Shadow Race
Every time I've raced my shadow
When the sun was at my back,
It always ran ahead of me,
Always got the best of me.
But every time I've raced my shadow
When my face was toward the sun,
I won.
Sheldon Allan Silverstein
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Shadow Race
Every time I've raced my shadow
When the sun was at my back,
It always ran ahead of me,
Always got the best of me.
But every time I've raced my shadow
When my face was toward the sun,
I won.
Sheldon Allan Silverstein
Some really lovely offerings on here of late, Steve I found your words really quite touching....
I love spring...something really hopeful about it...i like the line in this poem about "threadbare minds"....i am sure thats how my mind seems at times!
Sonnet
Emma Jones
Here it is again, spring, "the renewal".
People have written about this before.
And the people who track the four seasons,
the hunters who know that the weather has changed.
Still, rains happen; there are slow roots that make
progress, something has a hand in the earth
and turns it. Clouds unknot the wind. Bulbs blow.
Their threadbare minds gust outward, turn yellow
eyes to heaven. It answers with the sun.
And the sun is a bulb, a mutual bomb.
The daffodils crack. "Oh heavens!" they fret,
"Where's your terminus?" The flowers are wan
travellers. they unpack their cases. All
they know, they are. Renewal, rest, Renewal.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mountain Goatess
Loved that choice of poem MG :cool:
Quote:
Originally Posted by freckle
I love spring as well freckle, nice choice that:D
Heptonstall
Did you mind
when we disturbed
your slumber today.
We tried to be quiet
with our rubber soles
and careful parking.
Some knew your work
and the awful history
that brought you here.
And in the cold morning rain
remembered all the pain
you endured.
How could he leave you here
and then take his rest
hundreds of miles away.
We gave some money
for the upkeep of the church
in whose yard you sleep.
Not much really,
five pounds each, for someone
who enriched our lives so much.
A lovely, melancholy poem Alf.
I hope you had a good run.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Alf
Good stuff Alf. Wish I'd known you were doing the race as we could have said helloQuote:
Originally Posted by Alf
I wish I'd known. I would have looked for her grave and spared her some thoughts. Nice piece Alf.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Alf
Between going and coming.
Between going and staying
the day wavers,
in love with its own transparency.
The circular afternoon is now a bay
where the world in stillness rocks.
All is visible and all elusive,
all is near and can’t be touched.
Paper, book, pencil, glass,
rest in the shade of their names.
Time throbbing in my temples repeats
the same unchanging syllable of blood.
The light turns the indifferent wall
into a ghostly theater of reflections.
I find myself in the middle of an eye,
watching myself in its blank stare.
The moment scatters. Motionless,
I stay and go: I am a pause.
Octavio Paz
That's beautiful Alf and very good! :)Quote:
Originally Posted by Alf
Excuse my ignorance, but who is the poem about?
Sylvia Plath, who is buried in HeptonstallQuote:
Originally Posted by Mountain Goatess
Aahh I see, thanks DT! A poem very apt and totally belonging to this thread then! :)Quote:
Originally Posted by Derby Tup
I think she would love that poem Alf! :)
Crash landings
I have arrived in the
unforeseen
Not Coronation Street or yer
Facebook stereotypy
But within the oaks
A loopy elf,
headtorched with her brood
squealing as the tree swing
Makes (some of) my dreams
Come true
Its hard not to wish
in the face of all it
and as my baby
kisses the moon
I think...
My darling
You have it all too learn
Crash landings are the best
Even though they
might hurt.
brilliant poem alf and your own?Quote:
Originally Posted by Alf
wish I could have been trotting along with you to chew the fat about the plath :-)
Yes my own. I wonder whether it would have been written if the race had been on sunny Saturday rather than cold damp Sunday? Its amazing the effect weather can have on your mood and the feeling was at the time, as Hes pointed out, melancholic.Quote:
Originally Posted by freckle
Though that changed when I got in the pub at the end :rolleyes::D
Lovely poem that freckle :cool:Quote:
Originally Posted by freckle
Headtorch swing sessions into that huge moon at the moment...paints a wonderful picture :D
That's really very well written Alf - thanks for sharing it with us.Quote:
Originally Posted by Alf
Bloody BRILLIANT.Quote:
Originally Posted by Mountain Goatess
That's delicious MGQuote:
Originally Posted by Mountain Goatess
Blimey! Impressive stuff Alf xQuote:
Originally Posted by Alf
I loved your Octavio Paz offering MG and Freckle's original verse! Lovely.
Inspired by the sad sight of a pair of dead blackbirds:
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
Wallace Stevens
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.
II
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.
III
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.
IV
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.
V
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.
VI
Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.
VII
O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?
VIII
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.
IX
When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.
X
At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.
XI
He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds.
XII
The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.
XIII
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.
Its been a bit quiet on here of late...better find something nice to post for this Friday night.
If you could please... It'll break up the dull tedium of still working at 10-30pm on a Friday night! :angry:Quote:
Originally Posted by Hes
I missed this - so sorry Freckle - and it's superb too! And here's to dreams coming true.Quote:
Originally Posted by freckle
I'll do my best Dom. (my laptop just crashing didn't help)
Quote:
Originally Posted by dominion
This is a bit different Dominion - hope it breaks the tedium. (Oh the website POlice have **** the f-word!Quote:
Originally Posted by dominion
After a Fight
**** you too, my less compassionate self
says quietly. You've never really
respected me anyway, especially not now
that I refuse to be the keeper
of your anger, the messy pall
of it, from where we kill
what we can't suck. Still
I have faith in the healthy ink
of ideograms, the little cone of flame
nudged about by the wind.
My pillow book would list
such beautiful things, your heart
would die to read them.
from Shiner (2002) by Maggie Nelson, by permission of Hanging Loose Press.
Oophs - that wasn't something 'nice' i posted - sorry!Quote:
Originally Posted by Hes
from this website if interested:
http://slope.org/archive/issue17/FU_page1.html
Okay, this wasn't what I was looking for but Roald Dahl makes me laugh.
Hot and Cold
A woman who my mother knows
Came in and took off all her clothes.
Said I, not being very old,
'By golly gosh, you must be cold!'
'No, no!' she cried. 'Indeed I'm not!
I'm feeling devilishly hot!
;);););)Quote:
Originally Posted by Hes
I like this Mossy! I'll go and check out that website. It should be a lot better than the one I was just looking at. I was actually trying to find Phoebe Hesketh's 'the Kingfisher' so that I wouldn't have to type it all out and missed your post. I like the way other people's posts can send me off on tangents.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mossdog
Spring
The tread of Spring approaches
small birds sing,
a melody of hope;
of expectation, perhaps
And in the kernal of my heart
I feel the cold earth ease,
remembering
a slipstream, brightly scrolled
in the deep blue overhead
what was written for us?
My eyes are skywards and
in my arms you rest
tucked into our Summer's hollow
I draw in deeply
the soft, warm, fragrance of your hair
inscribing,
indelibly, the golden moment.
Lots of good stuff on that website but I have a feeling it will just be asterisks if I paste any on here! Been looking at some more Octavio Paz:
Counterparts
In my body you search the mountain
for the sun buried in its forest.
In your body I search for the boat
adrift in the middle of the night.
Octavio Paz
Oh wow, that's so gorgeous! Makes me feel a bit wistful...:o
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mossdog
Argghhhh!!! More bloody broken IT stuff!Quote:
Originally Posted by Hes
All mended now...I just switched it off and switched it back on again! I'm not sure that dropping carborundum down the keypad helped much...trying to work and surf the forum is not a great idea.
Quote:
Originally Posted by dominion
I've started being woken up early by the dawn chorus again but it has been brilliant to hear the air filled with birdsong.
Bird
It was passed from one bird to another,
the whole gift of the day.
The day went from flute to flute,
went dressed in vegetation,
in flights which opened a tunnel
through the wind would pass
to where birds were breaking open
the dense blue air -
and there, night came in.
When I returned from so many journeys,
I stayed suspended and green
between sun and geography -
I saw how wings worked,
how perfumes are transmitted
by feathery telegraph,
and from above I saw the path,
the springs and the roof tiles,
the fishermen at their trades,
the trousers of the foam;
I saw it all from my green sky.
I had no more alphabet
than the swallows in their courses,
the tiny, shining water
of the small bird on fire
which dances out of the pollen.
Pablo Neruda
That's lovely Hes, and a new PN for me - thank you.Quote:
Originally Posted by Hes
A Walk
My eyes already touch the sunny hill.
going far ahead of the road I have begun.
So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp;
it has inner light, even from a distance-
and charges us, even if we do not reach it,
into something else, which, hardly sensing it,
we already are; a gesture waves us on
answering our own wave...
but what we feel is the wind in our faces.
Translated by Robert Bly
Rainer Maria Rilke
Good selection MG. Lovely :)
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mountain Goatess