Poetry

A little song, a little dance, a little seltzer down your pants.
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Marcus
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Location: Alaska

Re: Poetry

Post by Marcus »

Do Not Go Gentle

If, at the end, I seemed
to depart too willingly,
don't be distressed: I was tired,

not of having or your love,
but of being incurably old.


—Ernest Sandeen
"The jawbone of an ass is just as dangerous a weapon today as in Sampson's time."
--- Richard Nixon
******************
"I consider looseness with words no less of a defect than looseness of the bowels."
—John Calvin
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Antipatros
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Re: Poetry

Post by Antipatros »

Dylan Thomas, A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15381
http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/a-refusa ... f-a-child/
http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarch ... oemId=7092
Never until the mankind making
Bird beast and flower
Fathering and all humbling darkness
Tells with silence the last light breaking
And the still hour
Is come of the sea tumbling in harness

And I must enter again the round
Zion of the water bead
And the synagogue of the ear of corn
Shall I let pray the shadow of a sound
Or sow my salt seed
In the least valley of sackcloth to mourn

The majesty and burning of the child's death.
I shall not murder
The mankind of her going with a grave truth
Nor blaspheme down the stations of the breath
With any further
Elegy of innocence and youth.

Deep with the first dead lies London's daughter,
Robed in the long friends,
The grains beyond age, the dark veins of her mother,
Secret by the unmourning water
Of the riding Thames.
After the first death, there is no other.
Be not too curious of Good and Evil;
Seek not to count the future waves of Time;
But be ye satisfied that you have light
Enough to take your step and find your foothold.

--T.S. Eliot
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Azrael
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To His Coy Mistress -- Andrew Marvell

Post by Azrael »

To His Coy Mistress

Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, Lady, were no crime
We would sit down and think which way
To walk and pass our long love's day.
Thou by the Indian Ganges' side
Shouldst rubies find: I by the tide
Of Humber would complain. I would
Love you ten years before the Flood,
And you should, if you please, refuse
Till the conversion of the Jews.
My vegetable love should grow
Vaster than empires, and more slow;
An hundred years should go to praise
Thine eyes and on thy forehead gaze;
Two hundred to adore each breast,
But thirty thousand to the rest;
An age at least to every part,
And the last age should show your heart.
For, Lady, you deserve this state,
Nor would I love at lower rate.
   But at my back I always hear
Time's wingèd chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
Thy beauty shall no more be found,
Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound
My echoing song: then worms shall try
That long preserved virginity,
And your quaint honour turn to dust,
And into ashes all my lust:
The grave's a fine and private place,
But none, I think, do there embrace.
   Now therefore, while the youthful hue
Sits on thy skin like morning dew,
And while thy willing soul transpires
At every pore with instant fires,
Now let us sport us while we may,
And now, like amorous birds of prey,
Rather at once our time devour
Than languish in his slow-chapt power.
Let us roll all our strength and all
Our sweetness up into one ball,
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Thorough the iron gates of life:
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.
cultivate a white rose
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Antipatros
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Re: Poetry

Post by Antipatros »

The November 2012 issue of Poetry is out.

Clive James, A Stretch of Verse

The notable, the quotable, and the forgettable

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrym ... cle/244758
A stretch of verse can have quite a high yield of quotable moments but we still might not think of it as being in one piece, as something coherent and ready to be recited or even learned by heart. This rule of thumb can be brutally dismissive, but all too often it meets the facts. Nobody except a prisoner serving a life sentence learns Wordsworth’s “Immortality Ode” by heart. To think of it as the one thing, like any other poem you know and admire for itself, you would have to be sitting an examination. Yet it is well sprinkled with quotations. The distance between them gives us a measure of how long a stretch of verse can go on discouraging quotation without wrecking the poem in which it appears:
The Rainbow comes and goes,
And lovely is the Rose.
Occurring in the poem’s second stanza, the line about the rainbow became famous enough to be raided, in the following century, for the title of a book by Lady Diana Cooper, The Rainbow Comes and Goes. Most people who bought the book would have known that it had a title from a poem, even if they didn’t know that the poem was by Wordsworth. But nothing as catchy shows up in the next stanza or the next. “Now, while the birds thus sing a joyous song” is so banal that it sounds Wordsworthian in the sense we have learned to dread, and “Land and sea/Give themselves up to jollity” is of interest only because he is saying the world is merry while he isn’t. “I hear, I hear, with joy I hear!” The tip-toed ecstasy would be pretty hard to bear if we didn’t suspect that he was preparing us for the revelation of a contrary mood lurking underneath. The mood breaks through with a quotable couplet:
Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower.
The key phrase, a truly delicious mouthful, was the title of Elia Kazan’s big film of 1961, Splendor in the Grass; and it was thus, while watching Natalie Wood resisting the perils of sex with Warren Beatty, that I finally got interested in Wordsworth, after several years of being bored by him. In my experience, poetry often gets into the mind through a side entrance. When, as a student, I saw a production of Long Day’s Journey into Night in Sydney in the late fifties, I went home with my head ringing to the cadences not of Eugene O’Neill’s dramatic prose, but of Ernest Dowson’s lyric poetry, which is quoted often throughout the play, but could never be quoted often enough to suit me. “They are not long, the days of wine and roses,” I told my bathroom mirror. Yes, it was Wordsworthian, but every phrase was begging to be said. Dowson liked to keep things short: short and tight.

The “Immortality Ode” is laid out like an essay. It has an argument, which can be paraphrased. But it also has moments that can’t, and as we read we find it hard to resist the conviction that those moments ought to be closer together. We tend to deduce that even a poem that is laid out like an essay is trying to be a short poem. It just might not have the wherewithal. This wish for the thing to be integrated by its intensity seems to be fundamental, although it might be wise to allow for the possibility that it has taken the whole of historic time for the wish to become so clear to us. Reading the Aeneid, you would like the whole thing to have the compact intensity of the Dido sequence. But that idea plainly never occurred to Dante, who worshipped Virgil; and still less could it have occurred to Virgil....
Be not too curious of Good and Evil;
Seek not to count the future waves of Time;
But be ye satisfied that you have light
Enough to take your step and find your foothold.

--T.S. Eliot
Hoosiernorm
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Re: Poetry

Post by Hoosiernorm »

Have A Nice Day

'Help, help, ' said a man. 'I'm drowning.'
'Hang on, ' said a man from the shore.
'Help, help, ' said the man. 'I'm not clowning.'
'Yes, I know, I heard you before.
Be patient dear man who is drowning,
You, see I've got a disease.
I'm waiting for a Doctor J. Browning.
So do be patient please.'
'How long, ' said the man who was drowning. 'Will it take for the Doc to arrive? '
'Not very long, ' said the man with the disease. 'Till then try staying alive.'
'Very well, ' said the man who was drowning. 'I'll try and stay afloat.
By reciting the poems of Browning
And other things he wrote.'
'Help, help, ' said the man with the disease, 'I suddenly feel quite ill.'
'Keep calm.' said the man who was drowning, ' Breathe deeply and lie quite still.'
'Oh dear, ' said the man with the awful disease. 'I think I'm going to die.'
'Farewell, ' said the man who was drowning.
Said the man with the disease, 'goodbye.'
So the man who was drowning, drownded
And the man with the disease past away.
But apart from that,
And a fire in my flat,
It's been a very nice day.

Spike Milligan
Been busy doing stuff
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Azrael
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Re: Poetry

Post by Azrael »

The Terrible People -- Ogden Nash

People who have what they want are very fond of telling people who haven't what they want that they really don't want it,
And I wish I could afford to gather all such people into a gloomy castle on the Danube and hire half a dozen capable Draculas to haunt it.
I don't mind their having a lot of money, and I don't care how they employ it,
But I do think that they damn well ought to admit they enjoy it.
But no, they insist on being stealthy
About the pleasures of being wealthy,
And the possession of a handsome annuity
Makes them think that to say how hard it is to make both ends meet is their bounden duity.
You cannot conceive of an occasion
Which will find them without some suitable evasion.
Yes indeed, with arguments they are very fecund;
Their first point is that money isn't everything, and that they have no money anyhow is their second.
Some people's money is merited,
And other people's is inherited,
But wherever it comes from,
They talk about it as if it were something you got pink gums from.
Perhaps indeed the possession of wealth is constantly distressing,
But I should be quite willing to assume every curse of wealth if I could at the same time assume every blessing.
The only incurable troubles of the rich are the troubles that money can't cure,
Which is a kind of trouble that is even more troublesome if you are poor.
Certainly there are lots of things in life that money won't buy, but it's very funny --
Have you ever tried to buy them without money?
cultivate a white rose
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Azrael
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Durer: Innsbruck, 1495

Post by Azrael »

I had often cowled in the slumbrous heavy air,
Closed my inanimate lids to find it real,
As I knew it would be, the colourful spires
And painted roofs, the high snows glimpsed at the back,
All reversed in the quiet reflecting waters –
Not knowing then that Durer perceived it too.
Now I find that once more I have shrunk
To an interloper, robber of dead men's dream,
I had read in books that art is not easy
But no one warned that the mind repeats
In its ignorance the vision of others. I am still
The black swan of trespass on alien waters.

Supposedly written in an afternoon (as part of the Ern Malley hoax); but pretty good none the less.

The black swan is an endemic species of Australia, the native country of "Ern Malley", and would have been considered foreign in Innsbruck.
cultivate a white rose
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Typhoon
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Re: Poetry

Post by Typhoon »

A Revolver [pdf]

~ Carl Sandburg

Recently discovered.
May the gods preserve and defend me from self-righteous altruists; I can defend myself from my enemies and my friends.
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Parodite
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Re: Poetry

Post by Parodite »

There are the rushing waves...
mountains of molecules,
each stupidly minding its own business...
trillions apart
...yet forming white surf in unison.

Ages on ages...
before any eyes could see...
year after year...
thunderously pounding the shore as now.
For whom, for what?
...on a dead planet
with no life to entertain.

Never at rest...
tortured by energy...
wasted prodigiously by the sun...
poured into space.
A mite makes the sea roar.

Deep in the sea,
all molecules repeat
the patterns of another
till complex new ones are formed.
They make others like themselves...
and a new dance starts.

Growing in size and complexity...
living things,
masses of atoms,
DNA, protein...
dancing a pattern ever more intricate.

Out of the cradle
onto dry land...
here it is standing...
atoms with consciousness
...matter with curiosity.

Stands at the sea...
wonders at wondering... I...
a universe of atoms...
an atom in the universe.


~Richard Feynman
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Azrael
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Re: Poetry

Post by Azrael »

Asymmetry

I’ve been thinking too much without feeling.
You’ve been feeling too much without thinking.
They’ve been remembering too much
while moving in the present.
And, them, they’ve been moving in the present too much
while not remembering.

They, you, me are:
Acting as though past actions didn’t change
the present.
Acting as though present actions will change
the past.
Acting as though present actions won’t change
the future.
Acting as though the shadow of future actions don’t change
the present.
Acting as though the tomorrows will always take care
of themselves.

But the tomorrows that could be, should be, will be are made from how we care.

They need to care more about their (those people’s) present.
And, them, they need to care more about their (those people’s) past.
I need to care more about you.
You need to care more about me.
And we all must care, want the best for the other—
see ourselves in those people, that place, that world.

Ask the prophet: Can the future forgive us?
The reply: Can we forgive the future?
There is no forgiveness here.
It asks for atonement.
It asks for caring.

© Mae Jemison
Astronaut
15 August 2008
cultivate a white rose
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Azrael
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Re: Poetry

Post by Azrael »

on the steps
of the Freedom Memorial
a discarded snake skin

Anthony Kudryavitsky, Ireland
cultivate a white rose
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Typhoon
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Re: To His Coy Mistress -- Andrew Marvell

Post by Typhoon »

Azrael wrote:To His Coy Mistress

Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, Lady, were no crime
We would sit down and think which way
To walk and pass our long love's day.

. . .
Personal favourite.
May the gods preserve and defend me from self-righteous altruists; I can defend myself from my enemies and my friends.
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Typhoon
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Re: Poetry

Post by Typhoon »

A Drunken Man's Praise Of Sobriety

COME swish around, my pretty punk,
And keep me dancing still
That I may stay a sober man
Although I drink my fill.

Sobriety is a jewel
That I do much adore;
And therefore keep me dancing
Though drunkards lie and snore.
O mind your feet, O mind your feet,
Keep dancing like a wave,
And under every dancer
A dead man in his grave.
No ups and downs, my pretty,
A mermaid, not a punk;
A drunkard is a dead man,
And all dead men are drunk.

~ William Butler Yeats

[I experience the rhythm and sensation of a waltz when I read this.]
May the gods preserve and defend me from self-righteous altruists; I can defend myself from my enemies and my friends.
Demon of Undoing
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The Rose of the Ocean

Post by Demon of Undoing »

Been down so long that I couldn't see the light;
Been so afraid of making afraid that I kept to endless night.

I've choked and I've gasped on the road in the middle,
Carrying a heavy load,
Looking for land mines and lifting up littles,
Down this endless and thankless road.

I've suffered such sadness and felt so denied;
Even pitiful goals were undone.
The nights were just dark and then the light left me fried,
Another day with a remorseless sun.

And just when I felt that it couldn't get worse,
That the journey would never be finished,
Even the burden that I quietly cursed,
Reviled me and left me diminished.

The burden it broke and slipped from my shoulders,
And I cried and not from relief,
Because I chose that burden though it weighed like lead boulders,
And felt as though undone by a thief.

Who took my reason, who took my own mission,
What bastard must I hunt down?
But the blank empty heavens they held no position,
And left me with nightfall come 'round.

And oh it was dark, I fell down in fatigue,
And I was left with only dead lies
That I'd told myself over many hot leagues;
Sweat and tears had blinded my eyes
.
And then came the shock, then came the blow,
That rattled me, bone and my core;
The great weight that I loved, which bent me so,
Wished to be carried no more.

And oh how I cried, what oaths did I call,
Cursing the road's destination,
Screaming at nothing and everything, all;
Tricked by my courage and station.

And the road got empty, I was free to go,
but nothing to go to or do.
Small sounds seemed to echo and the winds chilled me so,
It was all gone and over,
It's through.

But a warm breeze unbidden carried a sound,
And a smell both familiar and strange,
Of water and earth that no man had found,
And the landscape around me had changed.

There was no more a road but a deep ancient wood,
Moss and leaves all asked me to sit,
To listen to plans that would do me much good,
That would come and bless what was quit.

The wind boldly told me that it had come from below,
From the secret place in the earth,
With whispers of strength and of dreamscapes I know;
That the road had proven my worth.

I had not been punished, I'd not been abused,
And I certainly had not been thieved.
But Grace in its time had taken pain from me,
I'd not been abandoned, but relieved.

No one else could have carried the load that I shouldered,
Nobody else would have bothered to care,
That a girl from the plains who'd been burnt so she smoldered
Would need to be brought out to somewhere.

To some place where the wind would not treat her so raw,
Where the sea would meet the shore,
Where she could see and be things her elders never saw,
Where she could be happy for oh, ever more.

Wind spoke words that to me were so hard:
The differently souled must part;
But the wind and the waves would carry her onward,
And heal up the holes in her heart.

It wasn't mine to give what was decreed,
New beginnings would enliven what's numb,
And render salvation that could scarce be believed,
She'd have her own place in the sun.

But the wind wasn't finished, it had turned to my face,
And I felt it caress away tears,
I was happy for the woman I 'd brought to that place,
I was proud how she'd lived out our years.

She came to me frightened and running from hell,
Vicious cycles attempted to murder,
And when she felt a draw whose source she could not tell,
Grace sent me to carry her further.

She was truly no burden, I never didn't love ,
Though the straps on my heart they had chafed,
Until the wind and its wisdom spoke to Grace high above,
And told Him that now she was safe.

She slipped off my back and I howled at her missing,
I'd make a corpse had she been their take,
But she had not fallen nor been stolen nor slipping,
She had only just been waiting to wake.

My beauty would slip beneath caring waves,
There to learn what she could from the whales,
They are gods underwater that only can save.
Only that which can escape its own hell.

The wind it blew softly the last kiss that I had
And gave it to the Rose of the Ocean.
And already I saw that she'd have joy from what was sad,
She ran to the water in motion.

And I as I watched from my lovely vantage
Thought that Grace had been well played,
And turned to the forest and like all animals, vanished,
Still listening to the songs from the waves.
Hoosiernorm
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Re: Poetry

Post by Hoosiernorm »

The Charge of the Light Brigade

Half a league, half a league,
  Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death,
  Rode the six hundred.
'Forward, the Light Brigade!
Charge for the guns' he said:
Into the valley of Death
  Rode the six hundred.

'Forward, the Light Brigade!'
Was there a man dismay'd?
Not tho' the soldiers knew
  Some one had blunder'd:
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die:
Into the valley of Death
  Rode the six hundred.

Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon in front of them
  Volley'd and thunder'd;
Storm'd at with shot and shell,
Boldly they rode and well,
Into the jaws of Death,
Into the mouth of Hell
  Rode the six hundred.

Flash'd all their sabres bare,
Flash'd as they turned in air
Sabring the gunners there,
Charging an army while
  All the world wonder'd:
Plunged in the battery-smoke
Right thro' the line they broke;
Cossack and Russian
Reel'd from the sabre-stroke
Shatter'd and sunder'd.
Then they rode back, but not
Not the six hundred.

Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon behind them
  Volley'd and thunder'd;
Storm'd at with shot and shell,
While horse and hero fell,
They that had fought so well
Came thro' the jaws of Death,
Back from the mouth of Hell,
All that was left of them,
  Left of six hundred.

When can their glory fade?
O the wild charge they made!
  All the world wonder'd.
Honour the charge they made!
Honour the Light Brigade,
  Noble six hundred!
Been busy doing stuff
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kmich
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Re: Poetry

Post by kmich »

Demon

In bygone days when life's array -
The sweet song of the nightingale
And maidens' eyes, the rustling woods -
Still left a fresh impression on me,
When loftiness of feeling,
And freedom, glory, love
Artistic inspiration
So deeply stirred my blood,
My times of hope were cast in shade
And pleasure dimmed by longing,
For it was then an evil genius
Began to pay me secret visits.
Our meetings were quite dolorous:
His smile, his glance mysterious,
His venom-filled and caustic sermons
Poured frozen poison in my soul.
With endless slandering remarks
He tempted Providence;
He claimed that beauty's but a dream;
Felt scorn for inspiration;
He had no faith in love or freedom;
He looked on life with ridicule-
And in the whole of nature
He did not wish to praise a single thing.

- Alexander Pushkin
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kmich
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Re: Poetry

Post by kmich »

William Blake's answer to Swedenborg in "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell," a personal favorite. Swedenborg's error was that he conversed only with angels and not with devils...

P04JCvBWAXg
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Miss_Faucie_Fishtits
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Re: Poetry

Post by Miss_Faucie_Fishtits »

kmich wrote:'"......Swedenborg's error was that he conversed only with angels and not with devils..."
"533. All spirits in the hells, when seen in any light of heaven, appear in the form of their evil; for every one there is an image of his evil, since his interiors and exteriors act as one, the interiors making themselves visible in the exteriors, which are the face, body, speech and movements; thus the character of the spirit is known as soon as he is seen. In general, evil spirits are forms of contempt for others and of menaces against those that will not pay them respect; they are forms of hatreds of various kinds, also of various kinds of revenge. Fierceness and cruelty from their interiors show through their forms. But when they are commended, venerated and worshipped by others their expression is controlled, and takes on an expression of gladness from delight....."
Just by the manner he speaks OF them is impenetrable. If he bothered to even address a devil, he might have earned a....... l0l wut???????......'>>.......
She irons her jeans, she's evil.........
noddy
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Re: Poetry

Post by noddy »

reads as a speil against selfishness to me, a rant about self obsessed humans lightin up with delight when you tell em how special they is and generally being nazty and self absorbed when the conversation leaves that all important topic.
ultracrepidarian
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kmich
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Re: Poetry

Post by kmich »

ZPbHRnaihAo
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kmich
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Re: Poetry

Post by kmich »

Magic cannot save a lost soul...


The Talisman - Alexander Pushkin
Where the ocean comes careening
Against desolate, bare cliffs,
Where the moon is warmly gleaming
On the evening hour's sweet mists,
Where, in harems, at his pleasure,
Days find the Mohammedan,
There a sorceress gave me treasure,
Kissed me, gave a talisman.

She caressed me in our bower,
Said: “My talisman you’ll keep. It is full of hidden power
And t'is given with love deep.
From disease, the grave, storm's rages,
From the hurricane's dread wave,
Your sweet head, my own, my angel,
This, my talisman, won't save.

Of the Orient, the riches,
None my talisman can bring.
Where the Prophet's faithful preaches
This, my gift, won't make you King.
Longing for your dear friend's bosom
Forth out of a sad, strange land,
Homewards, northwards, o! my true one!
No speed gives my talisman…

But should cunning eyes behold you,
Suddenly bewitch your mind,
Some dark night, if lips too bold should
Kiss unloving and unkind--
My sweet friend! From sin heart-rending
From new wounds the heart can't stand,
From betrayal, from forgetting
Saves you then my talisman!
rrlHaXYKzFo
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Nonc Hilaire
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Re: Poetry

Post by Nonc Hilaire »

I think reading Pushkin in Russian must be like reading The Qu'ran in Arabic. I understand the artistry through translation, but I don't get the emotional thrill native language speakers find.
“Christ has no body now but yours. Yours are the eyes through which he looks with compassion on this world. Yours are the feet with which he walks among His people to do good. Yours are the hands through which he blesses His creation.”

Teresa of Ávila
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kmich
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Re: Poetry

Post by kmich »

Nonc Hilaire wrote:I think reading Pushkin in Russian must be like reading The Qu'ran in Arabic. I understand the artistry through translation, but I don't get the emotional thrill native language speakers find.
Not a native Russian speaker; grew up with my immigrant parents speaking Russian in the home. Continue to know enough to occasionally translate for our substantial Russian immigrant community with what native speakers describe as a distinctive American accent.

Still, there is a song in the Russian soul that Pushkin still sings deep within my own and is done well by the late Aleksander Byrykin. Well understand though how those unfamiliar with the language and, more importantly, the soul of the Russian would not be able to fully relate.
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kmich
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Re: Poetry

Post by kmich »

A Brief for the Defense - Jack Gilbert

Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies
are not starving someplace, they are starving
somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.
But we enjoy our lives because that's what God wants.
Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not
be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not
be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women
at the fountain are laughing together between
the suffering they have known and the awfulness
in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody
in the village is very sick. There is laughter
every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,
and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.
If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.
If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,
we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.
We must admit there will be music despite everything.
We stand at the prow again of a small ship
anchored late at night in the tiny port
looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront
is three shuttered cafés and one naked light burning.
To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat
comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth
all the years of sorrow that are to come.

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Nonc Hilaire
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Punctuation Poem, by David Morice (A limerick)

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“Christ has no body now but yours. Yours are the eyes through which he looks with compassion on this world. Yours are the feet with which he walks among His people to do good. Yours are the hands through which he blesses His creation.”

Teresa of Ávila
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