Is this what dying is for? Jaime Sabines, ¿Para esto morir? #mexico #poetryisjustawesome

From: A Few Words On The Death of Major Sabines by Jaime Sabines. Rest in peace Tommie.

Is this what dying is for?
To invent the soul,
God’s frock, eternity, the water
in the fountain of death, hope?
To die so one can fish?
To trap the spider in a web?

The wind blew past. The uncovered well and the blighted root
were all that remained of the house.
And there’s no point in crying. And if you pound
on the walls of God, and if you pull out
your hair or rip your shirt,
no one will ever hear you, no one will see you.
No one, nothing comes back. The golden
dust of life will not return.

Algo Sobre la Muerte de Mayor Sabines

¿Para esto morir?
¿para inventar el alma,
el vestido de Dios, la eternidad, el agua
del aguacero de la muerte, la esperanza?,
¿morir para pescar?
¿para atrapar con su red a la araña?

Pasó el viento. Quendaron de la casa
el pozo abierto y la raíz en ruinas.
Y es en vano llorar. Y si golpeas
las paredes de Dios, y si te arrancas
el pelo o la camisa,
nadie te oye jamás, nadie te mira.
No vuelve nadie, nada. No retorna
el polvo de oro de la vida.

From: Pinholes in the Night, essential poems from Latin America. Selected by Raul Zurita, edited by Forrest Gander.

USED and NEW: Pinholes in the Night at Abebooks.com.

Making cow eyes. For the love of cows. Cowscowscows “Cows” by Peter Kocan! #Valentines #poetryisjustawesome

Cows by Peter Kocan

Cows graze across the hill,
Measuring the day
As their shadows tell
Irrelevant time. Their gait is half-way
Between moving and standing still.

The sun is gentle on the green
Of their meadow, their mouths deep
In its heavy warmth,
A watcher could fall asleep
In the depth
Of that untroubled scene.

From each dewdrop morning
To every day’s end
They follow the cycle
Of the rhythm of the world turning
In its season. A miracle
Of normalcy is a cow’s mind.

Beyond thought’s prickling fever
They dwell in the grace
Of their own true concerns,
And in that place
Know they will live forever
With butterflies around their horns.

More about Kocan:http://evidenceanecdotal.blogspot.ca/2013/05/a-miracle-of-normalcy-is-cows-mind.html

“There is a field near the main kitchen where cows from the hospital dairy graze. There’s a peacefulness about cows.

At weekends you take a book and sit under the tree near the field and read a little and listen to music on your transistor and watch the cows.

Sometimes you lean on the fence and click your tongue at the cows and they will wander close and sniff at you and

examine you with big peaceful eyes but with a dubious look also, as if they’re wondering what your game is.

You don’t stay leaning on the fence too long.             It’s a bit too visible there.

It might look odd.

Other people don’t spend their time looking at cattle. Looking at cattle is

probably a symptom of something. ”

The New Oxford Book of Australian Verse, chosen by Les A. Murray.
USED: http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=14144434264

Love built of a long marriage: “Tongues” by Philip Martin. #Valentines #poetryisjustawesome

Tongues
(The speaker is a woman whose husband has died after a long illness)

Three days before he died the hospital called me:
He was unconscious, sinking. I went at once.
His face was closed, remote against the pillows.
I sat by the window.The leaves outside were moving
Suddenly he began to speak. I thought
He was asking me for something, but before
I could cross the room I saw have fixed his eyes were,
And then I realized: he was speaking verse,
But in a language neither of us knew.
Not English certainly, not German, and not Russian,
His family’s language from the thirteenth century,
Though he had never learnt it.
.                                              He continued
For a full minute, measured, authoritative.
I picked up the rhythm: four stresses to each line.
I recall only the opening words of one:
Alléndam tatsú…
.                         He seemed to be speaking
Past me, his eyes directed to the window,
Yet also to me. For thirty lines or more
He spoke, and then, as if the poem was finished,
Fell silent and lay back.
.                                   Two hours after,
He spoke once more, in German, using my name.
His eyes were soft and and again familiar.
We did not refer to the poem, then or later.
But though he was conscious almost until he died
He took no leave of me. And I think now
The poem was his taking-leave.
.                                                His doctor,
Who speaks German fluently, believes
That what I heard was German, much distorted.
I’m certain it was not: the voice was too
Distinct, unfaltering.
.                              His father said,
‘Ah, yes. Of course I need not remind you, we
Are an old family. It was our forbears speaking.’

Philip Martin

The New Oxford Book of Australian Verse, chosen by Les A. Murray.

USED: http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=14144434264

 

When You Love What Do You Love? ¿Qué se ama cuando se ama? Gonzales Rojas. #Valentines #poetryisjustawesome

When You Love What Do You Love?

When you love what do you love, my God: terrible light of life
or death’s delight? What do you look for, what uncover, what
is it: love? And who? Woman with her depths, her roses, her volcanoes,
or this flushed sun, my furious blood
as I enter into her last roots?

Or is it all a great game, God, with no woman
or man but just one body: yours,
shared out in beauty-stars, in brief grains
of visible eternity?

It kills me, oh God, this war
of going and coming among them in the streets, unable to love
three hundred at a time, condemned as I am to one,
this one, this one alone, you gave me in that old paradise.

 

¿Qué se ama cuando se ama?

¿Qué se ama cuando se ama, mi Dios: la luz terrible de la vida
o la luz de la muerte? ¿Qué se busca, qué se halla, qué
es eso: amor? ¿Quién es? ¿La mujer con su hondura, sus rosas, sus volcanes,
o este sol colorado que es mi sangre furiosa
cuando entro en ella hasta las últimas raíces?

¿O todo es un gran juego, Dios mío, y no hay mujer
ni hay hombre sino un solo cuerpo: el tuyo,
repartido en estrellas de hermosura, en particular fugaces
de eternidad visible?

Me muero en esto, oh Dios, en esta guerra
de ir y venir entre ellas por las calles, de no poder amar
trescientas a la vez, porque estoy condenado siempre a una,
a esa una, a esa única que me diste en el viejo paraíso.

De Contra la muerte, 1964.

From: Pinholes in the Night, essential poems for Latin America. Selected by Raul Zurita, edited by Forrest Gander.

USED and NEW: Pinholes in the Night at Abebooks.com.

J.C. Bloem, “How notably stiller death is compared to sleep.” #inmemoriam

The rhythm is slightly off, but I think it conveys the mood better.

From: In memoriam

And this stayed with me forever,
How notably stiller death is     comparedto sleep,
That it is a daily marvel to live,
And that we, with every ‘wakeningawaken     as if from death.

Another ending, bit more awkward:

And this stayed with me forever:
How notably stiller death is compared to sleep,
That it is a daily marvel to be alive,
And that we with every ‘wakening    are       resurrected.

“En voor altijd is mij bijgebeleven:
hoe zeer veel stiller dood dan slapen is;
dat het een daaglijks wonder is, te leven,
en elk ontwaken een herrijzenis.”

J.C. Bloem

Geheel:
De blaren vallen in de gele grachten;
Weer keert het najaar en het najaarsweer
Op de aarde, en de donkre harten smachten
Der levenden. Hij ziet het nimmermeer

Hoe had hij dit bemind, die duistre straten
Die atmosfeer van mist en zaligheid,
Wanneer het avond wordt en het verlaten
Plaveisel vochtig is en vreemd en wijd.

Hij was geboren voor de stille dingen,
Waarmee wij leven—maar niet even lang—
waarvan wij ‘t wezen slaken in ons zingen,
Totdat wij zinken, en met ons de zang.

Het was een herfst als nu: de herfsten keren,
maar niet de harten, na hun korten dag;
Wij stonden, wreed van menselijk begeren,
In de ademlooze kamer waar hij lag

En voor altijd is dit mij bijgebleven:
Hoe zeer veel stiller dood dan slapen is;
dat het een dag’lijks wonder is, te leven,
en elk ontwaken een herrijzenis.

Nu weer hervind ik mij in het gewijde
Seizoen, waar de gevallen blaren zijn
Als het veeg zonlicht van een dood getijde
En denk: hoe lang nog leef ik in die schijn?

Wat blijft ons over van dit lange derven,
Dat leven is? Wat dat ik nog begeer?
voor hem en mij een herfst die niet kan sterven;
zon, mist en stilte, en dan voor immermeer.

 

The Subway Piranhas by Edwin Morgan! And The Loch Ness Monster’s Song. Recorded at #LochNess: real sounds!!

The Subway Piranhas

Did anyone tell you
that in each subway train
there is one special seat
with a small hole in it
and underneath the seat
is a tank of piranha-fish
which have not been fed
for quite some time.
The fish become quite agitated
by the shoogling of the train
and jump up through the seat.
The resulting skeletons
of unlucky passengers
turn an honest penny
for the transport executive,
hanging far and wide
in medical schools.

From: Poems on the Underground, edited by Chernaik, Herbert and Benson.
Buy NEW and USED at abebooks: Poems on the Underground!!!

The Loch Ness Monster’s Song

Sssnnnwhuffffll?
Hnwhuffl hhnnwfl hnfl hfl?
Gdroblboblhobngbl gbl gl g g g g glbgl.
Drublhaflablhaflubhafgabhaflhafl fl fl –
gm grawwwww grf grawf awfgm graw gm.
Hovoplodok – doplodovok – plovodokot-doplodokosh?
Splgraw fok fok splgrafhatchgabrlgabrl fok splfok!
Zgra kra gka fok!
Grof grawff gahf?
Gombl mbl bl –
blm plm,
blm plm,
blm plm,
blp.

Buy NEW and USED at abebooks: Collected Poems by Edwin Morgan!

 

A mother’s yearning/love: “Your clear eye is the one absolutely beautiful thing…” Sylvia Plath #Valentines #poetryisjustawesome

Child by Sylvia Plath

Your clear eye is the one absolutely beautiful thing.
I want to fill it with color and ducks,
The zoo of the new

Whose names you meditate —
April snowdrop, Indian pipe,
Little

Stalk without wrinkle,
Pool in which images
Should be grand and classical

Not this troublous
Wringing of hands, this dark
Ceiling without a star.

.

.

From: Poems on the Underground. Illlustrated edition. Edited by Judith Chernaik, Gerard Benson and Cicely Herbert.

 

Out of longing, Dvorah Fogel- Yiddish poetry! “…Every night something should happen in the world…”

Favourite stanza because the thought:

Every night something should happen in the world.
Something should come
of all the walks
One takes in a day.

 

Out of longing

Today I bought yellow cherries
smelling wetly of loneliness.

Cherries never grow old.
Just sixteen, seventeen years old.

Today I’m a yellow cherry,
I taste emptily of drifting
through night streets, city streets.
Yellow lamps.

Every night something should happen in the world.
Something should come
of all the walks
One takes in a day.

But last year
and again two and three years ago

Only the watery taste
of loneliness.

Dvorah Fogel.

 

From: a Treasury of Yiddish Poetry edited by Irving Howe and Liezer Greenberg.
USED and NEW: http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=13535919967

http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/fogel-dvoyre

“Together with her husband and son, Fogel was killed in the Lwów ghetto in 1942.

Fogel’s remarkable experimental poetry, all written in the 1930s, was, in the spirit of early twentieth-century art, radically avant-garde and attuned to all the modernist minimalisms.

She attempted to fuse modern art and poetry in a new style that she termed “white words,” striving, as she put it, to create a new lyric poetry of the urban condition: a poetry of cool stasis and of geometric ornamentation with a rhythm of repetition that can replace melodiousness and dynamism, in which monotone becomes theme.

In her creative prose she employed repetitive detached impressions (“montages”) to achieve the same goals.

Contemporaneous and later critics considered her style too intellectual, studied and obscure, and lacking in traditional Jewish and feminine thematics.

Yet Fogel herself regarded her project not as a deliberate experiment, but rather as “a necessity, achieved and paid for with life’s experience.

No need to spell out love— poems: “Beyond the last horizon/We’ll see what there is to see…” #TweetHearts #Valentines

When you don’t have to spell out that you love.

North London Sonnet
for Lucinda

A boom-box boats by,
less music than sonic muscle
assaulting the night sky,
a pumped-up hustle-bustle

which manages to disturb
the twirly, needling alarm
of a car tucked into the kerb—
its mantra, or charm—

but that too, soon, quiets
and you sleep on, proof
against the rumpuses and riots
encircling our roof,

till my switching off the light
prompts a muffled Good Night

Christopher Reid

From: London a History in Verse, ed by Mark Ford.

NEW: http://www.localbookshops.co.uk
USED: http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=9186279941
Canto IV

[…]
You know your glance bedecks the sailboats
In the rocking nights of the catch
You know your glance ties the knot of stars
And the knot of song that will come from this chest
Your glance carries the word to the heart
And the enchanted mouth of a nightingale

There’s no time to lose
At the hour of the body in the dubious shipwreck
I measure the infinite step by step

The sea waits to conquer
So there’s no time to lose
Then
.    Ah then

Beyond the last horizon
We’ll see what there is to see

[…]

Vicente Huidobro

From: Pinholes in the Night, essential poems for Latin America. Selected by Raul Zurita, edited by Forrest Gander.

USED and NEW: Pinholes in the Night at Abebooks.com.

Love poems that are boss of Valentine’s Day: “…Your dream will sleep in my hands…”

Canto IV
[…]
And I lifted the cape of your laughter
And I cut through the shadows
That cast the signs of distance over you

Your dream will sleep in my hands
Marked with the lines of my inseparable fate
In the breast of the same bird
That consumes itself in the fire of its song
Of its song that weeps for time
For time slips through fingers

[…]
I love my eyes and your eyes and eyes
Eyes with their own flash-point
Eyes that dance to the sound of an inner music
And open like a door onto a crime
[…]
Vicente Huidobro

From: Pinholes in the Night, essential poems for Latin America. Selected by Raul Zurita, edited by Forrest Gander.

USED and NEW: Pinholes in the Night at Abebooks.com.

Rain Journal: London: June 65
by Lee Harwood

sitting naked together
on the edge of the bed
drinking vodka

this my first real love scene

your body so good
your eyes sad love stars

but John
now when we’re miles apart
the come-down from mountain visions
and the streets all raining
and me in the back of the shop
making free phone calls to you

what can we do?

crackling telephone wires shadow me
and this distance haunts me
and yes – i am miserable
and lost without you

whole days spent
remaking your face
the sound of your voice
the feel of your shoulder
.

From: London a History in Verse, ed by Mark Ford.

NEW: http://www.localbookshops.co.uk
USED: http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=9186279941

I shall drown you in love poems. By Valentine’s Day you will be able to face the chocolate hearts and red red roses!

Not typical love poems, although some are.

Freedom, summer (To my mother, reminding her of the fire)

I hold the photo of two lovers who fell into the sea. They’re dressed
.   for winter, I ask them to take off their clothes. During siestas we sit
.   beside the water pump and stare at each other: light collects in her
.   breasts again; he loved horses and one time he tried to kill himself. (1978)

La Libertad, el verano (A mi madre, recordándole el fuego)

Tengo la foto de dos novios que cayeron al mar. Están vestidos de
.   invierno, los invito a desnudarse. En las siestas nos sentamos junto
.   a la bomba de agua y nos miramos: de nuevo embolsan luz los
.   pechos de ella; él amaba a los caballos y una vez intentó suicidarse. (1978)

For more on Héctor Viel Témperley go here!

Canto IV
[…]
Rose upturned and rose returned and rose and rose
Though the warden don’t want it
Muddy rivers make for clean fishing.
[…]

Vicente Huidobro

From: Pinholes in the Night, essential poems for Latin America. Selected by Raul Zurita, edited by Forrest Gander.

USED and NEW: Pinholes in the Night at Abebooks.com.

Stations by Audre Lorde

Some women love
to wait
for life          for a ring
in the June light          for a touch
of the sun to heal them           for another
woman’s voice       to make them whole
to untie their hands
put words in their mouths
form to their passages      sound
to their screams        for some other sleeper
to remember         their future         their past.

Some women wait for their right
train          in the wrong station
in the alleys of morning
for the noon to holler
the night come down.

Some women wait for love
to rise up
the child of their promise
to gather from earth
what they do not plant
to claim pain for labor
to become
the tip of an arrow       to aim
at the heart of now
but it never stays.

Some women wait for visions
That do not return
Where they were not welcome
Naked
For invitations to places
They always wanted
To visit
To be repeated.

Some women wait for themselves
Around the next corner
And call the empty spot peace
But the opposite of living
Is only not living
And the stars do not care.

Some women wait for something
To change        and nothing
Does change
So they change
Themselves.

 

From The Oxford Anthology of African-American Poetry.
NEW and USED: Abebooks.com The Oxford Anthology of African-American Poetry
NEW at independent bookstores: http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780195125634

For the *person* I loved so much, my pug Tommie. 8.9.2001- 24.1.2015 Go snuggle some place nice!

5022_384286841654311_1515368800_nI imagine her comfortable in a little bed looking at me:

Do not stand at my grave and weep

Do not stand at my grave and weep
I am not there; I do not sleep.
I am a thousand winds that blow,
I am the diamond glints on snow,
I am the sunlight on ripened grain,
I am the gentle autumn rain.
When you awaken in the morning’s hush
I am the swift uplifting rush
Of quiet birds in circled flight.
I am the soft stars that shine at night.
Do not stand at my grave and cry,
I am not there; I did not die.

1410792_10201773201145672_1092475997_oAnd another one that reminds me of her pugginess and love of sun:

Wordsworth’ Daffodils

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

And:

Remember me when I am gone away,
Gone far away into the silent land;
When you can no more hold me by the hand,
Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay.
Remember me when no more day by day
You tell me of our future that you plann’d:
Only remember me; you understand
It will be late to counsel then or pray.
Yet if you should forget me for a while
And afterwards remember, do not grieve:
For if the darkness and corruption leave
A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,
Better by far you should forget and smile
Than that you should remember and be sad.

Rossetti

202185_4239688264381_2083941327_o

And by Elizabeth Barrett Browning:

— I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.

205103_1051554923040_7217_n

A sad poem:

IX.
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message She Is Dead,
Put crêpe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

She was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;
For nothing now can ever come to any good

WH Auden

294590_2270775282787_1792519193_n

Fat piglets: Tommie and her brothers…

Adlestrop (This poem accompanies Pugs in the sun Everywhere)

BY EDWARD THOMAS

Yes. I remember Adlestrop—
The name, because one afternoon
Of heat the express-train drew up there
Unwontedly. It was late June.
The steam hissed. Someone cleared her throat.
No one left and no one came
On the bare platform. What I saw
Was Adlestrop—only the name
And willows, willow-herb, and grass,
And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,
No whit less still and lonely fair
Than the high cloudlets in the sky.
And for that minute a blackbird sang
Close by, and round him, mistier,
Farther and farther, all the birds
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.

 

Snuggle close, sleep deep, snore loud, Tommie.
And find a place where I can smell and see you easily. Oh, Tommeleh, Moon face, Dogalopoulous, Pugminion, Pug-befje, Mopsehondicus… Champignon neus… the Tongue… Your eye lashes were so cute too.

 

 

 

 

Song Cycle of the Moon Bone, Wonguri-Mandjigai people. #nativelivesmatter #LifeLivedLikeaStory 1/3

Song Cycle of the Moon Bone

…The prawn is there, at the place of the Dugong, digging out mud with its claws
The hard-shelled prawn living there in the water, making soft little noises.

They are sitting about the camp, among the branches, along the
.        back of the camp;
sitting along in lines in the camp, they’re in the shade of the paperbark
.        trees:
sitting along in a line, like the new white spreading clouds;
In the shade of the paperbarks, they’re sitting like resting clouds.
People of the clouds, living there like the mist; like the mist sitting
.        resting with arms on knees,
In here towards the shade, in this Place, in the shadow of paperbarks.
Sitting there in rows, those Wonguri-Mandjigai people, paperbarks
.        along like a cloud.
Living on cycad-nut bread; sitting there with white-stained fingers,
Sitting in there resting, those people of the Sandfly clan…
Sitting there like mist, at that place of the Dugong… And of the
.        Dugongs Entrails…
Sitting resting there in the place of the Dugong…
In the place of the Moonlight Clay Pans, and at the place of the
.        Dugong…
There at that Dugong place they are sitting all along.

The prawn is there, at the place of the Dugong, digging out mud
.        with its claws…
The hard-shelled prawn living there in the water, making soft little
.        noises.
It burrows into the mud and casts it aside, among the lilies…
Throwing aside the mud, with soft little noises…
Digging out mud with its claws at the place of the Dugong, the place
.        of the Dugong’s Tail…
Calling the bone bukalili, The catfish bukalili, the frog bukalili, the
.        sacred tree bukalili,
The prawn is burrowing, coming up, throwing aside the mud, and
.        digging…
Climbing up on to the Lotus plants and onto their pods…

(Note from book: bukalili mans sacred epithet, power name)

 

USED: The New Oxford Book of Australian Verse at Abebooks!
chosen by Les A. Murray

Everything Will Remember, Rajzel Zychlinska. #Yiddishpoetry … The ships will be the color/Of my clothing

Everything will remember

Everything will remember
That I was here.
The ships will be the color
Of my clothing.
The birds will use my voice for singing,
The fisherman on the rock
Will ponder my poem,
The river
Will follow my footprints.

.
By Rajzel Zychlinska.

 

Read more about her at the  Jewish Women’s archives: http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/zychlinski-rajzel

Thanks to Wiki: “Rajzel Żychlińsky was a Polish writer of poetry in Yiddish whose poetry covered a span from the pre–World War II depression years in Poland to the terrors and tragedies of the Holocaust. She is especially noted for her poem God Hid His Face.”

From: a Treasury of Yiddish Poetry edited by Irving Howe and Liezer Greenberg.
USED and NEW: http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=13535919967