You created the night, I created the lamp. Iqbal!

Mount-Everest-2
www.pakistantoday.com.pk

You created the night, I created the lamp
You created clay and I made the pottery
You created the deserts, the mountains and jungles
And I produced the rice fields, the gardens and the orchards
It was I who turned rock into mirrors
And poison into cures

Iqbal

“…one blue-colored cloak, I had considered to be the sky”

Iqbal

Iqbal was born in 1877 in what is now Pakistan: the Punjab Province of British India. From a Brahmin family converted to Islam, he studied in Cambridge, became a lawyer, did his phd in Germany and wrote poetry in Persian and Urdu. He was a favourite of the Iranian revolution in 1979 and stood at the birth of the nation of Pakistan.

“Le sporting-club de Monte Carlo (for Lena Horne)” James Baldwin. Daughter of the thunder!!

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REX USA/Sten Rosenlund

Oh, I love these lines! G-d struts a little.

the lady is the apple
of God’s eye:
He’s cool enough about it
but He tends to strut a little
when she passes by

http://www.pugetsound.edu/news-and-events/campus-news/details/1097/

 

“Le sporting-club de Monte Carlo (for Lena Horne)”

The lady is a tramp

a camp
a lamp

The lady is a sight
a might
a light
the lady devastated
an alley or two
reverberated through the valley
which leads to me, and you

the lady is the apple
of God’s eye:
He’s cool enough about it
but He tends to strut a little
when she passes by

the lady is a wonder
daughter of the thunder
smashing cages
legislating rages
with the voice of ages
singing us through.

Bits of time and sound by Arthur Seymour John Tessimond. A poet hidden and then almost lost!

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Beautiful!

[…]

I am the rails on which the moment passes,
The megaphone for many words and voices:
I am the graph diagram,
Composite face.

[…]

I am the man they call the nation’s backbone,
Who am boneless – playable castgut, pliable clay:
The Man they label Little lest one day
I dare to grow.

I am the led, the easily-fed,
The tool, the not-quite-fool,
The would-be-safe-and-sound,
The uncomplaining, bound,
The dust fine-ground,
Stone-for-a-statue waveworn pebble-round

Arthur Seymour John Tessimond

And in the correct order:

The Man In The Bowler Hat

I am the unnoticed, the unnoticable man:
The man who sat on your right in the morning train:
The man who looked through like a windowpane:
The man who was the colour of the carriage, the colour of the mounting
Morning pipe smoke.
I am the man too busy with a living to live,
Too hurried and worried to see and smell and touch:
The man who is patient too long and obeys too much
And wishes too softly and seldom.

I am the man they call the nation’s backbone,
Who am boneless – playable castgut, pliable clay:
The Man they label Little lest one day
I dare to grow.

I am the rails on which the moment passes,
The megaphone for many words and voices:
I am the graph diagram,
Composite face.

I am the led, the easily-fed,
The tool, the not-quite-fool,
The would-be-safe-and-sound,
The uncomplaining, bound,
The dust fine-ground,
Stone-for-a-statue waveworn pebble-round

 

http://vimeo.com/70885550 a radio recording of himself reading a poem.

http://thefilter.blogs.com/thefilter/asj_tessimond/

 

In Canterbury Cathedral

Trees, but straighter than birches, rise to the sky
Of stone. Their branches meet in the sky of stone.
Stone fountains leap and meet: their traceries are
As light as lace. These prayers of stone were prayed
To a God I can’t believe in, but were made
By Man, men almost gods, in whom I can
Believe: were made as strong, to last as long
As time. I stare and pray to Man alone.

 

[…] leave as your final legacy
A box double-locked by the spider
Packed with your unsolved problems

‘The Children Look at the Parents’

June Jordan, “Poem About My Rights” Black History.

Black History Month– Poems about the body. Your body. Your body.

[…]
alone on the streets/alone not being the point/
the point being that I can’t do what I want
to do with my own body because I am the wrong
sex the wrong age the wrong skin and
suppose it was not here in the city but down on the beach/
or far into the woods and I wanted to go
there by myself thinking about God/or thinking
about children or thinking about the world/all of it
disclosed by the stars and the silence:
I could not go and I could not think and I could not
stay there
alone
as I need to be
alone because I can’t do what I want to do with my own
body and
who in the hell set things up
like this
[…]

I am the history of battery assault and limitless
armies against whatever I want to do with my mind
and my body and my soul and
whether it’s about walking out at night
or whether it’s about the love that I feel or
whether it’s about the sanctity of my vagina or
the sanctity of my national boundaries
or the sanctity of my leaders or the sanctity
of each and every desire
that I know from my personal and idiosyncratic
and indisputably single and singular heart
[…]

but let this be unmistakable this poem
is not consent I do not consent
to my mother to my father to the teachers
[…]

I am not wrong: Wrong is not my name
My name is my own my own my own
and I can’t tell you who the hell set things up like this
but I can tell you that from now on my resistance
my simple and daily and nightly self-determination
may very well cost you your life

June Jordan. “Poem about my rights”

June Jordan, “Poem About My Rights” from Directed By Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan (Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2005). Copyright © 2005 by The June M. Jordan Literary Trust.

Black History Month- poetry: “Black Cryptogram” for Sterling A. Brown by Michael S. Harper

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When God
created
the black child
He was
showing off.

“Black Cryptogram” for Sterling A. Brown by Michael S. Harper

Black History Month- poetry: Samuel Allen.

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Satchell Paige was one of the best pitchers in baseball. Black.

“Satch”

Sometimes I feel like I will *never* stop
Just go on forever
Til one fine mornin’
I’m gonna reach up and grab me a handful stars
Swing out my long lean leg
And whip three hot strikes burnin’ down the heavens
And look over at God and say
How about that!

by Samuel W. Allen (1917-)
Black History Month.

Thylias Moss: God and Church and beautiful, laughing speech!!

Woohoo!

‘Contemporary Black American poets’ came in the post.
From New Orleans Public Library- Algiers Point. They got it in 1995.

Here is one funny piece of a poem from Thylias Moss.
((TRIGGER warning-sexual assault/rape.))

Moss had “beautiful, laughing speech” – like Yeats said of Blake’s says Harold Bloom.

“Doubts during Catastrophe.”

“No better time to recall God’s fascination
with his image. He put something of himself
in every creation. When he was tired
he made lazy idiots. When he had hiccups
he made tumbleweeds. When he needed a twin
he made Adam. And whenever he needed to
he watched Adam seduce Eve. And when once Eve refused
God’s eyebrows raised , merged and flew off, a caracara
seeking carrion. And then there was wrath. ‘Vengeance
is mine’ he said. And then there was his seduction
of Mary who had to submit, could not disobey the Lord.”

Harold Bloom comments:

“”Here the black congregation exemplifies the saddest truth that this poetic visionary intuits about her people’s intense resort to faith:

“Our shouting, our jubilation scares the ominous into
crouching behind our ribs where it intercepts what
would best serve us if it reached our hearts.”

That is so bleak an intimation that only masterly language saves it from being unbearable as a truth.””