Warm in my truck by the lighthouse at Watch Hill
on a sunny morning in midwinter, I observe
the ducks bobbing among ice-covered rocks
and think of Bashō and what his position might
have been on the subject of the demand-side
economics of poetry, a term I have just learned,
which argues that the smaller a poet’s number
of readers, the less reason the poet has to write
and why bother if not a single line will stick
in the mind a nanosecond past the poet’s death?
And I also wonder about these ducks and why
their feet don’t get frozen down there among
the chunks of ice, or maybe they only seem not
to get frozen and instead the ducks are very brave
as they seek out sweet things to eat, or sweet
for a duck. Bashō wrote; I feel when I sit with
Kikaku at a party that he is anxious to compose
a verse that will delight the entire company,
while I have no such wish. Bashō of course said
this in Japanese, which I know as much about
as I know about the feel of ducks. As for Kikaku,
he is recalled only tor once being mentioned
by Bashō, despite his faith in the demand-side
economics of poetry. On ducks, Bashō wrote:
Sea darkening—the wild duck’s cry is dimly white.
This morning the ducks have been joined by terns,
cormorants, and gulls. There’s good eating if you
don’t mind diving for it and don’t mind the cold.
The day is so clear I can almost count the trees
on Block Island eight miles away. I doubt Bashō
when writing a poem ever said: This will knock
their socks off. But he did write. Eat vegetable
soup rather than duck stew. Which wasn’t meant
to keep ducks from being eaten, bur expressed
his belief in simplicity— plainness and oddness
being qualities he liked. Across the narrow strip
of land to the lighthouse the wind blows so hard
that a seagull by my truck has to beat its wings
like crazy just to stay in one spot. Many times
my life feels like that, Iots of work just to stay put.
Bashō said that within him was something like
a windswept spirit that when he was young took
to writing poetry merely to amuse itself at first,
but then at last becoming its lifelong occupation.
At times it grew so dejected that it nearly quit,
at other times it grew so swollen with pride that
it rejoiced in vain victories over others, Barthes
in an essay claimed that writers are driven only
by vanity, which is why they must appear in print,
and maybe this fuels the demand-side economics
of poetry, the wish for a kiss-me-kiss-me response.
Like most lighthouses, this one is a white pillar
of stone with a beacon on top, but surely it’s no
longer needed, since ships don’t come this close
and all have radar—even small boats would be
warned away by the buoys. In the fog, its horn
makes a moan like a cow mourning for her calf
and its light slowly rotates like an exploratory eye,
but the whole business could be knocked down
and sold to developers, which makes good sense
if you buy into the demand-side theory of life.
Bashō said that ever since his windswept spirit
began to write poetry it never felt at peace with itself
but was prey to all sorts of doubts. Once it wanted
the security of a job at court and once it wanted
to measure the depths of its ignorance by becoming
a scholar. I know I haven’t read as much as I might,
but it seems the demand-side folks and Barthes
are leaving out a big part of the argument. A poet
has a complicated emotion and produces a poem;
a duck has a complicated emotion and produces
an egg. The demand-side case says they differ
just in the nature of their product, poem versus egg,
and both could fetch the same price at the market.
Off to my left float two brightly colored milliards;
to my right are three brown ducks, clearly females.
They appear to be ignoring one another, but perhaps
I’m wrong, perhaps they shoot quick sexual glances
in each other’s direction and soon they will head
back to the marsh and create an egg. And good
for them, I say, the world could use more ducks.
What other creature so aptly describes a doctor?
Bashō also wrote: Cold night—the wild duck, sick,
falls from the sky and sleeps a awhile. And he said
he didn’t become a courtier or scholar because
his unquenchable love of poetry held him back.
In fact, this. windswept spirit knew no other art
than the art of writing poetry, and consequently,
it clung to it, he said. more or less blindly At times
I repeat those last words to myself: more or less
blindly. Maybe many people would consider this
a bleak picture of the poet’s work, but in me
it awakens a sense of excitement, as when you love
to eat turkey bladders and then one day you meet somebody
else who loves to eat turkey bladders
and you feel you could talk to this person forever
and never grow bored. And I’m glad that Bashō
didn’t say the product or purpose was the poem’s
future life, but instead the product was the writing,
that Bashō was writing the poem for itself alone—
as reckless as that seems—and not for any future
profit. Doesn’t this put Bashō into the category
of nutcase, just as a person with an intense passion
for turkey bladders might be called a nutcase?
Sitting in my truck, locking out past the ducks,
out past Block Island and into the Atlantic, perhaps
in the direction of France, I see the water is a much
darker blue than in summer, as if the cold added
an extra layer of color The white tips of the waves
look more like ice or snow than flecks of froth.
How long could I watch without growing bored?
Maybe until I got hungry or needed to pee. As for
why ducks don’t get cold feet, to me it’s a mystery,
though I’ll wager books arc written on the subject,
just as books get written on the motivation of poets
and why they bother. A little ways from shore, light
reflects off the water as if from the sun’s hand mirror,
and I like to believe that shortly there will emerge
from the iridescence, more or less blindly, a small
boat carrying an aged Japanese poet, at which point
I’ll jump from my truck into the wind’s whirling
ambiguity and shout and wave my hat over my head.
Nothing is rational about this and it’s something
about which I should maybe keep my mouth shut,
but it’s an event the ducks and f hope to see happen,
not for profit, mind you, just for the thing itself.
Saturday, 20 September 2014
t. kilgore splake
wait not yet
charters cathedral choir
singing bach’s “jesu”
young girl pushing
strand of blond hair
away from her cheek
charters cathedral choir
singing bach’s “jesu”
young girl pushing
strand of blond hair
away from her cheek
tachibana akemi | poems of solitary delights
What a delight it is
When, skimming through the pages
Of a book, I discover
A man written of there
Who is just like me.
When, skimming through the pages
Of a book, I discover
A man written of there
Who is just like me.
Floating on a Marsh by Wang Wei
Autumn
the sky huge and clear
the marsh miles from farms and house
overjoyed by the cranes
standing around the sandbar
the mountains above the clouds in the distance
this water
utterly still
in the dusk
the white moon overhead
I let my boat drift free tonight
I can’t go home.
the sky huge and clear
the marsh miles from farms and house
overjoyed by the cranes
standing around the sandbar
the mountains above the clouds in the distance
this water
utterly still
in the dusk
the white moon overhead
I let my boat drift free tonight
I can’t go home.
My Mount Chungnan Cottage by Wang Wei
Since middle age I’ve been
a most enthusiastic Buddhist
now that I’m old I’ve settled
here in the mountain country
sometimes I get so happy
I have to go off by myself
there are marvelous places
I alone know about
I climb
to the source of a stream
and sit
to watch the rising mists
sometimes I come across
an old man of the woods
we talk and laugh
and forget to go home.
a most enthusiastic Buddhist
now that I’m old I’ve settled
here in the mountain country
sometimes I get so happy
I have to go off by myself
there are marvelous places
I alone know about
I climb
to the source of a stream
and sit
to watch the rising mists
sometimes I come across
an old man of the woods
we talk and laugh
and forget to go home.
haiku by yosano akiko
Left on the beach
Full of water,
A worn out boat
Reflects the white sky
Of early autumn.
Full of water,
A worn out boat
Reflects the white sky
Of early autumn.
Three Haiku by Yu Chang
deepening dusk
a canoe comes in
with the fog
fallen leaves
do I have to
go home?
blinding snow
there is no need
to understand everything
a canoe comes in
with the fog
fallen leaves
do I have to
go home?
blinding snow
there is no need
to understand everything
triumph of the sparrow by shinkichi takahashi
The wind blows hard among the pines
toward the beginning
of an endless past.
Listen: you’ve heard everything.
toward the beginning
of an endless past.
Listen: you’ve heard everything.
In the Suburbs by Louis Simpson
There’s no way out.
You were born to waste your life.
You were born to this middleclass life
As others before you
Were born to walk in procession
To the temple, singing.
You were born to waste your life.
You were born to this middleclass life
As others before you
Were born to walk in procession
To the temple, singing.
Shooting Whales by Mark Strand
When the shoals of plankton
swarmed into St. Margaret’s Bay,
turning the beaches pink,
we saw from our place on the hill
the sperm whales feeding,
fouling the nets
in their play,
and breaching clean
so the humps of their backs
rose over the wide sea meadows.
Day after day
we waited inside
for the rotting plankton to disappear.
The smell stilled even the wind,
and the oxen looked stunned,
pulling hay on the slope
of our hill.
But the plankton kept coming in
and the whales would not go.
That’s when the shooting began.
The fishermen got in their boats
and went after the whales,
and my father and uncle
and we children went, too.
The froth of our wake sank fast
in the wind shaken water.
The whales surfaced close by.
Their foreheads were huge,
the doors of their faces were closed.
Before sounding, they lifted
their flukes into the air
and brought them down hard.
They beat the sea into foam,
and the path that they made
shone after them.
Thought I did not see their eyes,
I imagined they were
like the eyes of mourning,
glazed with rheum,
watching us, sweeping along
under the darkening sheen of salt.
When we cut our engine and waited
for the whales to surface again,
the sun was setting,
turning the rock strewn barrens a gaudy salmon.
A cold wind flailed at our skin.
When finally the sun went down
and it seemed like the whales had gone,
my uncle, no longer afraid,
shot aimlessly into the sky.
Three miles out
in the rolling dark
under the moon’s astonished eyes,
our engine would not start
and we headed home in the dinghy.
And my father, hunched over the oars,
brought us in. I watched him,
rapt in his effort, rowing against the tide,
his blond hair glistening with salt.
I saw the slick spillage of moonlight
being blown over his shoulders,
and the sea and spindrift
suddenly silver.
He did not speak the entire way.
At midnight
when I went to bed,
I imagined the whales
moving beneath me,
sliding over the weed-covered hills of the deep;
they knew where I was;
they were luring me
downward and downward
into the murmurous
waters of sleep.
swarmed into St. Margaret’s Bay,
turning the beaches pink,
we saw from our place on the hill
the sperm whales feeding,
fouling the nets
in their play,
and breaching clean
so the humps of their backs
rose over the wide sea meadows.
Day after day
we waited inside
for the rotting plankton to disappear.
The smell stilled even the wind,
and the oxen looked stunned,
pulling hay on the slope
of our hill.
But the plankton kept coming in
and the whales would not go.
That’s when the shooting began.
The fishermen got in their boats
and went after the whales,
and my father and uncle
and we children went, too.
The froth of our wake sank fast
in the wind shaken water.
The whales surfaced close by.
Their foreheads were huge,
the doors of their faces were closed.
Before sounding, they lifted
their flukes into the air
and brought them down hard.
They beat the sea into foam,
and the path that they made
shone after them.
Thought I did not see their eyes,
I imagined they were
like the eyes of mourning,
glazed with rheum,
watching us, sweeping along
under the darkening sheen of salt.
When we cut our engine and waited
for the whales to surface again,
the sun was setting,
turning the rock strewn barrens a gaudy salmon.
A cold wind flailed at our skin.
When finally the sun went down
and it seemed like the whales had gone,
my uncle, no longer afraid,
shot aimlessly into the sky.
Three miles out
in the rolling dark
under the moon’s astonished eyes,
our engine would not start
and we headed home in the dinghy.
And my father, hunched over the oars,
brought us in. I watched him,
rapt in his effort, rowing against the tide,
his blond hair glistening with salt.
I saw the slick spillage of moonlight
being blown over his shoulders,
and the sea and spindrift
suddenly silver.
He did not speak the entire way.
At midnight
when I went to bed,
I imagined the whales
moving beneath me,
sliding over the weed-covered hills of the deep;
they knew where I was;
they were luring me
downward and downward
into the murmurous
waters of sleep.
Elegy 1969 by Mark Strand
You slave away into your old age
and nothing you do adds up to much.
Day after day you go through the same motions,
you shiver in bed, you get hungry, you want a woman.
Heroes standing for lives of sacrifice and obedience
fill the parks through which you walk.
At night in the fog they open their bronze umbrellas
or else withdraw to the empty lobbies of movie houses.
You love the night for its power of annihilating,
but while you sleep, your problems will not let you die.
Waking only proves the existence of The Great Machine
and the hard light falls on your shoulders.
You walk among the dead and talk
about times to come and matters of the spirit.
Literature wasted your best hours of love-making.
Weekends were lost, cleaning your apartment.
You are quick to confess your failure and to postpone
collective joy to the next century. You accept
rain, war, unemployment and the unjust distribution of wealth
because you can’t, all by yourself, blow up Manhattan Island.
and nothing you do adds up to much.
Day after day you go through the same motions,
you shiver in bed, you get hungry, you want a woman.
Heroes standing for lives of sacrifice and obedience
fill the parks through which you walk.
At night in the fog they open their bronze umbrellas
or else withdraw to the empty lobbies of movie houses.
You love the night for its power of annihilating,
but while you sleep, your problems will not let you die.
Waking only proves the existence of The Great Machine
and the hard light falls on your shoulders.
You walk among the dead and talk
about times to come and matters of the spirit.
Literature wasted your best hours of love-making.
Weekends were lost, cleaning your apartment.
You are quick to confess your failure and to postpone
collective joy to the next century. You accept
rain, war, unemployment and the unjust distribution of wealth
because you can’t, all by yourself, blow up Manhattan Island.
The Coming of Light by Mark Strand
Even this late it happens:
the coming of love, the coming of light.
You wake and the candles are lit as if by themselves,
stars gather, dreams pour into your pillows,
sending up warm bouquets of air.
Even this late the bones of the body shine
and tomorrow’s dust flares into breath.
the coming of love, the coming of light.
You wake and the candles are lit as if by themselves,
stars gather, dreams pour into your pillows,
sending up warm bouquets of air.
Even this late the bones of the body shine
and tomorrow’s dust flares into breath.
Our Masterpiece is the Private Life by Mark Strand
I
Is there something down by the water keeping itself from us,
Some shy event, some secret of the light that falls upon the deep,
Some source of sorrow that does not wish to be discovered yet?
Why should we care? Doesn’t desire cast its
rainbows over the coarse porcelain
Of the world’s skin and with its measures fill the
air? Why look for more?
II
And now, while the advocates of awfulness and sorrow
Push their dripping barge up and down the beach, let’s eat
Our brill, and sip this beautiful white Beaune.
True, the light is artificial, and we are not well-dressed.
So what. We like it here. We like the bullocks in the field next door,
We like the sound of wind passing over grass. The way you speak,
In that low voice, our late night disclosures . . . why live
For anything else? Our masterpiece is the private life.
III
Standing on the quay between the Roving Swan and the Star Immaculate,
Breathing the night air as the moment of pleasure taken
In pleasure vanishing seems to grow, its self-soiling
Beauty, which can only be what it was, sustaining itself
A little longer in its going, I think of our own smooth passage
Through the graded partitions, the crises that bleed
Into the ordinary, leaving us a little more tired each time,
A little more distant from the experiences, which, in the old days,
Held us captive for hours. The drive along the winding road
Back to the house, the sea pounding against the cliffs,
The glass of whiskey on the table, the open book, the questions,
All the day’s rewards waiting at the doors of sleep . . .
Is there something down by the water keeping itself from us,
Some shy event, some secret of the light that falls upon the deep,
Some source of sorrow that does not wish to be discovered yet?
Why should we care? Doesn’t desire cast its
rainbows over the coarse porcelain
Of the world’s skin and with its measures fill the
air? Why look for more?
II
And now, while the advocates of awfulness and sorrow
Push their dripping barge up and down the beach, let’s eat
Our brill, and sip this beautiful white Beaune.
True, the light is artificial, and we are not well-dressed.
So what. We like it here. We like the bullocks in the field next door,
We like the sound of wind passing over grass. The way you speak,
In that low voice, our late night disclosures . . . why live
For anything else? Our masterpiece is the private life.
III
Standing on the quay between the Roving Swan and the Star Immaculate,
Breathing the night air as the moment of pleasure taken
In pleasure vanishing seems to grow, its self-soiling
Beauty, which can only be what it was, sustaining itself
A little longer in its going, I think of our own smooth passage
Through the graded partitions, the crises that bleed
Into the ordinary, leaving us a little more tired each time,
A little more distant from the experiences, which, in the old days,
Held us captive for hours. The drive along the winding road
Back to the house, the sea pounding against the cliffs,
The glass of whiskey on the table, the open book, the questions,
All the day’s rewards waiting at the doors of sleep . . .
Thursday, 18 September 2014
A Private Singularity by John Koethe
I used to like being young, and I still do,
Because I think I still am. There are physical
Objections to that thought, and yet what
Fascinates me now is how obsessed I was at thirty-five
With feeling older than I was: it seemed so smart
And worldly, so fastidiously knowing to dwell so much
On time — on what it gives, what it destroys, on how it feels.
And now it’s here and doesn’t feel like anything at all:
A little warm perhaps, a little cool, but mostly waiting on my
Life to fill it up, and meanwhile living in the light and listening
To the music floating through my living room each night.
It’s something you can only recognize in retrospect, long after
Everything that used to fill those years has disappeared
And they’ve become regrets and images, leaving you alone
In a perpetual present, in a nondescript small room where it began.
You find it in yourself: the ways that led inexorably from
Home to here are simply stories now, leading nowhere anymore;
The wilderness they led through is the space behind a door
Through which a sentence flows, following a map in the heart.
Along the way the self that you were born with turns into
The self that you created, but they come together at the end,
United in the memory where time began: the tinkling of a bell
On a garden gate in Combray, or the clang of a driven nail
In a Los Angeles backyard, or a pure, angelic clang in Nova Scotia —
Whatever age restores. It isn’t the generalizations that I loved
At thirty-five that move me now, but particular moments
When my life comes into focus, and the feeling of the years
Between them comes alive. Time stops, and then resumes its story,
Like a train to Balbec or a steamer to Brazil. We moved to San Diego,
Then I headed east, then settled in the middle of the country
Where I’ve waited now for almost forty years, going through the
Motions of the moments as they pass from now to nothing,
Reading by their light. I don’t know why I’m reading them again —
Elizabeth Bishop, Proust. The stories you remember feel like mirrors,
And rereading them like leafing through your life at a certain age,
As though the years were pages. I keep living in the light
Under the door, waiting on those vague sensations floating in
And out of consciousness like odors, like the smell of sperm and lilacs.
In the afternoon I bicycle to a park that overlooks Lake Michigan,
Linger on a bench and read Contre Sainte-Beuve and Time Reborn,
A physics book that argues time is real. And that’s my life —
It isn’t much, and yet it hangs together: its obsessions dovetail
With each other, as the private world of my experience takes its place
Within a natural order that absorbs it, but for a while lets it live.
It feels like such a miracle, this life: it promises everything,
And even keeps its promise when you’ve grown too old to care.
It seems unremarkable at first, and then as time goes by it
Starts to seem unreal, a figment of the years inside a universe
That flows around them and dissolves them in the end,
But meanwhile lets you linger in a universe of one —
A village on a summer afternoon, a garden after dark,
A small backyard beneath a boring California sky.
I said I still felt young, and so I am, yet what that means
Eludes me. Maybe it’s the feeling of the presence
Of the past, or of its disappearance, or both of them at once —
A long estrangement and a private singularity, intact
Within a tinkling bell, an iron nail, a pure, angelic clang —
The echo of a clear, metallic sound from childhood,
Where time began: “Oh, beautiful sound, strike again!”
Because I think I still am. There are physical
Objections to that thought, and yet what
Fascinates me now is how obsessed I was at thirty-five
With feeling older than I was: it seemed so smart
And worldly, so fastidiously knowing to dwell so much
On time — on what it gives, what it destroys, on how it feels.
And now it’s here and doesn’t feel like anything at all:
A little warm perhaps, a little cool, but mostly waiting on my
Life to fill it up, and meanwhile living in the light and listening
To the music floating through my living room each night.
It’s something you can only recognize in retrospect, long after
Everything that used to fill those years has disappeared
And they’ve become regrets and images, leaving you alone
In a perpetual present, in a nondescript small room where it began.
You find it in yourself: the ways that led inexorably from
Home to here are simply stories now, leading nowhere anymore;
The wilderness they led through is the space behind a door
Through which a sentence flows, following a map in the heart.
Along the way the self that you were born with turns into
The self that you created, but they come together at the end,
United in the memory where time began: the tinkling of a bell
On a garden gate in Combray, or the clang of a driven nail
In a Los Angeles backyard, or a pure, angelic clang in Nova Scotia —
Whatever age restores. It isn’t the generalizations that I loved
At thirty-five that move me now, but particular moments
When my life comes into focus, and the feeling of the years
Between them comes alive. Time stops, and then resumes its story,
Like a train to Balbec or a steamer to Brazil. We moved to San Diego,
Then I headed east, then settled in the middle of the country
Where I’ve waited now for almost forty years, going through the
Motions of the moments as they pass from now to nothing,
Reading by their light. I don’t know why I’m reading them again —
Elizabeth Bishop, Proust. The stories you remember feel like mirrors,
And rereading them like leafing through your life at a certain age,
As though the years were pages. I keep living in the light
Under the door, waiting on those vague sensations floating in
And out of consciousness like odors, like the smell of sperm and lilacs.
In the afternoon I bicycle to a park that overlooks Lake Michigan,
Linger on a bench and read Contre Sainte-Beuve and Time Reborn,
A physics book that argues time is real. And that’s my life —
It isn’t much, and yet it hangs together: its obsessions dovetail
With each other, as the private world of my experience takes its place
Within a natural order that absorbs it, but for a while lets it live.
It feels like such a miracle, this life: it promises everything,
And even keeps its promise when you’ve grown too old to care.
It seems unremarkable at first, and then as time goes by it
Starts to seem unreal, a figment of the years inside a universe
That flows around them and dissolves them in the end,
But meanwhile lets you linger in a universe of one —
A village on a summer afternoon, a garden after dark,
A small backyard beneath a boring California sky.
I said I still felt young, and so I am, yet what that means
Eludes me. Maybe it’s the feeling of the presence
Of the past, or of its disappearance, or both of them at once —
A long estrangement and a private singularity, intact
Within a tinkling bell, an iron nail, a pure, angelic clang —
The echo of a clear, metallic sound from childhood,
Where time began: “Oh, beautiful sound, strike again!”
Try to Praise the Mutilated World by Adam Zagajewski
Try to praise the mutilated world.
Remember June's long days,
and wild strawberries, drops of rosé wine.
The nettles that methodically overgrow
the abandoned homesteads of exiles.
You must praise the mutilated world.
You watched the stylish yachts and ships;
one of them had a long trip ahead of it,
while salty oblivion awaited others.
You've seen the refugees going nowhere,
you've heard the executioners sing joyfully.
You should praise the mutilated world.
Remember the moments when we were together
in a white room and the curtain fluttered.
Return in thought to the concert where music flared.
You gathered acorns in the park in autumn
and leaves eddied over the earth's scars.
Praise the mutilated world
and the gray feather a thrush lost,
and the gentle light that strays and vanishes
and returns.
Remember June's long days,
and wild strawberries, drops of rosé wine.
The nettles that methodically overgrow
the abandoned homesteads of exiles.
You must praise the mutilated world.
You watched the stylish yachts and ships;
one of them had a long trip ahead of it,
while salty oblivion awaited others.
You've seen the refugees going nowhere,
you've heard the executioners sing joyfully.
You should praise the mutilated world.
Remember the moments when we were together
in a white room and the curtain fluttered.
Return in thought to the concert where music flared.
You gathered acorns in the park in autumn
and leaves eddied over the earth's scars.
Praise the mutilated world
and the gray feather a thrush lost,
and the gentle light that strays and vanishes
and returns.
Tuesday, 16 September 2014
sonoran jazz
A corrosive humor, a very Latin American sort of joke, a love of doom and a sense of incredible beauty in the apocalyptic landscape. Fighting a lost war by not fighting at all, fighting with faith or a burst of savage, directionless defiance at an enemy beyond comprehension, a monolith that rises above the clouds of its own creation and sends out mechanical spiders, invisible agents, invincible tides beyond even its own control to further ends as petty and animal any we can imagine. The sound of warring factions of howler monkeys: humanity.
Friday, 12 September 2014
A Desolation by Allen Ginsberg
Now mind is clear
as a cloudless sky.
Time then to make a
home in wilderness.
as a cloudless sky.
Time then to make a
home in wilderness.
What have I done but
wander with my eyes
in the trees? So I
will build: wife,
family, and seek
for neighbors.
wander with my eyes
in the trees? So I
will build: wife,
family, and seek
for neighbors.
Or I
perish of lonesomeness
or want of food or
lightning or the bear
(must tame the hart
and wear the bear) .
perish of lonesomeness
or want of food or
lightning or the bear
(must tame the hart
and wear the bear) .
And maybe make an image
of my wandering, a little
image—shrine by the
roadside to signify
to traveler that I live
here in the wilderness
awake and at home
of my wandering, a little
image—shrine by the
roadside to signify
to traveler that I live
here in the wilderness
awake and at home
...
s the twentieth century fades out
the nineteenth begins
.......................................again
it is as if nothing happened
though those who lived it thought
that everything was happening
enough to name a world for & a time
to hold it in your hand
unlimited.......the last delusion
like the perfect mask of death
the nineteenth begins
.......................................again
it is as if nothing happened
though those who lived it thought
that everything was happening
enough to name a world for & a time
to hold it in your hand
unlimited.......the last delusion
like the perfect mask of death
To Make A Dadist Poem by Tristan Tzara
Take a newspaper.
Take some scissors.
Choose from this paper an article the length you want to make your poem.
Cut out the article.
Next carefully cut out each of the words that make up this article and put them all in a bag.
Shake gently.
Next take out each cutting one after the other.
Copy conscientiously in the order in which they left the bag.
The poem will resemble you.
And there you are--an infinitely original author of charming sensibility, even though unappreciated by the vulgar herd.
Take some scissors.
Choose from this paper an article the length you want to make your poem.
Cut out the article.
Next carefully cut out each of the words that make up this article and put them all in a bag.
Shake gently.
Next take out each cutting one after the other.
Copy conscientiously in the order in which they left the bag.
The poem will resemble you.
And there you are--an infinitely original author of charming sensibility, even though unappreciated by the vulgar herd.
Proclamation Without Pretension by Tristan Tzara
Art is going to sleep for a new world to be born
"ART"-parrot word-replaced by DADA,
PLESIOSAURUS, or handkerchief
The talent THAT CAN BE LEARNED makes the
poet a druggist TODAY the criticism
of balances no longer challenges with resemblances
Hypertrophic painters hyperaes-
theticized and hypnotized by the hyacinths
of the hypocritical-looking muezzins
CONSOLIDATE THE HARVEST OF EX-
ACT CALCULATIONS
Hypodrome of immortal guarantees: there is
no such thing as importance there is no transparence
or appearance
MUSICIANS SMASH YOUR INSTRUMENTS
BLIND MEN take the stage
THE SYRINGE is only for my understanding. I write because it is
natural exactly the way I piss the way I'm sick
ART NEEDS AN OPERATION
Art is a PRETENSION warmed by the
TIMIDITY of the urinary basin, the hysteria born
in THE STUDIO
We are in search of
the force that is direct pure sober
UNIQUE we are in search of NOTHING
we affirm the VITALITY of every IN-
STANT
the anti-philosophy of spontaneous acrobatics
At this moment I hate the man who whispers
before the intermission-eau de cologne-
sour theatre. THE JOYOUS WIND
If each man says the opposite it is because he is
right
Get ready for the action of the geyser of our blood
-submarine formation of transchromatic aero-
planes, cellular metals numbered in
the flight of images
above the rules of the
and its control
BEAUTIFUL
It is not for the sawed-off imps
who still worship their navel
"ART"-parrot word-replaced by DADA,
PLESIOSAURUS, or handkerchief
The talent THAT CAN BE LEARNED makes the
poet a druggist TODAY the criticism
of balances no longer challenges with resemblances
Hypertrophic painters hyperaes-
theticized and hypnotized by the hyacinths
of the hypocritical-looking muezzins
CONSOLIDATE THE HARVEST OF EX-
ACT CALCULATIONS
Hypodrome of immortal guarantees: there is
no such thing as importance there is no transparence
or appearance
MUSICIANS SMASH YOUR INSTRUMENTS
BLIND MEN take the stage
THE SYRINGE is only for my understanding. I write because it is
natural exactly the way I piss the way I'm sick
ART NEEDS AN OPERATION
Art is a PRETENSION warmed by the
TIMIDITY of the urinary basin, the hysteria born
in THE STUDIO
We are in search of
the force that is direct pure sober
UNIQUE we are in search of NOTHING
we affirm the VITALITY of every IN-
STANT
the anti-philosophy of spontaneous acrobatics
At this moment I hate the man who whispers
before the intermission-eau de cologne-
sour theatre. THE JOYOUS WIND
If each man says the opposite it is because he is
right
Get ready for the action of the geyser of our blood
-submarine formation of transchromatic aero-
planes, cellular metals numbered in
the flight of images
above the rules of the
and its control
BEAUTIFUL
It is not for the sawed-off imps
who still worship their navel
Tuesday, 9 September 2014
Sometimes in the Middle Autumn Days by George Orwell
Sometimes in the middle autumn days,
The windless days when the swallows have flown,
And the sere elms brood in the mist,
Each tree a being, rapt, alone,
I know, not as in barren thought,
But wordlessly, as the bones know,
What quenching of my brain, what numbness,
Wait in the dark grave where I go.
And I see the people thronging the street,
The death-marked people, they and I
Goalless, rootless, like leaves drifting,
Blind to the earth and to the sky;
Nothing believing, nothing loving,
Not in joy nor in pain, not heeding the stream
Of precious life that flows within us,
But fighting, toiling as in a dream.
So shall we in the rout of life
Some thought, some faith, some meaning save,
And speak it once before we go
In silence to the silent grave …
The windless days when the swallows have flown,
And the sere elms brood in the mist,
Each tree a being, rapt, alone,
I know, not as in barren thought,
But wordlessly, as the bones know,
What quenching of my brain, what numbness,
Wait in the dark grave where I go.
And I see the people thronging the street,
The death-marked people, they and I
Goalless, rootless, like leaves drifting,
Blind to the earth and to the sky;
Nothing believing, nothing loving,
Not in joy nor in pain, not heeding the stream
Of precious life that flows within us,
But fighting, toiling as in a dream.
So shall we in the rout of life
Some thought, some faith, some meaning save,
And speak it once before we go
In silence to the silent grave …
Saturday, 6 September 2014
mulholland drive
By including past images from the 50’s in the first two-hour segment of the film, Lynch shows us that the bourgeois world people want to believe in is a fantasy created to escape darker realities of American life. He also borrows a surrealist aesthetic from the past to challenge film viewers’ belief in the “reality” of the worlds created and perpetuated by the Hollywood film industry. Instead, Lynch wants people to go ahead and enjoy what are very likely necessary fantasies – but not to mistake them for the “Real,” since doing so will lead to the failure of fantasy, just as Diane’s total investment in her fantasy left her with nowhere else to turn but back to the traumatic Real from which she originally tried to flee. We need to create and enjoy our fantasies, Lynch tells us, but we should not believe they can fulfill our unresolved conflicts and desires from actual life, since doing so will only lead to tragedy.
http://sensesofcinema.com/2014/feature-articles/the-perils-of-fantasy-memory-and-desire-in-david-lynchs-mulholland-drive/
http://sensesofcinema.com/2014/feature-articles/the-perils-of-fantasy-memory-and-desire-in-david-lynchs-mulholland-drive/
Saturday, 23 August 2014
the Minnesota Decleration: Truth and fact in documentary cinema "LESSONS OF DARKNESS".
1. By dint of declaration the so-called Cinema Verité is devoid of verité. It reaches a merely superficial truth, the truth of accountants.
2. One well-known representative of Cinema Verité declared publicly that truth can be easily found by taking a camera and trying to be honest. He resembles the night watchman at the Supreme Court who resents the amount of written law and legal procedures. "For me," he says, "there should be only one single law: the bad guys should go to jail." Unfortunately, he is part right, for most of the many, much of the time.
3. Cinema Verité confounds fact and truth, and thus plows only stones. And yet, facts sometimes have a strange and bizarre power that makes their inherent truth seem unbelievable.
4. Fact creates norms, and truth illumination.
5. There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.
6. Filmmakers of Cinema Verité resemble tourists who take pictures amid ancient ruins of facts.
7. Tourism is sin, and travel on foot virtue.
8. Each year at springtime scores of people on snowmobiles crash through the melting ice on the lakes of Minnesota and drown. Pressure is mounting on the new governor to pass a protective law. He, the former wrestler and bodyguard, has the only sage answer to this: "You can´t legislate stupidity."
9. The gauntlet is hereby thrown down.
10. The moon is dull. Mother Nature doesn´t call, doesn´t speak to you, although a glacier eventually farts. And don´t you listen to the Song of Life.
11. We ought to be grateful that the Universe out there knows no smile.
12. Life in the oceans must be sheer hell. A vast, merciless hell of permanent and immediate danger. So much of a hell that during evolution some species - including man - crawled, fled onto some small continents of solid land, where the Lessons of Darkness continue.
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota April 30, 1999 Werner Herzog
2. One well-known representative of Cinema Verité declared publicly that truth can be easily found by taking a camera and trying to be honest. He resembles the night watchman at the Supreme Court who resents the amount of written law and legal procedures. "For me," he says, "there should be only one single law: the bad guys should go to jail." Unfortunately, he is part right, for most of the many, much of the time.
3. Cinema Verité confounds fact and truth, and thus plows only stones. And yet, facts sometimes have a strange and bizarre power that makes their inherent truth seem unbelievable.
4. Fact creates norms, and truth illumination.
5. There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.
6. Filmmakers of Cinema Verité resemble tourists who take pictures amid ancient ruins of facts.
7. Tourism is sin, and travel on foot virtue.
8. Each year at springtime scores of people on snowmobiles crash through the melting ice on the lakes of Minnesota and drown. Pressure is mounting on the new governor to pass a protective law. He, the former wrestler and bodyguard, has the only sage answer to this: "You can´t legislate stupidity."
9. The gauntlet is hereby thrown down.
10. The moon is dull. Mother Nature doesn´t call, doesn´t speak to you, although a glacier eventually farts. And don´t you listen to the Song of Life.
11. We ought to be grateful that the Universe out there knows no smile.
12. Life in the oceans must be sheer hell. A vast, merciless hell of permanent and immediate danger. So much of a hell that during evolution some species - including man - crawled, fled onto some small continents of solid land, where the Lessons of Darkness continue.
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota April 30, 1999 Werner Herzog
Tuesday, 19 August 2014
porta alchemica
There are six sigils on the jambs, each with its phrase.
Saturn/Lead: “When in your house black crows give birth to white doves, then will you be called wise.”
Jupiter/Tin: “The diameter of the sphere, the tau in the circle, and the cross of the globe bring no joy to the blind.”
Mars/Iron: “He who can burn with water and wash with fire makes a heaven of earth and a precious earth of heaven.”
Venus/Bronze: “If you make the earth fly upside down, with its wings you may convert torrential waters to stone.”
Mercury: “When azoth and fire whiten Latona, Diana comes unclothed.”
Antimony: “Our dead son lives, returns from the fire a king, and enjoys occult conjugation.”
On the base, Vitriol: “It is an occult work of true wisdom to open the earth, so that it may generate salvation for the people.”
Saturn/Lead: “When in your house black crows give birth to white doves, then will you be called wise.”
Jupiter/Tin: “The diameter of the sphere, the tau in the circle, and the cross of the globe bring no joy to the blind.”
Mars/Iron: “He who can burn with water and wash with fire makes a heaven of earth and a precious earth of heaven.”
Venus/Bronze: “If you make the earth fly upside down, with its wings you may convert torrential waters to stone.”
Mercury: “When azoth and fire whiten Latona, Diana comes unclothed.”
Antimony: “Our dead son lives, returns from the fire a king, and enjoys occult conjugation.”
On the base, Vitriol: “It is an occult work of true wisdom to open the earth, so that it may generate salvation for the people.”
The overriding arc of The Sopranos as a series (and I swear to you newbies that this is not a major spoiler) is the idea of exits on a long highway. Most of the time, you're riding along the highway and not really paying attention to the scenery, but every so often, life presents you with a series of options and forces you to make a choice. Do you stay on the highway as you have been and keep heading along? Or do you exit and take a new highway or unmarked road, trying to change your route? You end up in the same place anyway, since we all die, but there are multiple routes to take there, and sometimes, the one you're on isn't the best. Every so often, The Sopranos places an exit sign in front of its characters, letting them know that this is an optimal time to change things up. And each time, they make the choice to take that exit or ignore it and blow on by.
http://www.avclub.com/tvclub/the-sopranos-from-where-to-eternitybust-out-44181
http://www.avclub.com/tvclub/the-sopranos-from-where-to-eternitybust-out-44181
Friday, 15 August 2014
Think of Others by Mahmoud Darwish
As you prepare your breakfast, think of others
(do not forget the pigeon’s food).
As you wage your wars, think of others
(do not forget those who seek peace).
As you pay your water bill, think of others
(those who are nursed by clouds).
As you return home, to your home, think of others
(do not forget the people of the camps).
As you sleep and count the stars, think of others
(those who have nowhere to sleep).
As you express yourself in metaphor, think of others
(those who have lost the right to speak).
As you think of others far away, think of yourself
(say: If only I were a candle in the dark).
(do not forget the pigeon’s food).
As you wage your wars, think of others
(do not forget those who seek peace).
As you pay your water bill, think of others
(those who are nursed by clouds).
As you return home, to your home, think of others
(do not forget the people of the camps).
As you sleep and count the stars, think of others
(those who have nowhere to sleep).
As you express yourself in metaphor, think of others
(those who have lost the right to speak).
As you think of others far away, think of yourself
(say: If only I were a candle in the dark).
An Old Man and a Young Man in Gaza By Heathcote Williams
A bearded old man holds a placard:
"You take my water, burn my olive trees,
Destroy my house, take my job, steal my land,
Imprison my father, kill my mother,
Bombard my country, starve us all,
Humiliate us all, but I am to blame:
I shot a rocket back."
From the Zionist Book of Psalms
A selection of ungodly chants
Are used to justify the destruction
Of a country and its inhabitants:
"We must blow Gaza back to the Middle Ages
Destroying all the infrastructure including roads and water"
– Eli Yishai, former Deputy Prime Minister.
Amen
"There should be no electricity in Gaza,
No gasoline or moving vehicles, nothing…
We need to flatten entire neighborhoods…
Flatten all of Gaza"
– Gilad Sharon, Ariel Sharon's son in the Jerusalem Post.
Amen
"There are no innocents in Gaza. Mow them down …
Kill the Gazans without thought or mercy."
– Michael Ben-Ari, an ex-member of the Knesset.
Amen
Gaza should be "bombed so hard the population
Has to flee into Egypt"
– Israel Katz, a Minister of Transportation.
Amen
Gaza should be "wiped clean with bombs",
– Avi Dichter, a Minister of Home Front Defense.
Amen
Israeli soldiers must "learn from the Syrians
How to slaughter the enemy",
– Israeli Rabbi Yaakov Yosef.
Amen
Here is Ze'ev Jabotinsky, admirer of Mussolini
And the godfather of Zionist terrorism,
Justifying the flattening of Arab villages in 1948
And turning their inhabitants into refugees in vast numbers
"The world has become accustomed to the idea
Of mass migrations and has become fond of them."
Jabotinsky adds, "Hitler, as odious as he is to us
Has given this idea a good name in the world."
Amen
It is ironic that Jabotinsky used Hitler
As precedent for the transfer of the inhabitants
Since forcible expulsion
Was among the charges against Adolf Eichmann –
An architect of the Nazi Holocaust
Captured in Argentina, and tried and hanged in Israel.
Undeterred, the former chief rabbi,
Mordechai Elyahu, has urged Israel,
Its army and its government
To "employ the Nazi choice"
Against the Palestinians.
To carry out a series of carpet bombings
Of Palestinian population centres in Gaza;
He urges the "indiscriminate killing of civilians".
On religious grounds.
Amen
The Chabad Lubavitch Rabbi Schneerson,
A self proclaimed Messiah
Whose followers await his return from the dead,
(As if the Rabbi hadn't preached
Enough when alive by his making the claim
That his religion heralded a new Master Race) –
Has a devoted and powerful acolyte, Rabbi Manis Friedman,
Who declares that the "only way to fight a moral war"
Is to "destroy the Arabs' holy sites" and "to kill them."
To "kill men, women and children", and to eliminate anyone
Who stands in the way of a Greater Israel.
Friedman embraces Israel's ruthless colonizing power
With an Old Testament ferocity –
With what Christopher Hitchens has called,
"The root of religious evil" –
Whereby the Torah can be misused
To mow down men in a mosque
With an automatic rifle,
And such vengeful triumphs
Given a country's blessing:
Streets in Israeli cities
Are routinely named after armed cuckoos –
Murderous Israeli heroes
Who've evicted indigenous birds
From the Palestinian nest,
And then killed them.
The Head of Israeli's National Defense College,
Professor Arnon Sofer,
Outlines his country's Defense strategy:
"If we want to remain alive, we will have to kill and kill and kill.
All day, every day."
Amen
Colonel Yoav Gal, an Israeli Air Force pilot,
Tells Israel's Army Radio
"I believe that it [Operation Cast Lead]
Should have been even stronger! Dresden! Dresden!
The extermination of a city!
Not even a stone will be thrown at us. Because we're Jews.
I want the Arabs of Gaza to flee to Egypt.
This is what I want. I want to destroy the city."
Amen
Ethnic cleansing is Israel's origin
Not peace:
Netanyahu tells students at Bar Ilan University,
"Israel should have exploited the repression
Of the demonstrations in China,
When world attention focused on that country,
To carry out mass expulsions
Among the Arabs of the territories."
"The Palestinians are like crocodiles,
The more you give them meat, they want more"
Says Ehud Barak, when Prime Minister of Israel.
Despondently, the philosopher Martin Buber
Once told a New York audience,
"When we followers of the prophetic Judaism
Returned to Palestine...the majority of Jewish people
Preferred to learn from Hitler rather than from us."
Enflamed when Palestinians fight back
With increasing desperation
And despite overwhelming odds
To try to regain their ancestral land,
Israelis chant "Death to the Arabs"
"A Jew is a brother, an Arab is a bastard".
In front of their Arab neighbours,
A song is sung by settlers at Purim
Praising Baruch Goldstein's massacre
Of 29 Palestinians at prayer during Ramadan:
"Dr. Goldstein, there is none other like you in the world.
Dr. Goldstein, we all love you… he aimed at terrorists' heads,
Squeezed the trigger hard, and shot bullets,
And shot, and shot."
At this settler hero's funeral, Rabbi Yaacov Perrin
Famously claimed that even one million Arabs
Are "not worth a Jewish fingernail".
Goldstein's mass murder created suicide bombers –
Some two hundred amongst ten million Palestinians –
Which led to Israel's land-grabbing apartheid wall.
The Israeli lawmaker, Ayelet Shaked, calls
For the genocide of Palestinians on Facebook
And she advocates "the slaughter of Palestinian mothers
Who give birth to 'little snakes,'"
"The entire Palestinian people is the enemy."
She urges their complete destruction,
"Including its elderly and its women."
The new media are used to demonize the innocent
And to host persistent irrationalities:
A Jerusalem city councillor in charge of municipal security, Aryeh King, publicly advocates the murder
And the mutilation of non-Jews:
"I am calling out to all the Pinchases that are here …
Every one of us has a mission …
The Rebbe, who is here with us, expects us to commit acts of Pinchas."
Pinchas (Phineas in English) in the Torah was so incensed
By interracial (Jewish-Midianite) sex
That he took a sword and plunged it through both bodies
Of a couple in the middle of their lovemaking.
Then with a medieval fervor, Rabbi Noam Perel
Advocates scalping Arabs
By removing their genitalia –
A blood sacrifice to a mad mind-set
Of mystical thuggery.
Two Israeli girls hold up a banner
"Hating Arabs is not racism, it's values!"
Placing the Hebrew word for "Arabs", ARAVIM,
Into Twitter reveals young Israelis desiring
That Arabs die or be tortured to death.
The US House of Representatives
Votes unanimously to reaffirm its full support for Israel.
US jets duly declare war on Arab children
Whose futures they disintegrate.
In the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis,
Eight members of the Al Haj family
Are killed, including five children.
Five children killed in Gaza
Four Arab children, fishermens' children
First cousins from the Bakr family, aged nine to eleven,
Playing football on the Gaza beach in July, 2014,
Are shot dead by an Israeli gunboat.
Dead boy in the sand
A 12-year-old boy loses 18 members of his family in an air raid
From US planes including his father, a schoolteacher,
A photograph of Abdul Rahman Al-Batsh
Shows his shoulders slumped against a car.
It's the moment that he's discovered
That his father is amongst the dead.
Grieving boy
Abdul Rahman Al-Batsh, aged 12, loses 18 members of his own family
Later Abdul Rahman would say,
"They think we are worth nothing. They are killers,
They have no humanity,
And one day I will avenge my father."
Israel receives more aid from the US
Than the whole of the continent of Africa
Whilst the US population remains docile.
The Israeli Foreign Minister, Avigdor Lieberman,
Says that Israel must "go all the way" in Gaza.
Comfortably seated on camp chairs and sofas
Some fifty Israelis gather to eat popcorn
And watch from a Sderot hilltop
As bombs rain down from US-supplied F-16s.
They clap and applaud each deadly blast
From 1,000-pound iron fragmentation bombs.
Israelis cheer Gaza bombardment
Israelis gathered on a hilltop outside the town of Sderot to watch the bombardment of Gaza.
"We are here to see Israel destroy Hamas," Eli Chone,
A 22-year-old American tells Allan Sørensen,
Of Kristeligt Dagblad, pointing to a dot of light in the sky.
"It is a fighter who is about to dive. This means that it is about to shoot."
The conquerors' fans draw up their chairs;
Swigging on beers as they tend their barbecue
And watch Gaza burn from their vantage-point
In Sderot (once the Palestinian village of Najd).
One says, "this is our entertainment."
Someone points out that Hamas
(Rather than it having been elected)
Is "a death-cult" and Palestinians "enjoy martyrdom"
So "we're doing the Arabs a favour."
A lurid cocktail of triumphalist hatred,
Mixed with smoke from burning flesh,
Blinds them to Palestine's righteous yearning
For self-determination,
Their right in international law;
Their right to be unencumbered by occupation;
To be free from being Israel's penal colony;
Free from being stateless in a brutalized Bantustan –
A colonized people who are jeered at and decried
For their minimal attempts to fight back.
Later that night a bomb would land on a Gaza care home
Filled with elderly patients who cannot move
And with children who are already disabled;
Both are bombed in their wheelchairs or in their beds.
The Rabbi Noam Perel, head of Bnei Akiva
The world's largest religious-Zionist youth organization,
Urges on his Facebook page that the IDF,
The Israeli Defense Force be transformed
Into an army of avengers,
"Which will not stop at 300 Philistine foreskins"
Palestinian boy kidnapped and murdered
A young man in Shuafat, Jerusalem,
Muhammad Abu-Khdeir,
A 16-year old boy with a knowing, elfin smile
Is pulled into a car
And kidnapped in East Jerusalem
While waiting to go into the mosque.
He is tied and beaten;
He has gasoline poured into his mouth
And he is burned alive.
His body is found in the Jerusalem Forest;
Battered in the head
And with soot deposits in the lungs
Suggesting he's still breathing
When set on fire.
Ninety per cent of his body is burned.
Another victim of Israel's slow motion genocide –
A holocaust which, this time,
Is being financed and uncritically supported
By 'the good guys',
By the internationally 'great and the good',
By the craven chorus of the compliant
Who ritually pipe up to defend
Israel's right to defend itself –
To defend the indefensible,
And to supply the money
The weapons, and the excuses
To enable it to do so.
On Friday July 2014
The Israeli Defence Force
Invades Gaza by land.
An Israeli soldier posts a selfie
Of himself having black camouflage paint
Applied to his face.
He tweets, "From the Field: Our soldiers preparing to enter Gaza.
The whole nation stands behind us"
Another tweets: "We have hit Hamas hard,
And we will continue to hit Hamas hard."
Tzipi Livni, Israel's Justice Minister,
Says she backs the invasion "wholeheartedly".
And expresses "love and confidence in our soldiers strength".
Israel's soldiers' strength is misused
To produce genocide as well as a scorched policy
Whereby 800,000 olive trees in Occupied Palestine
Are destroyed to drive Palestinian farmers from their land.
King Herod revisits his massacre of the Innocents,
But this time round he has the mainstream media
On his side: his spin doctors have them swallowing
His party line that toddlers are terrorists if they're Arab,
And Herod has journalists fired who don't please him.
"Expel the Palestinians, and populate Gaza with Jews",
Urges the Knesset's deputy speaker, Moshe Feiglin,
"Israel must attack Gaza even more mercilessly"
To expel the population "with maximum force".
The deputy speaker of Israel's parliament, the Knesset,
Promotes war crimes as a state sanctioned tactic:
After "softening" the targets with firepower
He recommends the IDF "conquer the entire Gaza."
He is emboldened by the US's blank cheques,
And in their support of Israel's heroism
In attacking a defenceless population,
Few see fit to mention that Israel's
First victim in its ground invasion of Gaza
Is a five-month-old baby killed
By an Israeli tank in southern Rafah
On July 17, 2014 – almost as if King Herod
Has returned to rule his zombie state.
The "most moral army in the world"
Is reportedly targeting women and children,
And even animals.
A doctor speaking to Al Jazeera says that the Israeli army
"Is shooting at anything moving in Shujaiyah"
And consequently the streets of East Gaza are strewn
With dead bodies and severed limbs.
A Norwegian doctor in Shifa hospital, Mads Gilbert,
Is overwhelmed by the ground invasion:
By the carloads of those "maimed, torn apart, and bleeding; Shivering, and dying - all sorts of injured Palestinians,
All ages, all civilians, all innocent."
"The heroes in the ambulances," he continues,
"And in all of Gaza's hospitals
Are working 12-24 hour shifts, grey from fatigue
And inhuman workloads – they care, they triage,
And they try to understand the incomprehensible chaos
Of bodies, sizes, limbs, walking, not walking, breathing,
Not breathing, bleeding, not bleeding humans. HUMANS!"
With these words Dr Gilbert addresses himself
to the President of the United States.
Predictably there's no response.
Palestinian baby wounded
Israel's vision of itself was once
As a "light unto the nations".
It has no need of the fearful hatred,
Fuelling its bombs and its bullets,
Unless it wishes to fade away –
Putting out the light that might enable it
To see the stranger as a friend.
"You take my water, burn my olive trees,
Destroy my house, take my job, steal my land,
Imprison my father, kill my mother,
Bombard my country, starve us all,
Humiliate us all, but I am to blame:
I shot a rocket back."
From the Zionist Book of Psalms
A selection of ungodly chants
Are used to justify the destruction
Of a country and its inhabitants:
"We must blow Gaza back to the Middle Ages
Destroying all the infrastructure including roads and water"
– Eli Yishai, former Deputy Prime Minister.
Amen
"There should be no electricity in Gaza,
No gasoline or moving vehicles, nothing…
We need to flatten entire neighborhoods…
Flatten all of Gaza"
– Gilad Sharon, Ariel Sharon's son in the Jerusalem Post.
Amen
"There are no innocents in Gaza. Mow them down …
Kill the Gazans without thought or mercy."
– Michael Ben-Ari, an ex-member of the Knesset.
Amen
Gaza should be "bombed so hard the population
Has to flee into Egypt"
– Israel Katz, a Minister of Transportation.
Amen
Gaza should be "wiped clean with bombs",
– Avi Dichter, a Minister of Home Front Defense.
Amen
Israeli soldiers must "learn from the Syrians
How to slaughter the enemy",
– Israeli Rabbi Yaakov Yosef.
Amen
Here is Ze'ev Jabotinsky, admirer of Mussolini
And the godfather of Zionist terrorism,
Justifying the flattening of Arab villages in 1948
And turning their inhabitants into refugees in vast numbers
"The world has become accustomed to the idea
Of mass migrations and has become fond of them."
Jabotinsky adds, "Hitler, as odious as he is to us
Has given this idea a good name in the world."
Amen
It is ironic that Jabotinsky used Hitler
As precedent for the transfer of the inhabitants
Since forcible expulsion
Was among the charges against Adolf Eichmann –
An architect of the Nazi Holocaust
Captured in Argentina, and tried and hanged in Israel.
Undeterred, the former chief rabbi,
Mordechai Elyahu, has urged Israel,
Its army and its government
To "employ the Nazi choice"
Against the Palestinians.
To carry out a series of carpet bombings
Of Palestinian population centres in Gaza;
He urges the "indiscriminate killing of civilians".
On religious grounds.
Amen
The Chabad Lubavitch Rabbi Schneerson,
A self proclaimed Messiah
Whose followers await his return from the dead,
(As if the Rabbi hadn't preached
Enough when alive by his making the claim
That his religion heralded a new Master Race) –
Has a devoted and powerful acolyte, Rabbi Manis Friedman,
Who declares that the "only way to fight a moral war"
Is to "destroy the Arabs' holy sites" and "to kill them."
To "kill men, women and children", and to eliminate anyone
Who stands in the way of a Greater Israel.
Friedman embraces Israel's ruthless colonizing power
With an Old Testament ferocity –
With what Christopher Hitchens has called,
"The root of religious evil" –
Whereby the Torah can be misused
To mow down men in a mosque
With an automatic rifle,
And such vengeful triumphs
Given a country's blessing:
Streets in Israeli cities
Are routinely named after armed cuckoos –
Murderous Israeli heroes
Who've evicted indigenous birds
From the Palestinian nest,
And then killed them.
The Head of Israeli's National Defense College,
Professor Arnon Sofer,
Outlines his country's Defense strategy:
"If we want to remain alive, we will have to kill and kill and kill.
All day, every day."
Amen
Colonel Yoav Gal, an Israeli Air Force pilot,
Tells Israel's Army Radio
"I believe that it [Operation Cast Lead]
Should have been even stronger! Dresden! Dresden!
The extermination of a city!
Not even a stone will be thrown at us. Because we're Jews.
I want the Arabs of Gaza to flee to Egypt.
This is what I want. I want to destroy the city."
Amen
Ethnic cleansing is Israel's origin
Not peace:
Netanyahu tells students at Bar Ilan University,
"Israel should have exploited the repression
Of the demonstrations in China,
When world attention focused on that country,
To carry out mass expulsions
Among the Arabs of the territories."
"The Palestinians are like crocodiles,
The more you give them meat, they want more"
Says Ehud Barak, when Prime Minister of Israel.
Despondently, the philosopher Martin Buber
Once told a New York audience,
"When we followers of the prophetic Judaism
Returned to Palestine...the majority of Jewish people
Preferred to learn from Hitler rather than from us."
Enflamed when Palestinians fight back
With increasing desperation
And despite overwhelming odds
To try to regain their ancestral land,
Israelis chant "Death to the Arabs"
"A Jew is a brother, an Arab is a bastard".
In front of their Arab neighbours,
A song is sung by settlers at Purim
Praising Baruch Goldstein's massacre
Of 29 Palestinians at prayer during Ramadan:
"Dr. Goldstein, there is none other like you in the world.
Dr. Goldstein, we all love you… he aimed at terrorists' heads,
Squeezed the trigger hard, and shot bullets,
And shot, and shot."
At this settler hero's funeral, Rabbi Yaacov Perrin
Famously claimed that even one million Arabs
Are "not worth a Jewish fingernail".
Goldstein's mass murder created suicide bombers –
Some two hundred amongst ten million Palestinians –
Which led to Israel's land-grabbing apartheid wall.
The Israeli lawmaker, Ayelet Shaked, calls
For the genocide of Palestinians on Facebook
And she advocates "the slaughter of Palestinian mothers
Who give birth to 'little snakes,'"
"The entire Palestinian people is the enemy."
She urges their complete destruction,
"Including its elderly and its women."
The new media are used to demonize the innocent
And to host persistent irrationalities:
A Jerusalem city councillor in charge of municipal security, Aryeh King, publicly advocates the murder
And the mutilation of non-Jews:
"I am calling out to all the Pinchases that are here …
Every one of us has a mission …
The Rebbe, who is here with us, expects us to commit acts of Pinchas."
Pinchas (Phineas in English) in the Torah was so incensed
By interracial (Jewish-Midianite) sex
That he took a sword and plunged it through both bodies
Of a couple in the middle of their lovemaking.
Then with a medieval fervor, Rabbi Noam Perel
Advocates scalping Arabs
By removing their genitalia –
A blood sacrifice to a mad mind-set
Of mystical thuggery.
Two Israeli girls hold up a banner
"Hating Arabs is not racism, it's values!"
Placing the Hebrew word for "Arabs", ARAVIM,
Into Twitter reveals young Israelis desiring
That Arabs die or be tortured to death.
The US House of Representatives
Votes unanimously to reaffirm its full support for Israel.
US jets duly declare war on Arab children
Whose futures they disintegrate.
In the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis,
Eight members of the Al Haj family
Are killed, including five children.
Five children killed in Gaza
Four Arab children, fishermens' children
First cousins from the Bakr family, aged nine to eleven,
Playing football on the Gaza beach in July, 2014,
Are shot dead by an Israeli gunboat.
Dead boy in the sand
A 12-year-old boy loses 18 members of his family in an air raid
From US planes including his father, a schoolteacher,
A photograph of Abdul Rahman Al-Batsh
Shows his shoulders slumped against a car.
It's the moment that he's discovered
That his father is amongst the dead.
Grieving boy
Abdul Rahman Al-Batsh, aged 12, loses 18 members of his own family
Later Abdul Rahman would say,
"They think we are worth nothing. They are killers,
They have no humanity,
And one day I will avenge my father."
Israel receives more aid from the US
Than the whole of the continent of Africa
Whilst the US population remains docile.
The Israeli Foreign Minister, Avigdor Lieberman,
Says that Israel must "go all the way" in Gaza.
Comfortably seated on camp chairs and sofas
Some fifty Israelis gather to eat popcorn
And watch from a Sderot hilltop
As bombs rain down from US-supplied F-16s.
They clap and applaud each deadly blast
From 1,000-pound iron fragmentation bombs.
Israelis cheer Gaza bombardment
Israelis gathered on a hilltop outside the town of Sderot to watch the bombardment of Gaza.
"We are here to see Israel destroy Hamas," Eli Chone,
A 22-year-old American tells Allan Sørensen,
Of Kristeligt Dagblad, pointing to a dot of light in the sky.
"It is a fighter who is about to dive. This means that it is about to shoot."
The conquerors' fans draw up their chairs;
Swigging on beers as they tend their barbecue
And watch Gaza burn from their vantage-point
In Sderot (once the Palestinian village of Najd).
One says, "this is our entertainment."
Someone points out that Hamas
(Rather than it having been elected)
Is "a death-cult" and Palestinians "enjoy martyrdom"
So "we're doing the Arabs a favour."
A lurid cocktail of triumphalist hatred,
Mixed with smoke from burning flesh,
Blinds them to Palestine's righteous yearning
For self-determination,
Their right in international law;
Their right to be unencumbered by occupation;
To be free from being Israel's penal colony;
Free from being stateless in a brutalized Bantustan –
A colonized people who are jeered at and decried
For their minimal attempts to fight back.
Later that night a bomb would land on a Gaza care home
Filled with elderly patients who cannot move
And with children who are already disabled;
Both are bombed in their wheelchairs or in their beds.
The Rabbi Noam Perel, head of Bnei Akiva
The world's largest religious-Zionist youth organization,
Urges on his Facebook page that the IDF,
The Israeli Defense Force be transformed
Into an army of avengers,
"Which will not stop at 300 Philistine foreskins"
Palestinian boy kidnapped and murdered
A young man in Shuafat, Jerusalem,
Muhammad Abu-Khdeir,
A 16-year old boy with a knowing, elfin smile
Is pulled into a car
And kidnapped in East Jerusalem
While waiting to go into the mosque.
He is tied and beaten;
He has gasoline poured into his mouth
And he is burned alive.
His body is found in the Jerusalem Forest;
Battered in the head
And with soot deposits in the lungs
Suggesting he's still breathing
When set on fire.
Ninety per cent of his body is burned.
Another victim of Israel's slow motion genocide –
A holocaust which, this time,
Is being financed and uncritically supported
By 'the good guys',
By the internationally 'great and the good',
By the craven chorus of the compliant
Who ritually pipe up to defend
Israel's right to defend itself –
To defend the indefensible,
And to supply the money
The weapons, and the excuses
To enable it to do so.
On Friday July 2014
The Israeli Defence Force
Invades Gaza by land.
An Israeli soldier posts a selfie
Of himself having black camouflage paint
Applied to his face.
He tweets, "From the Field: Our soldiers preparing to enter Gaza.
The whole nation stands behind us"
Another tweets: "We have hit Hamas hard,
And we will continue to hit Hamas hard."
Tzipi Livni, Israel's Justice Minister,
Says she backs the invasion "wholeheartedly".
And expresses "love and confidence in our soldiers strength".
Israel's soldiers' strength is misused
To produce genocide as well as a scorched policy
Whereby 800,000 olive trees in Occupied Palestine
Are destroyed to drive Palestinian farmers from their land.
King Herod revisits his massacre of the Innocents,
But this time round he has the mainstream media
On his side: his spin doctors have them swallowing
His party line that toddlers are terrorists if they're Arab,
And Herod has journalists fired who don't please him.
"Expel the Palestinians, and populate Gaza with Jews",
Urges the Knesset's deputy speaker, Moshe Feiglin,
"Israel must attack Gaza even more mercilessly"
To expel the population "with maximum force".
The deputy speaker of Israel's parliament, the Knesset,
Promotes war crimes as a state sanctioned tactic:
After "softening" the targets with firepower
He recommends the IDF "conquer the entire Gaza."
He is emboldened by the US's blank cheques,
And in their support of Israel's heroism
In attacking a defenceless population,
Few see fit to mention that Israel's
First victim in its ground invasion of Gaza
Is a five-month-old baby killed
By an Israeli tank in southern Rafah
On July 17, 2014 – almost as if King Herod
Has returned to rule his zombie state.
The "most moral army in the world"
Is reportedly targeting women and children,
And even animals.
A doctor speaking to Al Jazeera says that the Israeli army
"Is shooting at anything moving in Shujaiyah"
And consequently the streets of East Gaza are strewn
With dead bodies and severed limbs.
A Norwegian doctor in Shifa hospital, Mads Gilbert,
Is overwhelmed by the ground invasion:
By the carloads of those "maimed, torn apart, and bleeding; Shivering, and dying - all sorts of injured Palestinians,
All ages, all civilians, all innocent."
"The heroes in the ambulances," he continues,
"And in all of Gaza's hospitals
Are working 12-24 hour shifts, grey from fatigue
And inhuman workloads – they care, they triage,
And they try to understand the incomprehensible chaos
Of bodies, sizes, limbs, walking, not walking, breathing,
Not breathing, bleeding, not bleeding humans. HUMANS!"
With these words Dr Gilbert addresses himself
to the President of the United States.
Predictably there's no response.
Palestinian baby wounded
Israel's vision of itself was once
As a "light unto the nations".
It has no need of the fearful hatred,
Fuelling its bombs and its bullets,
Unless it wishes to fade away –
Putting out the light that might enable it
To see the stranger as a friend.
Letter From Managua 1 by Margaret Randall.
All you want to do is murder us, those who have survived
your several dress rehearsals
It’s not that serious yet, most of us don’t meet
your person-level: neither robust nor blue-eyed nor promising
according to your current IQ
or the Rorschach that defines your sense of life.
Forgive us if we don’t agree
With your definition of the N-Bomb
the binary chemical solution or the Salvadorean solution
as an adequate pain-killer. We’re sufficiently underdeveloped
to want to deal with our pain in our own primitive way.
Forgive us too if we can’t fully answer
your questions about our society, define it
as marxist-lenist or social-democrat, agreeable pluralist
or sufficiently free enterprise.
If we insist on the crudity of exploring our own creative process
loving our homeland with the passion
50,000 sisters and brothers root in our throats.
Excuse us, please, we’re always forgetting
we were supposed to ask permission to defend our truth
and distribute our laughter as we see fit.
Don’t bother yourselves trying to understand
our teaching our soldiers poetry along with defense combat
self respect and how to write their names in ink instead of blood,
When our grandparents scraped their living from this land
you sent your Marines. Later you provided us
with “one of our own”: bought and paid for
by your American Way of Life.
He had a brother and a son, a grandson
and infinite pockets.
We said goodbye more than once
but you trained a legion of our brothers
bought them off and kept them in shape
(to keep us in shape)
and the shape they kept us in was increasingly pine-boxed
and horizontal. Here it was a crime
to be young, and you reminded us daily
of that crime
committed by so many, and so often.
But we kept forgetting, we fought and came up from under
your undying friend and his protective Guard.
We fought and won, we buried
our sisters and brothers (few were blond
or met your standards for personhood)
and we began the long pain, the silent joy, the impossible
made possible by our history of eyes and hands.
We know we don’t meet your general 1982 standards
for dependent nations.
All you want to do is murder us. All we want to do is live.
your several dress rehearsals
It’s not that serious yet, most of us don’t meet
your person-level: neither robust nor blue-eyed nor promising
according to your current IQ
or the Rorschach that defines your sense of life.
Forgive us if we don’t agree
With your definition of the N-Bomb
the binary chemical solution or the Salvadorean solution
as an adequate pain-killer. We’re sufficiently underdeveloped
to want to deal with our pain in our own primitive way.
Forgive us too if we can’t fully answer
your questions about our society, define it
as marxist-lenist or social-democrat, agreeable pluralist
or sufficiently free enterprise.
If we insist on the crudity of exploring our own creative process
loving our homeland with the passion
50,000 sisters and brothers root in our throats.
Excuse us, please, we’re always forgetting
we were supposed to ask permission to defend our truth
and distribute our laughter as we see fit.
Don’t bother yourselves trying to understand
our teaching our soldiers poetry along with defense combat
self respect and how to write their names in ink instead of blood,
When our grandparents scraped their living from this land
you sent your Marines. Later you provided us
with “one of our own”: bought and paid for
by your American Way of Life.
He had a brother and a son, a grandson
and infinite pockets.
We said goodbye more than once
but you trained a legion of our brothers
bought them off and kept them in shape
(to keep us in shape)
and the shape they kept us in was increasingly pine-boxed
and horizontal. Here it was a crime
to be young, and you reminded us daily
of that crime
committed by so many, and so often.
But we kept forgetting, we fought and came up from under
your undying friend and his protective Guard.
We fought and won, we buried
our sisters and brothers (few were blond
or met your standards for personhood)
and we began the long pain, the silent joy, the impossible
made possible by our history of eyes and hands.
We know we don’t meet your general 1982 standards
for dependent nations.
All you want to do is murder us. All we want to do is live.
Tutto è Sciolto by James Joyce
A birdless heaven, sea-dusk and a star
Sad in the west;
And thou, poor heart, love’s image, fond and far,
Rememberest:
Her silent eyes and her soft foam-white brow
And fragrant hair,
Falling as in the silence falleth now
Dusk from the air.
Ah, why wilt thou remember these, or why,
Poor heart, repine,
If the sweet love she yielded with a sigh
Was never thine?
Sad in the west;
And thou, poor heart, love’s image, fond and far,
Rememberest:
Her silent eyes and her soft foam-white brow
And fragrant hair,
Falling as in the silence falleth now
Dusk from the air.
Ah, why wilt thou remember these, or why,
Poor heart, repine,
If the sweet love she yielded with a sigh
Was never thine?
Immortal Autumn by Archibald MacLeish
I speak this poem now with grave and level voice
In praise of autumn, of the far-horn-winding fall.
I praise the flower-barren fields, the clouds, the tall
Unanswering branches where the wind makes sullen noise.
I praise the fall: it is the human season.
Now
No more the foreign sun does meddle at our earth,
Enforce the green and bring the fallow land to birth,
Nor winter yet weigh all with silence the pine bough,
But now in autumn with the black and outcast crows
Share we the spacious world: the whispering year is gone:
There is more room to live now: the once secret dawn
Comes late by daylight and the dark unguarded goes.
Between the mutinous brave burning of the leaves
And winter’s covering of our hearts with his deep snow
We are alone: there are no evening birds: we know
The naked moon: the tame stars circle at our eaves.
It is the human season. On this sterile air
Do words outcarry breath: the sound goes on and on.
I hear a dead man’s cry from autumn long since gone.
I cry to you beyond upon this bitter air.
In praise of autumn, of the far-horn-winding fall.
I praise the flower-barren fields, the clouds, the tall
Unanswering branches where the wind makes sullen noise.
I praise the fall: it is the human season.
Now
No more the foreign sun does meddle at our earth,
Enforce the green and bring the fallow land to birth,
Nor winter yet weigh all with silence the pine bough,
But now in autumn with the black and outcast crows
Share we the spacious world: the whispering year is gone:
There is more room to live now: the once secret dawn
Comes late by daylight and the dark unguarded goes.
Between the mutinous brave burning of the leaves
And winter’s covering of our hearts with his deep snow
We are alone: there are no evening birds: we know
The naked moon: the tame stars circle at our eaves.
It is the human season. On this sterile air
Do words outcarry breath: the sound goes on and on.
I hear a dead man’s cry from autumn long since gone.
I cry to you beyond upon this bitter air.
Wednesday, 6 August 2014
... without shame or concern for etymology
For Pynchon, 9/11 is indeed a divine retribution. A “just” punishment. One can only imagine how this sounds to nationalist, patriotic Americans. Imagine there are no heroes. Imagine America is the force of darkness and the axis of evil: ominous, irresponsible, sowing death. It takes courage, and a good amount of anger, to state this as clearly as Pynchon does, in the face of the inhuman accusation of inhumanity. The force with which Pynchon’s commentary hits the national tragedy can be measured, perhaps, by the fact, that no commentator has dealt with it in detail. And by the fact that, although he was short-listed, he has once more not received the National Book Award.
Again, why is the event a just and holy punishment? Not because the Americans have not been Puritan enough, but because they are too Puritan; because they follow a religion that they have twisted and turned into a perfect apology for a culture of entitlement and greed. As Shawn notes in a conversation with Maxine, America has been
on borrowed time. Getting away cheap. Never caring about who’s paying for it, who’s starving somewhere else all jammed together so we can have cheap food, a house, a yard in the burbs…planetwide, more every day, the payback keeps gathering. And meantime the only help we get from the media is boo hoo the innocent dead. Boo fuckin hoo. You know what? All the dead are innocent. There’s no innocent dead.” […]
“You’re not going to explain that, or…”
“Course not, it’s a koan.”
http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/fictionspresent/bleeding
Monday, 4 August 2014
rubaiyat
Oh, come with old Khayyam, and leave the Wise
To talk; one thing is certain, that Life flies;
One thing is certain, and the Rest is Lies;
The Flower that once has blown forever dies.
Myself when young did eagerly frequent
Doctor and Saint, and heard great Argument
About it and about; but evermore
Came out by the same Door as in I went.
With them the Seed of Wisdom did I sow,
And with my own hand labour'd it to grow:
And this was all the Harvest that I reap'd —
'I came like Water and like Wind I go.'
To talk; one thing is certain, that Life flies;
One thing is certain, and the Rest is Lies;
The Flower that once has blown forever dies.
Myself when young did eagerly frequent
Doctor and Saint, and heard great Argument
About it and about; but evermore
Came out by the same Door as in I went.
With them the Seed of Wisdom did I sow,
And with my own hand labour'd it to grow:
And this was all the Harvest that I reap'd —
'I came like Water and like Wind I go.'
Wednesday, 16 July 2014
No Common Measure by LI 1954
The most dazzling displays of intelligence mean nothing to us. Political economy, love and urban planning are means that we must master in order to solve a problem that is first and foremost of an ethical kind. Nothing can release life from its obligation to be absolutely passionate. We know how to proceed. The world's hostility and trickery notwithstanding, the participants in an adventure that is altogether daunting are gathering, and making no concessions. We consider generally that there is no other honorable way of living apart from this participation.
Sunday, 13 July 2014
O bitter is the knowledge that one draws from the voyage!
The monotonous and tiny world, today
Yesterday, tomorrow, always, shows us our reflections,
An oasis of horror in a desert of boredom!
— Charles Baudelaire from “Le Voyage” in The Flowers of Evil
“And this is really more than enough. In the middle of a desert of boredom, an oasis of horror. There is no more lucid diagnosis for the illness of modern man. To escape boredom, to escape deadlock, all we have at at hand, though not so close at hand, because even here an effort is required, is horror, or in other words, evil.”
— Roberto Bolaño from “Notes Toward an Annotated Edition of 2666” by Natasha Wimmer, translator of 2666
The monotonous and tiny world, today
Yesterday, tomorrow, always, shows us our reflections,
An oasis of horror in a desert of boredom!
— Charles Baudelaire from “Le Voyage” in The Flowers of Evil
“And this is really more than enough. In the middle of a desert of boredom, an oasis of horror. There is no more lucid diagnosis for the illness of modern man. To escape boredom, to escape deadlock, all we have at at hand, though not so close at hand, because even here an effort is required, is horror, or in other words, evil.”
— Roberto Bolaño from “Notes Toward an Annotated Edition of 2666” by Natasha Wimmer, translator of 2666
Olduvai Gorge Thorn Tree by Sarah Lindsay
He kept dreaming of a tree, dreaming
of a tree, dreaming of a tree
and its sound like a hush,
and it seemed he could open
his mouth when he woke and make the others
know something they didn’t already know,
his tree. But he woke and he couldn’t.
He kept thinking of a tree. He made a tree
of his arms and called to the others,
but all he could say, all they could say,
was tree, not that one, no, not here,
tree. They were hungry, shrugged and went on.
Later a leopard dragged him some distance
and left him on the remains of his back,
his plucked face tilted up, and a seed
fell on the stub of his tongue
in his open mouth. Took root,
sent a finger between his teeth
that parted his jaws with its gradual thickness
and lifted its arms full of leaves that fed
on what was in his braincase
and mixed with the sky, and made
a sound in the wind that was
almost what he wanted.
of a tree, dreaming of a tree
and its sound like a hush,
and it seemed he could open
his mouth when he woke and make the others
know something they didn’t already know,
his tree. But he woke and he couldn’t.
He kept thinking of a tree. He made a tree
of his arms and called to the others,
but all he could say, all they could say,
was tree, not that one, no, not here,
tree. They were hungry, shrugged and went on.
Later a leopard dragged him some distance
and left him on the remains of his back,
his plucked face tilted up, and a seed
fell on the stub of his tongue
in his open mouth. Took root,
sent a finger between his teeth
that parted his jaws with its gradual thickness
and lifted its arms full of leaves that fed
on what was in his braincase
and mixed with the sky, and made
a sound in the wind that was
almost what he wanted.
Rain of Statues by Sarah Lindsay
From the Mithridatic Wars, first century BC
Our general was elsewhere, but we drowned.
While he rested, he shipped us home
with the bulk of his spoils
that had weighed his army down.
The thrashing storm
that caught us cracked the hulls
and made us offerings to the sea floor —
a rain of statues, gold, and men.
Released from service,
done with war,
the crash and hiss muted,
we fell through streams of creatures
whose lives were their purpose.
We settled with treasure looted
from temples of rubbled Athenian Greece;
among us, bronze and marble gods and goddesses
moored without grace,
dodged by incurious fish.
Their power was never meant to buoy us —
our pleasures were incidental gifts —
but, shaken by their radiance in our dust,
we had given them our voices.
Their faces, wings, and limbs
lie here with our sanded bones
and motionless devices.
Little crabs attempt to don rings
set with agate and amethyst,
and many an octopus,
seeking an hour of rest,
finds shelter in our brain-cases.
So we are still of use.
Small Moth by Sarah Lindsay
She's slicing ripe white peaches
into the Tony the Tiger bowl
and dropping slivers for the dog
poised vibrating by her foot to stop their fall
when she spots it, camouflaged,
a glimmer and then full on—
happiness, plashing blunt soft wings
inside her as if it wants
to escape again.
Attack Underground by Sarah Lindsay
Themiscyra, 72 BC
While Lucullus raided cherry orchards,
he left us to besiege,
grudgingly, this outlander fortress,
named for an Amazon queen,
while thinking of food and home.
Not one of us has seen
a single horse-borne warrior woman.
Meanwhile, we dug a tomb.
We intended it as the tunnel
through which we’d claim the fort.
We shored up the sifting roof
and dug by lamps
that shed more shadows than light.
At last we formed up underground
to attack with sword and fire,
but the enemy tossed in hives,
and in a cloud of stinging bees
our torches jerked and swung or fell
so we could hardly tell
where to strike, or what, for next
our enemy sent weasels in, and foxes,
which seemed to be done in jest
until we felt their teeth
and heard, more than saw, the larger beasts.
A wolf began my death.
I lay in men’s and weasels’ blood
and heard the body
that dropped at my side
ask, What barbarian thought to make
of thoughtless creatures weapons of war?
But a flung torch showed me the face
of a bear that said nothing, and died.
Then came the boar.
Friday, 11 July 2014
the true love by David Whyte
There is a faith in loving fiercely the one who is rightfully yours, especially if you have waited years and especially if part of you never believed you could deserve this loved and beckoning hand held out to you this way.
I am thinking of faith now and the testaments of loneliness and what we feel we are worthy of in this world.
Years ago in the Hebrides I remember an old man who walked every morning on the grey stones to the shore of baying seals,
who would press his hat to his chest in the blustering salt wind and say his prayer to the turbulent Jesus hidden in the water,
and I think of the story of the storm and everyone waking and seeing the distant yet familiar figure far across the water calling to them,
and how we are all preparing for that abrupt waking, and that calling, and that moment we have to say yes, except it will not come so grandly, so Biblically, but more subtly and intimately in the face of the one you know you have to love,
so that when we finally step out of the boat toward them, we find everything holds us, and everything confirms our courage, and if you wanted to drown you could, but you don’t
because finally after all this struggle and all these years, you don’t want to anymore, you’ve simply had enough of drowning, and you want to live and you want to love and you will walk across any territory and any darkness, however fluid and however dangerous, to the take the one hand you know belongs in yours.
I am thinking of faith now and the testaments of loneliness and what we feel we are worthy of in this world.
Years ago in the Hebrides I remember an old man who walked every morning on the grey stones to the shore of baying seals,
who would press his hat to his chest in the blustering salt wind and say his prayer to the turbulent Jesus hidden in the water,
and I think of the story of the storm and everyone waking and seeing the distant yet familiar figure far across the water calling to them,
and how we are all preparing for that abrupt waking, and that calling, and that moment we have to say yes, except it will not come so grandly, so Biblically, but more subtly and intimately in the face of the one you know you have to love,
so that when we finally step out of the boat toward them, we find everything holds us, and everything confirms our courage, and if you wanted to drown you could, but you don’t
because finally after all this struggle and all these years, you don’t want to anymore, you’ve simply had enough of drowning, and you want to live and you want to love and you will walk across any territory and any darkness, however fluid and however dangerous, to the take the one hand you know belongs in yours.
Tuesday, 1 July 2014
Rain by Edward Thomas
Rain, midnight rain, nothing but the wild rain
On this bleak hut, and solitude, and me
Remembering again that I shall die
And neither hear the rain nor give it thanks
For washing me cleaner than I have been
Since I was born into this solitude.
Blessed are the dead that the rain rains upon:
But here I pray that none whom once I loved
Is dying to-night or lying still awake
Solitary, listening to the rain,
Either in pain or thus in sympathy
Helpless among the living and the dead,
Like a cold water among broken reeds,
Myriads of broken reeds all still and stiff,
Like me who have no love which this wild rain
Has not dissolved except the love of death,
If love it be towards what is perfect and
Cannot, the tempest tells me, disappoint.
On this bleak hut, and solitude, and me
Remembering again that I shall die
And neither hear the rain nor give it thanks
For washing me cleaner than I have been
Since I was born into this solitude.
Blessed are the dead that the rain rains upon:
But here I pray that none whom once I loved
Is dying to-night or lying still awake
Solitary, listening to the rain,
Either in pain or thus in sympathy
Helpless among the living and the dead,
Like a cold water among broken reeds,
Myriads of broken reeds all still and stiff,
Like me who have no love which this wild rain
Has not dissolved except the love of death,
If love it be towards what is perfect and
Cannot, the tempest tells me, disappoint.
But These Things Also by Edward Thomas
But these things also are Spring's -
On banks by the roadside the grass
Long-dead that is greyer now
Than all the Winter it was;
The shell of a little snail bleached
In the grass; chip of flint, and mite
Of chalk; and the small birds' dung
In splashes of purest white:
All the white things a man mistakes
For earliest violets
Who seeks through Winter's ruins
Something to pay Winter's debts,
While the North blows, and starling flocks
By chattering on and on
Keep their spirits up in the mist,
And Spring's here, Winter's not gone.
On banks by the roadside the grass
Long-dead that is greyer now
Than all the Winter it was;
The shell of a little snail bleached
In the grass; chip of flint, and mite
Of chalk; and the small birds' dung
In splashes of purest white:
All the white things a man mistakes
For earliest violets
Who seeks through Winter's ruins
Something to pay Winter's debts,
While the North blows, and starling flocks
By chattering on and on
Keep their spirits up in the mist,
And Spring's here, Winter's not gone.
And you, Helen? by Edward Thomas
And you, Helen, what should I give you?
So many things I would give you
Had I an infinite great store
Offered me and I stood before
To choose. I would give you youth,
All kinds of loveliness and truth,
A clear eye as good as mine,
Lands, waters, flowers, wine,
As many children as your heart
Might wish for, a far better art
Than mine can be, all you have lost
Upon the travelling waters tossed,
Or given to me. If I could choose
Freely in that great treasure-house
Anything from any shelf,
I would give you back yourself,
And power to discriminate
What you want and want it not too late,
Many fair days free from care
And heart to enjoy both foul and fair,
And myself, too, if I could find
Where it lay hidden and it proved kind.
So many things I would give you
Had I an infinite great store
Offered me and I stood before
To choose. I would give you youth,
All kinds of loveliness and truth,
A clear eye as good as mine,
Lands, waters, flowers, wine,
As many children as your heart
Might wish for, a far better art
Than mine can be, all you have lost
Upon the travelling waters tossed,
Or given to me. If I could choose
Freely in that great treasure-house
Anything from any shelf,
I would give you back yourself,
And power to discriminate
What you want and want it not too late,
Many fair days free from care
And heart to enjoy both foul and fair,
And myself, too, if I could find
Where it lay hidden and it proved kind.
Beauty by Edward Thomas
WHAT does it mean? Tired, angry, and ill at ease,
No man, woman, or child alive could please
Me now. And yet I almost dare to laugh
Because I sit and frame an epitaph--
"Here lies all that no one loved of him
And that loved no one." Then in a trice that whim
Has wearied. But, though I am like a river
At fall of evening when it seems that never
Has the sun lighted it or warmed it, while
Cross breezes cut the surface to a file,
This heart, some fraction of me, happily
Floats through a window even now to a tree
Down in the misting, dim-lit, quiet vale;
Not like a pewit that returns to wail
For something it has lost, but like a dove
That slants unanswering to its home and love.
There I find my rest, and through the dusk air
Flies what yet lives in me. Beauty is there
No man, woman, or child alive could please
Me now. And yet I almost dare to laugh
Because I sit and frame an epitaph--
"Here lies all that no one loved of him
And that loved no one." Then in a trice that whim
Has wearied. But, though I am like a river
At fall of evening when it seems that never
Has the sun lighted it or warmed it, while
Cross breezes cut the surface to a file,
This heart, some fraction of me, happily
Floats through a window even now to a tree
Down in the misting, dim-lit, quiet vale;
Not like a pewit that returns to wail
For something it has lost, but like a dove
That slants unanswering to its home and love.
There I find my rest, and through the dusk air
Flies what yet lives in me. Beauty is there
Adlestrop 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 his 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
The name, because one afternoon
Of heat, the express-train drew up there
Unwontedly. It was late June.
The steam hissed. Someone cleared his 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
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