years, and convert the outrage of the years into a music, a sound, and a symbol.
To see in death a dream, in the sunset a golden sadness--such is poetry, humble and immortal, poetry, returning, like dawn and the sunset.
Sometimes at evening there's a face that sees us from the deeps of a mirror. Art must be that sort of mirror, disclosing to each of us his face.
They say Ulysses, wearied of wonders, wept with love on seeing Ithaca, humble and green. Art is that Ithaca, a green eternity, not wonders.
Art is endless like a river flowing, passing, yet remaining, a mirror to the same inconstant Heraclitus, who is the same and yet another, like the river flowing.
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aishapup
Anchor Cove Jr. Resident
KissyDog says "carpe diem, catfish, catgirls and catboys and of course catnippers and catpups"
Posts: 22
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Post by aishapup on Dec 6, 2006 14:02:16 GMT -5
Let's continue the "air movement at exotic locations" theme (Pablo Neruda counts!), because I need a vacation: A Letter from the CaribbeanBreezeways in the tropics winnow the air, ... mmm, now I want someone to take me to feel those cooling breezes..... ( ... aisha pulls a bukabit : nice nice nice, Caribe would be fantastic right now ... )
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