Hail, Poetry, thou heav’n-born maid!
Thou gildest e’en the pirate’s trade.
Hail, flowing fount of sentiment!
All hail, all hail, divine emollient!
–Gilbert and Sullivan, The Pirates of Penzance
(and yes, they knew they were being over the top)
Continued from version 2011.
By Saul Williams, from part two of “Release, Parts 1, 2 & 3” from the album Blazing Arrow by Blackalicious:
Inner breathlessness, outer restlessness
By the time I caught up to freedom I was out of breath
Grandma asked me what I’m running for
I answer I’m out for the same thing the sun is sunning for
What mothers birth their young’uns for
And some say Jesus coming for
For all I know the earth is spinning slow
Sun’s at half mast ’cause masses ain’t aglow
On bended knee, prostrate before an altered tree
I’ve made the forest suit me
Tables and chairs
Papers and prayers
Matter vs. spirit
A metal ladder
A wooden cross
A plastic bottle of water
A mandala encased in glass
A spirit encased in flesh
Sound from shaped hollows
The thickest of mucus released from heightened passion
A man that cries in his sleep
A truth that has gone out of fashion
A mode of expression
A paint splattered wall
A carton of cigarettes
A bouquet of corpses
A dying forest
A nurtured garden
A privatized prison
A candle with a broken wick
A puddle that reflects the sun
A piece of paper with my name on it
I’m surrounded
I surrender
All
All that I am I have been
All I have been has been a long time coming
I am becoming all that I am
The spittle that surrounds the mouth-piece of the flute
Unheard, yet felt
A gathered wetness
A quiet moisture
Sound trapped in a bubble
Released into wind
Wind fellows and land merchants
We are history’s detergent
Water soluble, light particles, articles of cleansing breath
Articles amending death
These words are not tools of communication
They are shards of metal
Dropped from eight story windows
They are waterfalls and gas leaks
Aged thoughts rolled in tobacco leaf
The tools of a trade
Barbers barred, barred of barters
Catchphrases and misunderstandings
But they are not what I feel when I am alone
Surrounded by everything and nothing
And there isn’t a word or phrase to be caught
A verse to be recited
A man to de-fill my being in those moments
I am blankness, the contained center of an “O”
The pyramidic containment of an “A”
I stand in the middle of all that I have learned
All that I have memorized
All that I’ve known by heart
Unable to reach any of it
There is no sadness
There is no bliss
It is a forgotten memory
A memorable escape route that only is found by not looking
There, in the spine of the dictionary the words are worthless
They are a mere weight pressing against my thoughtlessness
But then, who else can speak of thoughtlessness with such confidence
Who else has learned to sling these ancient ideas
Like dead rats held by their tails
So as not to infect this newly oiled skin
I can think of nothing heavier than an airplane
I can think of no greater conglomerate of steel and metal
I can think of nothing less likely to fly
There are no wings more weighted
I too have felt a heaviness
The stare of a man guessing at my being
Yes I am a homeless
A homeless man making offerings to the after-future
Sculpting rubber tree forests out of worn tires and shoe soles
A nation unified in exhale
A cloud of smoke
A native pipe ceremony
All the gathered cigarette butts piled in heaps
Snow-covered mountains
Lipsticks smeared and shriveled
Offerings to an afterworld
Tattoo guns and plastic wrappers
Broken zippers and dead-eyed dolls
It’s all overwhelming me, oak and elming me
I have seeded a forest of myself
Little books from tall trees
It matters not what this paper be made of
Give me notebooks made of human flesh
Dried on steel hooks and nooses
Make uses of use, uses of us
It’s all overwhelming me, oak and elming me
I have seeded a forest of myself
Little books from tall trees
On bended knee
Prostrate before an altered tree
I’ve made the forest suit me
Tables and chairs
Papers and prayers
Matter vs. spirit
Through meditation I program my heart to beat breakbeats and hum basslines on exhalation
I thought of this poem again this morning, after all that’s happened this past week. “By the time I caught up to freedom, I was out of breath.”
Yaay, I have some sort of poem going for a poetry contest. It’s about this and I’ve been trying to write a poem about it for a while, and I guess it’s ambiguous enough that anyone who was actually there who reads my poem will not remember or think it’s a metaphor for something. Anyway. I’ll post the poem later.
SFTDP: It’s comment 171.
Because I didn’t post it on the last thread but I lovelovelove it and have been internet-stalking the author for days:
“Spaces”
Arkaye Kierulf
1.
In this room I was born. And I knew I was in the wrong place: the world. I knew pain was to come. I knew it by the persistence of the blade that cut me out. I knew it as every baby born to the world knows it: I came here to die.
2.
Somewhere a beautiful woman in a story I do not understand is crying. If I strain hard enough I will hear a song in the background. She is holding a letter. She is in love with Peter. I am in love with her.
3.
Stand on the floor where it’s marked X. I am standing by your side where it’s marked Y. We are a shoulder’s length apart. I’m so close you can almost smell the perfume. If I step ten paces away from you, there could be a garden between us, or a table and some chairs. If I step another 20 paces there could be a house between us. If I continue to walk away from you in this way, tramping through walls and hovering above water, in 80,150,320 steps I will bump into you. I can never get away from you, and will you remember me? Distance brings us closer. There is no distance.
4.
In 1961 I was in Berlin. It was a dusty Sunday in August. In the radio news was out that Ulbricht had convinced Khrushchev to build a wall around West Berlin. I remember it precisely: By midnight East German troops had sealed off the zonal boundary with barbed wire. The streets along which the barrier ran had been torn up. I lived in that street. It was the day after my birthday. I remember the dust covering the sky. I remember being scared. Father had not returned from the other side. The Kampfgruppen der Arbeiterklasse had orders to shoot anyone who would attempt to defect. Father had not returned.
5.
Happiness is simple.
Sadness forks into many roads.
6.
Before the time of Christ, Aristotle believed that the earth was the center of the universe because he needed a stationary reference point against which to measure all other motions: a rock falling, a star reeling through the sky, his heart beating against his chest like a club. He needed to believe in certainty, in absolute space. Without it, the world would not be known absolutely. Without it, the world cannot be known.
Twenty centuries later Hendrik Lorentz needed to believe that every single molecule in the universe must move through a stationary material called the aether, as every human being in his various turnings must move through God. Scientists looked everywhere for proof of this aether. And everywhere they found nothing.
7.
I have sometimes been accused of being a bore. I beg to differ: people laugh at my jokes, and I’m handsome. I would like now to talk more about myself: I don’t like going to airports and hospitals. They make me uneasy. In both cases, somebody is always going to leave. I was born in 1983, and have never been to Berlin. But I have a memory of being in Berlin in 1961. I have a memory of something that never happened.
I would like to elaborate on myself, but you will understand if I talk instead about the sky in Berlin in 1961: it was covered with dust. There were no birds. There was no sky.
8.
Memory is brutal because precise.
9.
She said: give me more space. I said: don’t you love me anymore? She said: give me more space. I said: why? Did I do something wrong? Is there something wrong? Is there someone else? When did you stop loving me? In what precise moment? In what room? What city?
I held her tight as one who’s about to lose his own life holds on. Then she said: give me more space. I said: no.
10.
I have only one purpose: to live intensely.
11.
I wish I never met you
and I wish you never left.
You taste like a river in June.
12.
I’m going to say something important. Look at my face. Ignore my eyes. Just listen to me. But listen only to the timbre of my voice, not to what I am saying. They are different. They are two different rooms. The first is an exhibition of despair, the second only an explanation.
The first is all you have to listen to. So listen carefully because I cannot repeat myself:
“Everything/ one suspects to be true/ is true.â€
13.
In 1879 a boy is born in Germany. At age five he’d throw a chair at his violin teacher and chase him out. In time he would develop the capacity to withdraw instantaneously from a crowd into loneliness. At twenty-six he would publish his theory of relativity in Annalen der Physik. He looks crazy, but he is certain: there is no aether, no absolute space.
14.
Sometimes they thought it was the words.
What they wanted to say could not be said.
They fixed the TV, vacuumed the rug,
dusted the furniture, looked out the window.
Sometimes she would purposefully lose hold of
a plate and it would smash to the floor.
Then they would have something to say,
only to begin to say it then stop.
15.
Look at this box. It is empty except for a diary, a book, and this picture in my hand. Now look at this picture. It weighs nothing and occupies almost zero space. I can slip it in anywhere and it will fit: inside the diary, under the box, through a crack on the wall. If I tear it several times, it will occupy a different volume, many and various. It mutates, you see. If I burn it, it will smoke into the air. It will take up a whole expanse.
16.
How many more times
are you going to let the world
hurt you?
17.
My father is an incorrigible storyteller. He would tell the same stories in different ways. I wouldn’t know which ones to believe. So I believed all of them. “There is no story that is not true,†said Uchendu.
Father would point at the TV. He would repeat lines, rehearse the beginnings and ends, explicate with his hands the elaborate twists and turns of every road.
He said: “I am dying.â€
I said: “But aren’t all of us dying.â€
18.
And I thought the world
was about this leaving,
not about anybody’s leaving
but about this leaving.
The next day it was the same.
19.
A beautiful woman walks into a room. The room is dark. There are no windows. There is one light bulb but any time now it will go off. I pretend not to notice and look away, my heart beating against my chest like a club. If I strain hard enough I will hear a song in the background. What other forms of happiness are there than this?
20.
In 1989 the Berlin wall falls down.
21.
I believe in love only when it rains.
22.
To appreciate the value of land, one need only look into a painting: so much beauty. Buying land means buying the layers of beauty directly above it. It means buying the sky above it. And the birds above it, the clouds, the gods.
In truth you are buying a corner of the universe. You are saying: this is my room. You are saying: I live here. Here I exist.
23.
Your sadness is immaterial. You did
not come into the world to be happy.
~
You came to suffer/survive.
24.
How many words have you spoken in your life?
How many did you mean?
How many did you understand?
25.
Somebody picks up a phone. He dials a number. His voice travels a thousand miles into another country. On the other end somebody picks up and hears the voice. Who is this?– This is me. The phone is hung up. The voice travels back a thousand miles.
Elsewhere somebody picks up a phone and before he could dial forgets the number.
26.
Sometimes wars are waged because there are too many people in too few rooms.
27.
Memory is incomplete–lost.
The world is incomplete–vanishing.
Nothing more happens. You open your eyes and it’s over.
Memory is brutal.
Memory is precise.
28.
In the next room people I do not know are talking with hushed voices. Their secret slips out the window like a cat. It is raining, and I press my ear to the wall. I imagine that one of them is smoking a cigarette. I imagine that one of them is covering his mouth in surprise.
29.
When my aunt died the doctors said the fat clogged her arteries. Every week she visited the hospital, and every week the vein on her wrist had to be ripped out so a catheter could be stuck into her body to suck out her blood. You could see the plasma pass through a filter and then back to the body. If you put your ear to her wrist you would hear her heart.
Before my uncle died the heart attacks were so excruciating he said he’d prefer to just die. They transported him to the hospital, and on the way to the emergency room his heart gave. Mother said my uncle ate too much pork and drank too much beer. She wonders if he’s going to be happy in heaven.
30.
In some house in some province in some country in some novel there is a story of a man a father a child a lover who dies because of too much sadness.
31.
Nobody thought that what was wrong was the love.
32.
She said: give me more space.
it wasn’t till long after we left
that we realized we’d made a mistake.
Everything went perfectly, just as planned. Ships gleamed white in the sun
the day we left.
“It’s too far gone,â€
the scientists had said at the start.
“The air is smoke, the water acidic and grey and
we can’t fix it.
Not this time.â€
So we packed up our things, signed slips of paper, and waited for the United Central Government
to assign us our places. Boarding passes
were handed out, numbers were assigned.
Every family divided down into decimal places.
How fortunate it was, they told us, that they had found us a new home
They would prepare it
with everything we had left.
Dig up all the old flowerbeds, send spaceships sloshing full of water
hurtling towards it’s surface.
“So fortunate we are,”
they sobbed into the cameras.
“Just in time.”
There would be no coming back.
The day we left was many years after we realized the futility,
and the time only confirmed the matter.
Those days were the days we didn’t dare go outside
and were afraid to look up into the sky.
It took over a year to get everyone into those gleaming white lifeboats.
And now, we are staring stars that no longer seem familiar, gazing at one in particular as it comes over the horizon.
We were never meant for this after all,
it was not until it was too late we learned what it meant to lose your homeland
to leave everything you were behind
forever.
——
rough rough rough but I’ll do the editing thing later.
I killed the thread before it even really started
Naming the Stars
Joyce Sutphen
This present tragedy will eventually
turn into myth, and in the mist
of that later telling the bell tolling
now will be a symbol, or, at least,
a sign of something long since lost.
This will be another one of those
loose changes, the rearrangement of
hearts, just parts of old lives
patched together, gathered into
a dim constellation, small consolation.
Look, we will say, you can almost see
the outline there: her fingertips
touching his, the faint fusion
of two bodies breaking into light.
I believe in magic
but I do not believe in God.
Religion holds no meaning
but the whispers of the Earth
belong to me.
I have seen
and known
experienced
things so beautiful and strange
And all those things are mine.
Take your gods, prophets, saviors
take them and keep them
but keep them away from me.
I hold hands with no all-knowing God;
the powers of Mother Nature
are channeled through me.
The world is beautiful.
It sings to me
and I love it’s song.
How I wish to
capture it in words
put into subtle notation
that melody…
I wish it were a song
that I could sing
harmonies overlapping with
melodies interlocking with
the voices whispering to me
of the beautiful mysteries
of the living,
the dying,
all that ever was or will be
I am in love
with Life
and the entrancing melody
of that song.
The song is everywhere;
can you not hear it?
it calls to me and I step closer
to better hear the undertones
that draw me in
dizzying chromatics
energetic staccatos!
I want to dance,
feet moving in tandem
with the ambient rhythmic patterns
of the earth.
To write it out,
to be played
as a tribute to the triumph of Life
so that you too may hear that song.
That song connects me to life
that song is everything
the song that is but never really was
the song that is magic
the song that is mine.
The words flow through me
and through the pen
to gain life upon a blank page
these words dance through my mind
begging to be freed
to be given eternal life in ink
those words are mine
but at the same time no one’s.
They are the unspoken thoughts
of the Universe.
Everything dear to me
is also dear to itself
I respect all those who deserve respect.
My life is no more important
than yours, or anyone’s
These words have been unspoken
but now they are spoken
they are the words
whispered on the wind
they are the words that flow through me.
The stars are my kindred
the winds are my friend
I am a child of the moon.
Between the light and the dark
lurking at the edge of shadows
I dwell in the sky,
beneath the deepest sea…
I am alive
but my eyes are dead
and I am watching you
from my place beyond the dark
where you cannot see me.
I crave human companionship
the embrace of the wind makes me cold…
your eyes send shivers down my spine
I am scared to reach out,
to have what I have longed for.
I see the stars, reflected in you.
((I am not new. I merely have a new name and face… maybe you can tell by my writing. Maybe someday I’ll be able to come back for real and speak to you as an old friend… but right now all I can give you is the poems I’ve written in solitude. I had to share these with you all… I’ve changed, my friends… I can’t wait to return so that you can observe the changes yourself. ‘Till then, dearest MuseBlog, my closest friends and family…. ‘Till then. I shall not say farewell, for that is too final. I promise I’ll return, even if it takes me years and years to gain that freedom.))
I love this poem.
And, I hope you return soon. We’ll welcome you back.
This is beautiful.
Goodbye, my friend, whoever you are, and good luck. You might not want to say farewell, but I hope you fare well, wherever you might roam and however you might change; and I hope that in every place you visit, you are able to remember that you are never without a home.
In eight days I find out how I did in the poetry contest… I’ll probably post my poem then. I doubt it did very well but I’m just glad I got to express my feelings.
And I’d wondered
Can you teach me how to
Do the things I never got to?
Why is it that
Everything
All along
Just exists as fuel for one more song
I wish I was more than
I wish I was more than what was planned to be
I wish I was more than
Another flight of fancy drifting towards a cloudy sea
Why is it that the simplest things to write are inequalities?
I wish I was more than what I am
Because you gave a heart back to me
Other people don’t quite comprehend the reality
that we jump from fifty story rooftops for the same reasons that we stare into the sun:
Because we long for the knowledge of
how the breath of heaven will caress our cheekbones
we crave the way that the digits of gravity
tickle the insides of our stomachs
and we are toying with the notion of being gods.
It’s all because we understand what they shy away from hearing:
that the pure, unfiltered fear of falling
is the only way to make your crowded periphery a clean slate
that in accepting the hand of certain death
and brushing your lips against the clean skin of inexistence
the purpose of your vain resistance turns into
a desire for the secrets that your mind makes your weakness
until you plummet
towards the pavement.
Just wanted to say I really like this one! Great imagery and word choice. I especially like the second and last line of the first stanza.
Thank you so much, Jade!
My first excursion into haibun. Based on my evening walk.
“Attack”
As I push the buds into my ears, the sound of inadvisable music fills my head. Unexpectedly, the neighborhood becomes a haunted house of my own imagination. Skeletons hide behind every tree only to disappear as I walk by, and bats flutter raggedly under the streetlamp. A pair of girls from some ghost story bicycle past me and I shiver. I pass by one fire, and then another, and I am in the state park with my family. A whiff of cigarette smoke drifts by and I am in a cheap hotel in a swimming pool with sand on the bottom. The sun ebbs beneath the mucky horizon and the stink trees overpower me. A pair of red-tailed hawks alights on a tree branch and watches me as I stumble towards the park. Someone is setting off fireworks, and I squint confusedly towards the boom. As I try to find it, the source seems to jump from street to street. I turn towards an avenue with no lights and close my eyes. The air temperature has risen and fallen at least twenty degrees, and I can feel my heat reflect off every garage door. I quicken my pace and make another detour. Silence. I glance upwards. The thinnest sliver of moon hangs above the western horizon like a smile. I follow it.
torn-off wings
dead blood-stained feathers
flowering trees
the hate is blood red in the sky
the tears are acid rain
below it all, the battlefield
stretched to groaning pain
alone I stand, in howling wind
face my nemesis
abhor that fiend, she stands alone
across the deep abyss
faceless, shadowed, like myself
nameless enemy
I smile, bitter, stare her down
the one I fight is me
done are closets, boxes, fear
worry not, my friend
here’s the one who tore me down
we’re fighting to the end
That is beautiful and at the same time so sad.
Did not win anything in poetry contest, but here is the poem I submitted: (I wanted to wait until the winners were announced because they check copyright)
There is a door
a door on the edge of surreal- the door on the brink of your dreams
the barrier between real and make-believe
the threshold you can cross a thousand times
and never know its secrets.
Come.
Why wait for your turn in the spotlight?
Why-
when you can step outside to a better world?
Leave the heat-
the smoke-
the noise-
and come with me.
Revel in the silence
and fill it with song.
Feel the cool night air-
dance in the moonlight-
gaze at the stars.
In this alcove beyond the Door
with stairs that lead nowhere
with a wall blocking out the world
soaring above the sky, yet so close to the ground
we can be Safe.
It is here we walk the edge of Danger-
sit on a ledge
dangle your legs
but do not worry:
here we are invincible.
Here you will never fall.
Here your dreams will come true-
and Reality is a distant nightmare-
Awake.
Here at night we live
Waiting
Listen to the world inside
and the silence of outside.
In this in-between world
we know no limits. Hold my hand, for
enemies are friends-
here on this ledge we sit on, what need is there for
Hate?
Here, you belong.
Singing-
running-
sitting-
Tonight lives on
for each time we gather
the wall comes back.
The time comes-
and when we step back in through the door
shut it behind us and leave its secrets dormant
when we enter the real world
in all our resplendent glory
We will remember.
We will remember the night
We will not speak of it to anyone, but-
we will remember,
and embrace the new day’s
Music.
Neil Gaiman:
“Burton asked on Twitter if I would write a poem to be tattooed on his back. I thought about it and said yes. No-one had ever asked me for a poem as a tattoo before. I wrote a poem. David Mack illustrated it. Now Burton is getting it tattooed…”
“I will write in words of fire.
I will write them on your skin.
I will write about desire.
Write beginnings, write of sin.
You’re the book I love the bst,
your skin only holds my truth,
you will be a palimpsest
lines of age rewriting youth.
You will not burn upon the pyre.
Or be buried on the shelf.
You’re my letter to desire:
And you’ll never read yourself.
I will trace each word and comma
As the final dusk descends,
You’re my tale of dreams and drama,
Let us find out how it ends.”
((I was digging through my old files when I found this, written circa sophomore year.))
First, you are simply a thought
acted on a whim
maybe, just maybe
you were meant to be spoken
then, you are here
born to a planet
with no reckoning as to the
jumbled spark it has conceived
a drop on the face of a concrete mass
your burgeoning brilliance becomes
a wonder to the world
while every other face stares
vaguely to the earth,
you are discovering the sky.
(when, without your consent
the aubade of your life
has already begun to set)
infantile, juvenile, senile
all the while
you ask why it takes one life to
reach forever.
eternity does not take so long,
does it?
In the end, mankind
is the most sickening irony of all.
Created
just to be
destroyed.
The Labyrinth
My insides burn with the knowledge that reality is no more that infinity
minus every second that I’m existing in this entity where
you’re not walking next to me.
‘Maybe’ is a constant friend to my vocabulary
And when the paces of my mind rest, I see
thousands of maybes spread out before me
(in this endless maze of darkness, gaze steady)
I’m pacing in a permanent, tongue-tied trance, and someone
nameless reaches out to grab my hand
so for a moment I’m dancing in the desolation
shaken up, my words become a war
and certain terms mean nothing anymore
because no matter how hard I try,
I can’t know everything until you tell me.
And your words, they spin me into ascendancy
They weave me into omnipotency
and for a second, I’m God, and I feel
like if I ruled the world you’d be standing beside me.
(While flecks of sunlight burn my eyelids red,
the invisible fingers clasping mine are yours instead.)
Insanity
They say insanity
Is doing the same thing over
and over
and over
and over again and expecting a different result.
You put me in an asylum.
But as much as I would love to grasp
that fickle speck of reason
I can’t.
You dangle it out of my reach.
Love
People describe it so many ways
I couldn’t tell you what love is
But it sure as hell isn’t this.
You convince me it might be.
And as much as I tell myself
Not to trust you
Not to love you
Not to give in to the insanity
I always do.
You tempt me with poisoned fruit that I can’t resist.
“Waldeinsamkeit”, by Ralph Waldo Emerson
I do not count the hours I spend
In wandering by the sea;
The forest is my loyal friend,
Like God it useth me.
In plains that room for shadows make
Of skirting hills to lie,
Bound in by streams which give and take
Their colors from the sky;
Or on the mountain-crest sublime,
Or down the oaken glade,
O what have I to do with time?
For this the day was made.
Cities of mortals woe-begone
Fantastic care derides,
But in the serious landscape lone
Stern benefit abides.
Sheen will tarnish, honey cloy,
And merry is only a mask of sad,
But, sober on a fund of joy,
The woods at heart are glad.
There the great Planter plants
Of fruitful worlds the grain,
And with a million spells enchants
The souls that walk in pain.
Still on the seeds of all he made
The rose of beauty burns;
Through times that wear and forms that fade,
Immortal youth returns.
The black ducks mounting from the lake,
The pigeon in the pines,
The bittern’s boom, a desert make
Which no false art refines.
Down in yon watery nook,
Where bearded mists divide,
The gray old gods whom Chaos knew,
The sires of Nature, hide.
Aloft, in secret veins of air,
Blows the sweet breath of song,
O, few to scale those uplands dare,
Though they to all belong!
See thou bring not to field or stone
The fancies found in books;
Leave authors’ eyes, and fetch your own,
To brave the landscape’s looks.
Oblivion here thy wisdom is,
Thy thrift, the sleep of cares;
For a proud idleness like this
Crowns all thy mean affairs.
This is the first blog-publishable thing I’ve written in a while, so I thought I’d share it. It’s about my friend Sage.
Today, while you were
shivering and screaming,
your blackberry-bright eyes too far away
from me, I looked for
the shape of you in my spice cabinet
and imagined the way your eyes must look
right now;
last night you needed nothing more than to hold my hand and
today you want nothing more than to never see me again, and
tomorrow you will tell me to write more stories for you.
But this is not a story about you.
It is a story about how when I am at the edge of
insanity I am a mother to you;
it is a story about how you are half a country away and I want to
cup your cheekbones. This is a story about how
three months ago I felt like I was drowning
when you were at your own cliff edge of insanity.
This is a story about lives, and saving them.
And when on my end of the country
the sunset glimmered like stones I said,
it’s OK,
and you were the first person I’d ever met who believed me;
it’s not like the lines were ever clear between you and me, and they
blurred in grey soft clouds as
midnight raced towards me from you.
So I sang you a lullaby that you never heard, and hoped you would
click your heels,
follow the sound of my voice all the way
home, because I cannot rid myself of the fear
that I destroy everyone I touch
with miracles.
Thank you for writing this.
favorite line: “midnight raced towards me from you.”
by ee cummings
when serpents bargain for the right to squirm
and the sun strikes to gain a living wage-
when thorns regard their roses with alarm
and rainbows are insured against old age
when every thrush may sing no new moon in
if all screech-owls have not okayed his voice
-and any wave signs on the dotted line
or else an ocean is compelled to close
when the oak begs permission of the birch
to make an acorn-valleys accuse their
mountains of having altitude-and march
denounces april as a saboteur
then we’ll believe in that incredible
unanimal mankind(and not until)
“Early Fall Sanctuary” by Jeff Hardin:
I can’t remember autumn starting up.
In which leaf?
which sluice of air?
Four in the afternoon, the school bus
makes its stop,
children stepping back
into the other life, the one that’s been on hold,
that’s mostly spent outdoors.
Which child will love the moon
in forty years,
which touch his pulse from habit,
which rake his hand across the washing on the line?
We tell ourselves it’s not the destination
but the journey,
the being-where-one-is.
That’s a stretch. That’s a get-down-on-one’s-knees-
and-feel-around.
That’s the poetry in us talking.
Meanwhile, something’s happened to the sky,
more solitary,
more suffused and somber-tinted.
It passes on the closed-up school bus windows,
hushed with being
twinned above each bouncing seat.
_____________________________________________________________________________
“Starting a Hunt: Montana” by Gary Holthaus:
You can smell them
Rank in the pre-dawn dark
Odors of men long gone from the line shacks
Or tossing in their damp-chilled soogans.
You can almost see them
Hunkered down in glistening slickers
Rain rolling from wide-brimmed hats
Into tin plates.
You can even hear them
If you listen:
The laughter, the surprised cry, the silence;
Cold rattle and slap of saddle gear
In the morning
The horses blowing and stomping
Beside frost-breathed men
Both heads together to pull on the awkward bit.
All sights and sounds and smells
Of men who never will be known
Or maybe never were
Step to greet you from the shadows
When the tack room door is cracked.
For him the moments pass so flippantly
Cascading past him like a waterfall
In one big stream of okay
He cools off in the mist
And lets them fade away
For her the moments are gems
Shining and beautiful
She admires each one slowly
Before setting it back gently,
And picks up the next to gaze at fondly
Old dead thread but I have a lot of feelings about Greek mythology and my Celtic mythology class makes me want to write things so:
Daphne Reminices
After the change
–panic, confusion, relief–
the resentment slowly settled in.
Later, they would speak of it
as though it was my fault
with my hair like gold,
and beauty gracing my features
like still water
They would talk like it had been intentional–
radiance reflected back into the sky
like a dropped mirror
or ripples at dawn,
shining back into the great roving eye
that might otherwise have slid over and across the riverbank.
I can assure you:
None of it was my idea.
And to find him there before me
filled me with dread, not longing.
Protests tumbled from my lips like raindrops to the sea
while languid smiles curled his–
too assured he had already won.
Sun gods are all the same:
too drunk on their own light
to hear anything but songs of praise.
I will not lie–I could see the appeal.
The gods do not feel for long, but when they do,
it is an all-consuming flame
and it would be so, so easy to burn
(I would not be the first–
how many others have lingered in his embrace,
but once the light has left you
your skin will always hunger for that warmth)
but once the ashes have settled,
you find yourself alone,
dry as dust.
And droughts were never appealing to me.
So, perhaps it was foolish to run
from a monster that lives off the chase,
but in a way I had my revenge
As he reached to embrace me
(don’t think for a moment I slowed down on purpose)
I cried for death, for escape
And my father took pity:
I twisted. I writhed.
I stilled.
And burning bronze met with bark
instead of yielding flesh.
Oh, he wept, and cried,
and for a time, he grieved
plucking leaves to weave into a crown.
(without my permission, I might add–
and later, he discarded them,
in favor of Hephaestus’ gold)
And then he left
and I remained.
River gods have power, but are not the sort to undo
what once has been done.
I could have been stone,
or dead,
or a gleaming, silver trout
had my father put a little more thought into the matter.
So now, I am stuck.
In an ironic twist of the Fate’s threads,
I am forced daily to drink up the light
of he whom I fled,
never sleeping in the long months
While he circles round and round,
my face long since forgotten.
While I, I pray for clouds,
and let my leaves
grow bitter as bark.
________________
Suggestions etc very appreciated! I am really not happy with the “to hear anything but songs of praise” line but I need a third one and I can’t think of anything better. Will perhaps come back to it tomorrow.
I wonder how Emily Dickinson would feel about us reading her poetry. With some of them, I feel like I’m reading a diary!
I don’t think she’d be too pleased, really. I’m pretty sure she specifically didn’t want her works to be published.
Granted, I read them, anyway.
I’m cleaning my room, and I found this poem that I must have written a while ago. I rather like it, though it’s rough.
No name up in lights;
No blinding camera flashes;
No tabloid pages or movie reviews.
I see my name up in history,
Collective memory serving as a Nikon.
I’ll be the one they look up to-
Third-grade boys with mop-blonde manes
Little girls who see me and decide:
Princesses are nice and all,
but I really want to be a scientist.
And to that one, I’d lean over and say,
why choose? I’m the Princess of the Petri,
Her Highness of the hemoglobin,
the Lady of the Lab.
You can be all that and more,
Just dream.
200 years of spaceflight
for the moment we dreaded most:
Landing.
We were born in transit
and lived among the stars,
our sky was always black and light,
and we fell asleep knowing you could see forever.
Beneath us, the comforting hum of energy and steel,
a constant lullaby.
Our parents knew nothing but our ship,
the stories of Earth passed along to us
from grandparents who knew
through a generation who tried to care
but couldn’t,
knowing they would never see the next world–
so how could we?
The scripts, notes from the past all praising a glorious moment
we’re not sure how to face. It turns out
we’re not so connected to planets after all–
our bones didn’t miss soil and open air,
our skin does not crave the light of a single star.
We smile anyway,
as the thought of being trapped in a single spinning circle of existence
sets our hearts wild.
We smile out of duty to our children, our race,
who will never know the joy of the journey
as we never knew the smell of grass.
There’s nothing we dread more
than endless blue,
empty and flat.
___________________________
We didn’t write much last year, did we.
Dang. This makes me want to write that story about the derelict generation ship that’s been kicking around in my head for a few days. Well done.
Do it!! I like this sort of concept. I may do more with it later.
Very good.
“The Boy Who Got Lost Following a River” by David Troupes
I
I float on the raft of my blindness
past the summer girls, lily tangle in the slow pools,
shoreline thickets clotted with August.
II
She sits there like a bag of salt, beautiful.
Gliss of sun on the eddies
and the air a milk of heat, a yeast of August.
III
The river gargles and weeps.
The stones are warm and white. She lays down
like a road full of puddles, beautiful.
VI
I walk the starry meadows, the cool hampers of August,
where the bees of midnight
gather their strange pollen.
_____________________________________________________________
“The Simple Man Arriving Through the Fields” by the same
Throw myself down and here’s my camp–
under the thorn,
in the rolls
of gruff weed, in the fingers
of a new warmth. Stars
pop in the black and slowly
I align myself
like the needle and cork floated for a compass.
Mother! Such an endlessness–
the byways and nighways
which are all I need of home.
Tomorrow morning,
early, when the sun is a tray of crumbs
I’ll rise
in the spin and wander,
till I throw myself down and there’s my urn.
_____________________________________________________________
And two tanka by SaigyÅ:
The twilight bell
I waited for
is sounding–
if tomorrow is granted me,
I’ll listen for it again
Who would remember,
who would come
looking for me,
pushing his way along this mountain path
so drenched in dew?
Lovely and surprising.
I just wrote this on a whim when I had extra time in class:
In the corner of the bright, white room,
silent, invisible, waiting.
Dark as air,
heavy as sound.
All-enfolding as it sits
flying.
Sleeping alert,
watching without vision.
The cocoon of that which
would swallow the world.
It is the sense of self,
the lifeless vitality,
the knowledge of one’s own mind.
It lies and floats.
Pulsing in the back of the mind,
of space without depth,
of memory without time.
It is the anticipation,
the dread and the inevitability.
It is you,
yet it is nothing.
And you feel, as it does,
that its time is coming soon.
But not yet.
Not yet.
A quick haiku I wrote at the prompting of a friend of mine today. A bit of experimentation with more of a rural Nebraskan diction, and not just in the most obvious way.
it nuzzles my leg
but then it spooks and runs off
January wind
And how about a poem by the lovely David Troupes so that this comment isn’t so short (the connection should be obvious). This poem was collected in his first book, Parsimony, out of print now, so in the unlikely event you see it at a used bookshop, make sure you grab it. I’ve kept the formatting as close to how it is in the book as I could, just in case.
“January at Indian Brook”
I
Through the ruin-stitch of cruciform maples a foundry-
door blaze
lays,
gently, orange daggers on my neck, my wrists. So many days,
now, my dear, and so clear the means of our ways.
II
We stop, and build a fire to cook our little
spitting polyethylene-
wrapped wieners.
A wind. A waste-paradise. We burn our truths like
mantle-greens,
long before spring finds a few northern acres, long before
that warmth, that effortless sheen.
“What the Dragon Said: A Love Storyâ€
Catherynne M. Valente
Â
Â
So this guy walks into a dragon’s lair
and he says
why the long tale?
HAR HAR BUDDY
says the dragon
F*** YOU.
The dragon’s a classic
the ‘57 Chevy of existential chthonic threats
take in those Christmas colors, those
impervious green scales, sticky candy-red firebreath,
comes standard with a heap of rubylust
goldhuddled treasure.
Go ahead.
Kick the tires, boy.
See how she rides.
Sit down, kid, says the dragon. Diamonds
roll off her back like dandruff.
Oh, you’d rather be called a paladin?
I’d rather be a unicorn.
Always thought that
was the better gig. Everyone thinks
you’re innocent. Everyone calls you
pure. And the girls aren’t afraid
they come right up with their little hands out
for you to sniff
like you’re a puppy
and they’re gonna take you home.
They let you put your head right
in their laps.
But nobody on this earth
ever got what they wanted. Now
I know what you came for. You want
my body. To hang it up on a nail
over your fireplace. Say to some milk-and-rosewater chica
who lays her head in your lap
look how much it takes
to make me feel like a man.
We’re in the dark now, you and me. This is primal
s*** right here. Grendel, Smaug, St. George. You’ve been
called up. This is the big game. You don’t have
to make stupid puns. Flash your feathers
like your monkey bravado
can impress. I saw a T-Rex fight a comet
and lose. You’ve
got nothing I want.
Here’s something I bet you don’t know:
every time someone writes a story about a dragon
a real dragon dies.
Something about seeing
and being seen
something about mirrors
that old tune about how a photograph
can take your whole soul. At the end
of this poem
I’m going to go out like electricity
in an ice storm. I’ve made peace with it.
That last blockbuster took out a whole family
of Bhutan thunder dragons
living in Latvia
the fumes of their cleargas hoard
hanging on their beards like blue ghosts.
A dragon’s gotta get zen
with ephemerality.
You want to cut me up? Chickenscratch my leather
with butcher’s chalk:
cutlets, tenderloin, ribs for the company barbecue,
chuck, chops, brisket, roast.
I dig it, I do.
I want to eat everything, too.
When I look at the world
I see a table.
All those fancy houses, people with degrees, horses and whales,
bankers and Buddha statues
the Pope, astronauts, panda bears and yes, paladins
if you let me swallow you whole
I’ll call you whatever you want.
Look at it all: waitresses and ice caps and submarines down
at the bottom of the heavy lightless saltdark of the sea
Don’t they know they’d be safer
inside me?
I could be big for them
I could hold them all
My belly could be a city
where everyone was so loved
they wouldn’t need jobs. I could be
the hyperreal
post-scarcity dragonhearted singularity.
I could eat them
and feed them
and eat them
and feed them.
This is why I don’t get to be a unicorn.
Those ponies have clotted cream and Chanel No. 5 for blood
and they don’t burn up like comets
with love that tastes like starving to death.
And you, with your standup comedy knightliness,
covering Beowulf’s greatest hits on your tin kazoo,
you can’t begin to think through
what it takes to fill up a body like this.
It takes everything pretty
and everything true
and you stick yourself in a cave because
your want is bigger than you.
I just want to be
the size of a galaxy
so I can eat all the stars and gas giants
without them noticing
and getting upset.
Is that so bad?
Isn’t that
what love looks like?
Isn’t that
what you want, too?
I’ll make you a deal.
Come close up
stand on my emeraldheart, my sapphireself
the goldpile of my body
Close enough to smell
everything you’ll never be.
Don’t finish the poem. Not for nothing
is it a snake
that eats her tail
and means eternity. What’s a few verses worth
anyway? Everyone knows
poetry doesn’t sell. Don’t you ever feel
like you’re just
a story someone is telling
about someone like you?
I get that. I get you. You and me
we could fit
inside each other. It’s not nihilism
if there’s really no point to anything.
I have a secret
down in the deep of my dark.
All those other kids who wanted me
to call them paladins,
warriors, saints, whose swords had names,
whose bodies were perfect
as moonlight
they’ve set up a township near my liver
had babies with the maidens they didn’t save
invented electric lightbulbs
thought up new holidays.
You can have my body
just like you wanted.
Or you can keep on fighting dragons
writing dragons
fighting dragons
re-staging that same old Cretaceous deathmatch
you mammals
always win.
But hey, hush, come on.
Quit now.
You’ll never fix
that line.
I have a forgiveness in me
the size of eons
and if a dragon’s body is big enough
it just looks like the world.
Did you know
the earth used to have two moons?
I THOUGHT I GOT THEM ALL THAT TIME maybe I missed something :/
also the blog kind of eats the formatting for it, but you can google the name to get to the original on Tor.
I love you and want you to find poetry for me to read forever
That can be arranged, and does indeed follow the trend in this thread of me desperately throwing poems at people to keep it alive
You should both read stuff in goblin fruit! And stone telling. And mythic delirium.
I wrote this poem yesterday after seeing the axolotls at the New England Aquarium. I’d love to illustrate it if someone who can actually draw would be willing to help me with that.
(With due respect to the anonymous writer of the “Old Time Religion” parody that gave me the rhymes for the first verse and a meter to use.)
In the land of Quetzalcoatl
You will find the axolotl
It is brown like chocolotl*
Please share some with them and me!
Yes, they’re Aztec salamanders
And aquatic, not dry-landers
And you’ll come to understand there’s
Quite a lot to learn, truly!
For though you may not know it
Lose a limb and they regrow it
As for scarring, they don’t show it
They’re real marvels**, you can see!
Axolotl regeneration
Could be a medical sensation
For burn victims a salvation
Like a sci-fi fantasy!
Though they heal from any tey-er
We find them becoming rarer
‘Cause their habitat’s a pair
Of lakes, one’s gone and one’s dirty!
Mexico D.F.’s*** expandin’
So they’re turning lakes to land and
The pollution is outstandin’, but
They breed in captivity!
Now we’re trying to protect ’em
And the zoos breed and collect ’em
For their powers we inspect ’em
Can we save them yet? We’ll see…
*Axolotls do not actually eat chocolate, but the Aztecs who had their capital on islands in the lakes they inhabit were some of the first people to consume it.
**Marvels in the literal sense, but “Marvels” is also a term infrequently used in-universe for the superhumans of Marvel Comics, one of whom, Wolverine, is known for his regenerative ability. There is no mutant code-named Axolotl as far as I know yet.
*** México, Distrito Federal (Federal District) is the technical name for Mexico City, a-la Washington, District of Columbia.
Did the poem I submitted last night go through? (It was caught by the spam filter, but I sent it through! – admin)
Thank you.
[i don’t know if this counts as poetry but i wrote it during math class and i don’t know i’d like some constructive feedback please]
the sun will rise and the moon will set and the sun will set and the moon will rise and after the globe has spun and gone around the star you will still be there and I will still be there, clinging to the ground. maybe we won’t be quite as strong as we hoped but i promise we’ll still be alive. the stars may seem like they change, but they’ll always stay win their places. it’s just you that’s moving around them. and if a star swells and shrinks and goes nova, then, well, that’s how you were created
and when you cry your tears are part of a vast ocean that you drank up to sustain your vessel so cry out your tears because that saltwater once sustained a fish, and that fish is dead now probably but its atoms and its energy live on and somewhere back on your family tree that fish is your cousin. and when you and i look at the moon, the moon is always the same and if every cellphone tower collapses and ever satellite tumbles out of the sky and succumbs to gravity at last, you can still look at the moon, and it will be ours, and one day maybe we’ll fly there together and watch the stars from higher than we’ve ever been. maybe everything is a colossal waste of time and maybe there’s no point to anything that we do and maybe we are tiny fish splashing in a sea of time but i’d like to think that after our atoms are scattered to the edges of the universe something of you will remain. and without your vessel to contain you, you will shine brighter and more beautiful than ever before and i’d like to think that even after the heat death of the universe, when we both are nothing but thoughts without a mind, without particles or physics or a plane of existence to contain us, I Will Find You.
Yes, because I promise, that You and I will be okay.
And it will be good.
Reminds me of James Joyce, in a way. (C.F. last sentence of Ulysses)
tell me did you love her too
did you love her like you never actually said you loved me
did you love her more
tell me
about how your hands have held too many other hands
about how your heart is empty and cold and
god, what a fool was i to believe in you
a fool even now as i find i cannot reclaim
my heart
my love make up your mind
tell me
that i’m the only girl you’ve ever loved
the only girl you’ll ever
love
tell me you love me
i’ll believe you, i swear
i’ll give you all the second chances you never deserved
just tell me you love me
my heart in your hands please don’t
tear it apart rip me up crush my
hopes and dreams and
just tell me
i’ll wait for you.
i’ve waited too long to stop trying now.
“I Wish in the City of Your Heart” by Robley Wilson
—
I wish in the city of your heart
you would let me be the street
where you walk when you are most
yourself. I imagine the houses:
It has been raining, but the rain
is done and the children kept home
have begun opening their doors.
Joined a slam poetry group at my school and it’s been forcing me to write regularly, which is awesome. This is something I wrote because my anxiety’s been having more physical symptoms lately than it used to, and also because I wanted to do some experiments with meter. Doesn’t have a title.
Why can’t I ever sit still when I need to, why can’t I keep my hands calm when I speak, because
Standing to sing I can feel all the tremors but music can focus them, keep me from moving
At least while the music is still coming out, but I know what will happen when I have to stop
And the song’s never long enough, so when I sit and just have to speak slowly I’ll fumble my words and
I’ll never stop moving, and fidget and vibrate, and words won’t come out like I wanted them to
Like the pressure’s too much for the muscle and mucus and words get caught up where they’ve never belonged, and so
When they come out they come out in a flood and no one could keep all that under control
Or maybe a circuit inside me is broken
And maybe I’m broken, that would make some sense
And maybe it’s just that I’ve been so stressed out lately, maybe that let all my circuits get fried
But time and some polish could make them as bright as new, shining and clean and my head would be clear
And I’d sit without motion, my fingers at rest, and I’d know that for once I could hold back the flood
And at last I’d be calm again, healthy and normal, and wouldn’t need anyone’s help to be still
But then again, maybe I’ve never been broken, and speech needs no tune to be music for me.
Went to go see Interstellar with some friends and my god was it utterly amazing. It’s rare that I am so struck by the beauty or amazeballsness of something to the point of not wanting, not trying, but needing to write a poem inspired by it, but this certainly ranks high among those rare things. As such, I thought you guys might appreciate this poem.
wonderstruck
that feeling you get of pure elation,

when everything is perfect and the weights are lifted off your spine
even if only 
for a little while

that feeling you get when something is so beautiful

you couldn’t possibly do anything but just soak it all in
do you know that feeling?

have you ever lived in moments so pure

that your eyes flew open wide in awe

and your smile trembled with that disbelieving happiness?
is there a word for that feeling?

it seems that words could never be enough

to contain the depths of pure emotion,

felt fleetingly to quiet fade away

to capture that moment in words

the best i can do is say i am wonderstruck.
wonderstruck, struck with striking awe

at the ephemeral beauty of our universe

and how some great mind gave us this gift

to keep and hold forever, 
the miracle of life

timeless and untainted by death

you could live forever in those moments

(the pages of a book, the notes of a great symphony,

written into the stars which spin above)
if language ever could capture that thought,

this word might almost be enough.
i am wonderstruck.
“Overgrown Garden Deserted in Fall”, Su Tung-p’o, written 1074:
Overgrown garden deserted in fall,
lonely flowers dark in the evening;
the mountain town is far away —
farther still, here beyond the walls.
What did I come for?
I stay awhile to watch cloudy peaks.
Not finding my hardworking poet friend,
what use is the jug of clear wine I brought?
Piggy?
Piggy?
Piggy?
Donkey!
(No but for real what’s happening here)
The tl;dr version is I’m back home and I’m sad. It’ll take a while for me to put the longer version into words.
“Azaleas on a Mountain Trail”, SaigyÅ (1118-1190):
Moving from rock to rock,
I clutch at azaleas,
but not to pick them —
on these steep slopes
I count on them for a handhold
The azaleas are here for you, Piggy.
((Just seeing this comment by itself on the RC bar, it seems almost ominous.))
((Context matters in this case.
By the way, it turns out that in the Victorian “language of flowers,” the azalea conveys the message “take care of yourself for me.” That’s apt.))
I’ll put the kettle on.
I’ll get one of the wungs to put another log on the fire. And it sounds as if we’ll need crumpets.
No rush for the longer version, friend. I’m sorry you’re sad. We’re here if you need anything. ♥
I hope you reach a resting place soon so you can breathe easy for a bit. Good to hear from you.
*offers hugs and chocolate biscuits*
Piggy?!???
First stanza of the Ariadne poem. [collapses]
I would post some of the Philae poem but honestly it’s even more of a disaster than this, with possibly even less chance of ever being finished.
i.
Theseus abandoned me
but I didn’t mind so much.
He was cute but not my type
& anyway he’d killed my brother.
Monsters are monsters, sure,
but family is family.
Dad was a monster too,
with his inventor in the attic,
his shipments of best-quality
organic fair-trade Athenian youths.
Didn’t mean I didn’t love him,
didn’t love the Minotaur.
That’s what family is, family
is the red yarn, the journey
into the labyrinth’s heart.
Family is seeing the blood
on your baby brother’s teeth
& not minding, not caring.
I knew I was the one he loved,
the one he would never hurt.
Everybody I’ve ever loved
has been a monster,
& now most of them are dead.
okay, somebody convince me that a verse novel about ariadne (but also about daedalus and ikaros) would be a terrible idea — i think i might need somebody to fly over and punch me in the face.
What are friends for if not encouraging terrible ideas?
Say the Hymn to Apollo and go to!
[flies over and aggressively doesn’t punch you in the face] Please write this verse novel.
I wrote this a while back and also entered it in a local poetry contest. Wrote the last 3 stanzas while half awake at a very late hour, so I think it’s some of my better work, considering.
an ugly heart is an untroubled heart/
perhaps we did not love the girl with feet like cold and open air.
she manifested here one day with orders to handle with care.
the girl was porcelain, finest china, with the softest silk for hair.
if we had smashed open her chest, we would have found a diamond there.
her heart was compressed carbon, but her feet were cold and open air.
she said she was from far-off lands where life was pleasant; weather, fair.
we marveled at her porcelain skin, and vainly we tried to compare
it to the plastic limbs we wore in unforgiving summer air.
she scoffed at all our metal hearts, and we thought that it made her rare
to have a heart of diamond, and those feet like cold and open air.
we wondered deep into the night how such a girl could be here, where
the rain was acid and the poison permeated all the air.
she broke and cracked so easily and though we did try not to stare
we saw the dirt collect in all the silk she used to call her hair.
this was no place for such a girl, with feet like cold and open air.
with plastic limbs and ugly hearts, we did not mind the poison air
and yet when she began to ail we could not force ourselves to care
her porcelain skin wore all transparent till we saw inside her, where
a heart of diamond lie still quivering, beating in the cruel sun’s glare
and so we smashed open her chest and took her heart for us to share.
we reveled in our nature and how we’d obtained a heart so rare
we never considered that it was not ours for us to share
we left her back in the dark dust where her shards glimmered white and fair
and never did we hear her cry or heed her last unfeeling prayer
Perhaps we did not love the girl with feet like cold and open air.
Somebody ought to set this to music.
I’ve actually considered it. I personally think it would sound good as a spoken-word type thing, sort of like La Dispute’s “Here, Hear” volumes.
The summer brings memories
of summers long past-
But we must embrace it
for spring cannot last.
All life dies in autumn,
goes out with a flash.
The sighing of fire-
for summer can’t last.
In winter, we stagnate
and, cursing the frost,
We only can dwell on
the things that we’ve lost.
In spring, we’ll remember
and, shedding the past,
create a new morning,
for winter can’t last.
I feel I have to make a recommendation for Essential Books to Own: a complete translation of the Kokinshu (my copy was translated by Laurel Rasplica Rodd, et al., paperback with a green cover). Having read quite a lot of classical Japanese poetry in translation by many different authors in many different compilations, this has become my favorite anthology I’ve ever read.
The Kokinshu, or Kokinwakashu, was the first imperial collection of poetry, compiled around the turn of the 10th century by four poets at the request of the emperor. Most of the 1100-some poems are in the five-line waka, now called tanka, form (number of syllables: 5-7-5-7-7). Divided into twenty books by topic (each of the four seasons, travel, partings, love, etc.), the poems are taken mainly from contemporary and recent sources, including poems by the compilers themselves, though some date back several centuries. Not merely a pile of poems, they are arranged so that each poems is connected to and flows into the next, whether from shared imagery, wordplay, or topic. The arrangement adds an entire dimension to the richness of the poems themselves.
When I read books of Japanese poetry, my first read-through is generally pretty quick. With pencil in hand, I read from cover to cover, jotting down comments, questions, things to examine more deeply later on, notes about the poems’ allusions, and the like. If a poem really jumps out at me, I circle the number of the poem so I can see it while flipping through the book later on. No book I’ve read has had so many and so frequent circlings as the Kokinshu; if there’s eight or nine poems on a two-page spread, sometimes seven of those will be circled. It’s wonderful. It’s introducing me to some new poets as well (Oshikochi no Mitsune has risen to the top end of my list of favorites).
The Kokinshu has Piggy’s thorough approval and recommendation. If you’re remotely interested in Japanese poetry, this is fundamental.
I first encountered Alfonsina Storni’s “Pudiera ser” in my Spanish Literary Analysis class last spring, and was immediately captivated by its rhythm, rhyme, and quietly powerful message. I highly recommend it. The version at the bottom is my translation, for which I was fortunate enough to win my school’s translation prize this spring – so I fancy it’s pretty good. Enjoy!
Pudiera Ser
Alfonsina Storni
Pudiera ser que todo lo que en verso he sentido
no fuera más que aquello que nunca pudo ser,
no fuera más que algo vedado y reprimido
de familia en familia, de mujer en mujer.
Dicen que en los solares de mi gente, medido
estaba todo aquello que se debÃa hacer…
Dicen que silenciosas las mujeres han sido
de mi casa materna… Ah, bien pudiera ser…
A veces en mi madre apuntaron antojos
de liberarse, pero, se le subió a los ojos
una honda amargura, y en la sombra lloró.
Y todo esto mordiente, vencido, mutilado,
todo esto que se hallaba en su alma encerrado,
pienso que sin quererlo lo he libertado yo.
It Could Be
Translated by Cat’s Meow
It could be all I have ever felt in rhyme
was nothing more than what could never be,
was nothing more than something repressed and maligned
from family to family, from Eve to me.
They say that where my people come from, all
was prescribed that one must do…
They say women have been silent and small
from my motherland… Well, it could be true…
Sometimes ambitions arose in my mother
to free herself, but her eyes were smothered
by deep sorrow, and in shadows cried she.
And all this, wounded, crippled, torn apart,
all this which was found in her hemmed-in heart,
I think without wanting to I have set free.
During an afternoon walk on sunny day which we expected to be rainy.
at the Boys Town lake
boys sit on picnic tables
and cast fishing rods
a crowd of goslings cools off
under the cottonwood trees
Juan Felipe Herrera was just named the first Latino U.S. poet laureate!
why, spiders, no, please
go away, leave me alone
here’s no good for you
That sounds like me when I’m about to take a shower.
(I’m not afraid of spiders; I just don’t want to drown them.)
My Favorite Spider Encounter
by Lizzie
2am shower
I step out, naked, wet, blind.
Hello there, spider.
(I could have sworn I posted this as a reply to Robert? I guess I’m being particularly spacey today)
While we’re on the topic: a reminiscence of dorm living:
rinsing out shampoo
oh–hello, shower partner
dear mr. cockroach
(Roaches are my high school’s unofficial mascot)
Allowables, by Nikki Giovanni
I killed a spider
Not a murderous brown recluse
Nor even a black widow
And if the truth were told this
Was only a small
Sort of papery spider
Who should have run
When I picked up the book
But she didn’t
And she scared me
And I smashed her
I don’t think
I’m allowed
To kill something
Because I am
Frightened
in Osaka
the howling tempests rage and
winds lash cold but still
I know no place to go so
I’ll sleep here in misery
— Anonymous, Kokinshu #988
A reply:
half blinded by tears
in the roaring, biting wind
head bowed I look for shelter
in a grove of cedar trees,
breathing soft, a hart asleep
Nicely done.
Thank you!
Have you read Ken Liu’s short story “Mono no aware”? It ought to be free online somewhere—it’s science fiction about Japanese characters, and there’s quite a lot of poetry in it.
I have not! I will be sure to find it and read it.
Could I have some help/input with a song I’m working on? I want it to have chords G, D, and C with a kind of Killers-ish sound, though I’m not super attached to that.
I am speeding down the highway, a receding silhouette
I am laughing like a maniac, I am soaked in tears and sweat
Nothing and nobody has a hold on me
And suddenly I’m shaking uncontrollably
And they said, you’re not gonna make it ten miles, kid (x4)
Stop for convenience store snacks under the massive desert moon
I got a clean slate for new mistakes, I am crossing the state border soon
I am cutting off my hair, I am moving someplace colder
(Line I haven’t written yet but it has to fit the rhyme scheme)
And they said, you’re not gonna make it ten miles, kid (x4)
And that’s all I have so far. I think it definitely needs more lyrics, maybe a chorus with more than one line, or a bridge or make the verses longer? And I need a line to rhyme with “colder” unless I change the one before it. What do you guys think?
I like what you have so far! For the line you haven’t figured out yet, maybe try something about getting older?
Or doing something before you get older, or instead of just getting older?
I love what you have, and thirding “older”! Off the top of my head, trying to work with your rhythm: “I’m not getting any younger, I’m not getting any older,” “I am gonna get better, I am gonna get older.” You could also do something with “bolder.” Actually, thinking about it, “I am gonna get better, I am gonna get bolder” is also a good line, because that gets you the alliteration.
Song fragments I might turn into songs in the future. What do you guys think?
Sun flashing bright on the water
Waves wearing away the sand on the shore
I don’t think I have to tell you that we are not the same people anymore
I love you, I’ll always love you, but I hope that everybody else I love stays out of your way
Metal head, metal heart, outdated and falling apart
We will all fall down with no one to carry us, and I think that’s hilarious
I haven’t slept in two nights and the dark bruises under my eyes are becoming permanent, darling you know that’s not what I meant
Even if we ended up sworn nemeses I’d still invite you over for Monopoly on the weekends, and we’d still kind of be friends
Also I decided to go with “North of Santa Fe I’ll live to be another day older” for the last bit of my previous song. But I think it needs more lyrics and better chords. I might make “You’re not gonna make it ten miles, kid” a pre-chorus thing and write a better actual chorus. Or write a bridge.
I actually have a couple mostly finished songs I’ve done rough recordings of on the piano and would be interested in you guys’ feedback on. GAPAs, is there any way I could link or submit them without breaking the blog rules?
R*S, that’s fine. Just delinkify your links so spambots can’t ride them back to us.
Okay! Here’s a Google Drive folder with recordings of my seven songs + a Word document with the lyrics to all of them. I think the order they’re in on the Word document is the best, but it probably doesn’t really matter. If any of you guys would want to listen to them and give feedback that would be really great, thanks!
https://drive.google. com/drive/folders/0B54ECAGP8JcFRkNOc2thVzJNNzA
Wait, sorry. Is this better?
https://drive. google. com/drive/folders/0B54ECAGP8JcFRkNOc2thVzJNNzA
https:// drive. google. com/drive/folders/0B54ECAGP8JcFRkNOc2thVzJNNzA
HEY WHO WANTS TO LISTEN TO SOME MUSIC because I added another song to the folder and fixed the lyric sheet to be more readable. Any opinions, feedback, or ideas on how to improve would be great! I want to narrow my songs down to like the 4-5 best to record better versions of and put in an EP or something.
“Warm summer sun
Shine kindly here,
Warm southern wind
Blow softly here,
Green sod above
Lie light, lie light–
Good night, dear heart,
Good night, good night.”
The poem Mark Twain had engraved on his daughter Susy’s headstone after she died of meningitis at age twenty-four. Adapted from the last stanza of Robert Richardson’s “Annette”.
“just follow that creek
and it’ll take you straight home”–
his directions blend
with the playful trickling sound
of the fork in the waters
Forgot to comment on it–this is the most obscured of the several poems I’ve written in the last few days (some original, some replies to Kokinshu poems). The others I might share in a few years, but not yet.
Question:
Which direction is home? If the creek forks, then there’s no “straight” to follow. Is the speaker misleading the receiver of the directions?
Maybe that’s the point (or one point) of the poem.
After Frost:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And honestly I’m starting to get a little nervous
Because it’s been like an hour and I still haven’t seen any buildings
And I think the sun’s going to be setting pretty soon,
So maybe I should just backtrack and try the other one?
I should have brought a sweatshirt,
Because it’s getting a little chilly now too.
Crap, why didn’t I just take the other road?
We must not look at goblin men,
We must not buy their fruits:
Who knows upon what soil they fed
Their hungry thirsty roots?
From “Goblin Market” by Christina Rossetti. I’ve had that chunk memorized ever since it popped up in the Midnight episode of Doctor Who in season 4.
I have a confession.
I don’t like poetry.
I don’t think I dislike poetry in itself; I think I resent the way it’s been taught to me. First of all, I was always taught to analyze poetry, which was just another way of unlocking the secret message inside the poem, the deep hidden meaning that other people seemed to know to look for while I didn’t have a clue. Just like with modern art, people pull out emotion and statements about modern society and life and love that I just don’t see. My own response always seemed to be incorrect, according to teachers. And that makes me confront the awful possibility that maybe there’s something wrong with me, because I’m not connecting with these human emotions and perspectives.
Then there’s nature poetry, which to me seems to capture a moment in time created by nature. But I don’t know if that’s right, and because poetry about nature seems more akin to a prayer, there’s the chance that in misunderstanding, or only understanding it in a shallow way, I’m being disrespectful.
I like narrative poems–I quite enjoyed the Odyssey and I think that Tolkien’s The Fall of Arthur is glorious–but that’s just because I like stories, and I can appreciate a succinct expression of meaning. But even there I feel ashamed, because the narrative is a crutch for my understanding. The more poetical elements elude me.
Whose fault is it that I don’t “get” poetry? Is it anyone’s? Does this make sense to anyone else?
Teaching poems as riddles with right or wrong answers seems to me the best possible way to discourage people from appreciating poetry — especially when, as in an academic setting, there’s a penalty for getting it wrong.
I have a degree in literature and I agree with Robert. I will add that what a poem is doing, and how, is usually at least as interesting as what it means.
One of the main reasons I love poetry, as described by Tachibana Akemi (d. 1868):
How pleasant it is–
when I’m reading through a book
at my leisure
and see there a person
who is exactly like me.
It sounds to me as though you DO get poetry. You obviously get a lot of enjoyment and inspiration from some of it, and that’s what it’s for. If you’re not seeing the inner meanings that other people see. maybe the poet should be less obscure, or maybe people are reading things into the poem that the poet never intended. That’s not unknown. Anyway, read and enjoy. If you don’t enjoy, read another one.
As regards unintended meanings, I often find new things in my own poetry that I didn’t have in mind when I wrote it. I think that if you have an interpretation that you can really defend, it’s perfectly valid, regardless of the poet’s original intention.
Kokinshu 539:
in my suffering
I cry aloud surely there
can be no mountain
echo that remains unmoved–
my calls must summon a reply
A reply:
in the mid-June heat
the thick air shimmers above
the broken concrete
if a cicada were out,
what would its cry sink into?
“A Drinking Song” by Yeats.
Wine comes in at the mouth
And love comes in at the eye;
That’s all we shall know for truth
Before we grow old and die.
I lift the glass to my mouth,
I look at you, and I sigh.
!!!
I just recently attended a premier of a work by a friend/composer who set this text to some very pretty music.
Just kidding. I love Yeats.
Hey, you know as well as I that there are dozens of cheesier Yeats poems I could post.
At least it wasn’t “Brown Penny.”
(Of which I’m also very fond.)