Nice post Dom. It was one of those days in Masham on Sunday, sunshine, birds singing, kids playing, church bells ringing, football on the rec and a swim in the river. :) Mind you, blizzards this evening!:w00t:
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Nice post Dom. It was one of those days in Masham on Sunday, sunshine, birds singing, kids playing, church bells ringing, football on the rec and a swim in the river. :) Mind you, blizzards this evening!:w00t:
the curlew laments
as - soft as blackthorn petals,
the snow falls again
Ooooooooo how lovely....his voice is like melted chocolate....dom, you dark horse you! ;0)Quote:
Originally Posted by dominion
ps is that the tune from the hovis ad?
beautiful hes..i was lamenting a tad with the sideways sleet on my run tonight but the then the other part of me though how much i like our crazy spring weather, micheal fish was on five live stating that apparentl it is more common to have snow in april than in december in england! xQuote:
Originally Posted by Hes
Dvořák's Symphony No. 9Quote:
Originally Posted by freckle
Siobhan Harvey...a new poet to me...i love this so elegant...
cactus
No snags, I promise,
simply a gift so that we might part smoothly,
our points of difference buried.
The distance between two spikes
might once have measured our passion,
an infinite world of tenderness there.
But now, it’s enough
that each sharp star speaks of something long gone.
Perhaps you’ll take this cactus with you;
grow into it from afar,
rooted by it wherever you go:
Ulluru, Rio, Arizona.
Perhaps you’ll leave it behind,
allow it to stand in place of you,
holding your memory
in the same way a picture might,
or a closed book on a shelf in your room:
a silent, internal way,
the way of the animate,
the wrist-watch, the ghost.
I’ll tolerate either choice,
for some winter’s morning
you’ll fly home to darkness
and you’ll know that you’re alive,
because you’ll stroke this cactus,
recalling the moment it was offered,
and it will prick you,
and it will hurt.
Indeed...its as good for you today as it has always been!...Quote:
Originally Posted by dominion
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Mq59ykPnAE
That is very good freckle thanks for posting it.Quote:
Originally Posted by freckle
Quote:
Originally Posted by Hes
Not lost your touch Hes :cool: I love the Blackthorn at this time of year. Petals without leaves amongst the thorns just made for poetry.
The Fist
The fist clenched round my heart
loosens a little, and I gasp
brightness; but it tightens
again. When have I ever not loved
the pain of love? But this has moved
past love to mania. This has the strong
clench of the madman, this is
gripping the ledge of unreason, before
plunging howling into the abyss.
Hold hard then, heart. This way at least you live.
Derek Walcott
The Red and the Black
We sat up late, talking -
thinking of the screams of the tortured
and the last silence of starving children,
seeing the faces of bigots and murderers.
Then sleep.
And there was the morning, smiling
in the dance of everything. The collared doves
guzzled the Rowan berries and the sea
washed in, so gently, so tenderly.
Our neighbours greeted us
with humour and friendliness.
World why do you do this to us,
giving us the poison with one hand
and the bread of life with another?
And reason sits helpless at its desk,
adding accounts that never balance,
finding no excuse for anything.
Norman MacCaig
There's something rather sad and desperate in those lines Alf. Derek was probably having more than his fair share of heartache I'm guessing.Quote:
Originally Posted by Alf
Someone’s Coming Back
Now that the summer has emptied
and laughter’s warned against possessions
and the swans have drifted from the rivers,
like one coming back from a long journey
no longer certain of his country
or of its tangled past and sorrows,
I am wanting to return to you.
When love affairs can no longer be distinguished from song
and the warm petals drop without regret,
and our pasts are hung in a dream of ruins,
I am wanting to come near to you.
For now the lark’s song has grown visible
and all that was dark is ever possible,
and the morning grabs me by the heart and screams,
'O taste me! Taste me please!'
And so I taste. And the tongue is nude,
and eyes awake; the clear blood hums
a tune to which the world might dance;
and love which often lived in vaguer forms
bubbles up through sorrow and laughing, screams:
'Oh taste me! Taste me please!'
Brian Patten
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mossdog
I enjoyed that one Mossy. Brian Patten is very popular on the thread at the moment.
I have been reading quite a bit of Norman MacCaig recently and this one must have been written with Fellrunners in mind :D
Descent from the Green Corrie
The climb's all right, it's the descent that kills you.
Knees become fists that don't know how to clench
And thighs are strings in parallel.
Gravity's still your enemy - it drills you
With your own backbone - its love is all to wrench
You down on screes or boggy asphodel
And the elation that for a moment fills you
Beside the misty cairn’s that lesser thing
A memory of it. Its not
The punishing climb, it’s the descent that kills you
However sweetly the valley thrushes sing
And shadows darken with the peace they’ve brought.
Norman MacCaig
Ooo, thanks Alf, Norman MacCaig is a favourite of mine! (I enjoyed Mossy's Patten too)
Stolly and I found a kingfisher's perch on a run recently and I've been back several times and each time I've caught it darting up the river, bright as an Amazonian butterfly. Stunning birds!
Kingfisher
That kingfisher jewelling upstream
seems to leave a streak of itself
in the bright air. The trees
are all the better for its passing.
It's not a mineral eater, though it looks it.
It doesn't nip nicks out of the edges
of rainbows. - It dives
into the burly water, then, perched
on a Japanese bough, gulps
into its own incandescence
a wisp of minnow, a warrior stickleback.
- Or it vanishes into its burrow, resplendent
Samurai, returning home
to his stinking slum
By Norman MacCaig
Great choice Alf one of my favourite walcott poems :-)Quote:
Originally Posted by Alf
Treeless landscape
Except in grooves of streams, armpits of hills,
Here’s a bald, bare land, weathered half away.
It pokes its bony blades clean through its skin
And chucks the light up from grey knucklebones,
Tattering the eye, that’s teased with flowers and stones.
Something to do with time has all to do
With shape and size. The million shapes of time,
Its millions of appearances are the true
Mountain and moor and tingling water drop
That runs and hangs and shakes time towards a stop.
Prowling like cats on levels of the air
These buzzards mew, or pounce: one vole the less,
One alteration more in time, or space.
But nothing’s happened, all is in control
Unless you are the buzzard or the vole.
Yet, all the same, it’s weathered half away.
Time’s no procrastinator. The land thrusts
A rotting elbow up. It makes a place
By sinking into it, and buzzards fly
To be a buzzard and create a sky.
Norman MacCaig
Can't put down my book of Norman MacCaig poems at the moment. He has been described as the opposite of Ted Hughes in the ways he describes animals and birds but I like both their approaches to the subject.
Greenshank
His single note - one can't help calling it
piping, one can't help
calling it plaintive - slides droopingly down
no more than a semitone, but is filled
with an octave of loneliness, with the whole sad scale
of desolation.
He won't leave us. He keeps flying
fifty yards and perching
on a rock or a small hummock,
drawing attention to himself.
Then he calls and calls
and flies on again
in a flight
roundshouldered but dashing,
skulking yet bold.
Cuckoo, phoenix, nightingale,
you are no truer emblems
than this bird is.
He is the melancholy that flies
in the weathers of my mind,
He is the loneliness that calls to me there
in a semitone
of desolate octaves.
Norman MacCaig
Nice choice Alf. It was his bird poems in an anthology edited by Simon Armitage that first made me aware of him. I was given his collected works (probably the same book you have?) and its brilliant. Have you read 'At the Loch of the Green Corrie'? Its written by Andrew Greig and is about his friendship with Norman and the times he visited the place that inspired so much of his poetry. Interesting.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Alf
The collection I have is edited by Norman MacCaig's son Ewen. I just read the review on Amazon of the Andrew Greig book, sounds very good Hes :cool:Quote:
Originally Posted by Hes
April 18
the slime of all my yesterdays
rots in the hollow of my skull
and if my stomach would contract
because of some explicable phenomenon
such as pregnancy or constipation
I would not remember you
or that because of sleep
infrequent as a moon of greencheese
that because of food
nourishing as violet leaves
that because of these
and in a few fatal yards of grass
in a few spaces of sky and treetops
a future was lost yesterday
as easily and irretrievably
as a tennis ball at twilight
Sylvia Plath
Been awhile since SP's made an appearance on this thread. Shocking! I've missed her jolly verse and uplifting tones.
The Armada
Long, long ago
when everything I was told was believable
and the little I knew was less limited than now,
I stretched belly down on the grass beside a pond
and to the far bank launched a child’s armada.
A broken fortress of twigs,
the paper-tissue sails of galleons,
the waterlogged branches of submarines -
all came to ruin and were on flame
in that dusk-red pond.
And you, mother, stood behind me,
impatient to be going,
old at twenty-three, alone,
thin overcoat flapping.
How closely the past shadows us.
In a hospital a mile or so from that pond
I kneel beside your bed and, closing my eyes,
reach out across forty years to touch once more
that pond’s cool surface,
and it is your cool skin I’m touching;
for as on a pond a child’s paper boat
was blown out of reach
by the smallest gust of wind,
so too have you been blown out of reach
by the smallest whisper of death,
and a childhood memory is sharpened,
and the heart burns as that armada burnt,
long, long ago.
Brian Patten
Anyone catch Countryfile on sunday night? Simon Armitage was on, it may be on BBC iPlayer.
Thanks for the heads up Steve! I've just read on the web that his book, 'Walking Home', will be out on the 5th July and he is walking a section of the Pennine Way from Thwaite to Hawes and inviting people to join him some time in July.
Quote:
Originally Posted by stevefoster
That's the book that I have too Alf, great isn't it? :)
Quote:
Originally Posted by Alf
Nothing like the cheeriness of Sylvia...thanks Mossy (I think;) ). I did like the Patten, that's a particularly moving choice.
Thanks HesQuote:
Originally Posted by Hes
I've been a bit busy recently and haven't had time to visit the thread as much as usual but was shocked to see we had been 'relegated' to the 2nd page :w00t: Despite your's and Alf plus Merrylegs...ooophs I mean Steve's stalwart contributions. I'll make amends I hope.
many thanks for posting this steve I enjoyed hearing a bit of the armitage's voice (from 3:07 onwards) brought back I lot of good memories! looking forward to the book coming out :-)Quote:
Originally Posted by stevefoster
I really enjoyed the plath choice mossy, she really is a cheerful lass!
been looking for poems about strength and endurance and curiously this one came up on the search by an old favourite bukowski, perhaps this will give some of us a little more ooompf on the hills this weekend....
Roll the Dice
by Charles Bukowski
if you’re going to try, go all the
way.
otherwise, don’t even start.
if you’re going to try, go all the
way. this could mean losing girlfriends,
wives, relatives, jobs and
maybe your mind.
go all the way.
it could mean not eating for 3 or
4 days.
it could mean freezing on a
park bench.
it could mean jail,
it could mean derision,
mockery,
isolation.
isolation is the gift,
all the others are a test of your
endurance, of
how much you really want to
do it.
and you’ll do it
despite rejection and the
worst odds
and it will be better than
anything else
you can imagine.
if you’re going to try,
go all the way.
there is no other feeling like
that.
you will be alone with the
gods
and the nights will flame with
fire.
do it, do it, do it.
do it.
all the way
all the way.
you will ride life straight to
perfect laughter,
it’s the only good fight
there is.
Fantastic choice Freckle...just what I needed to read and very apt for your challenge tomorrow and mine next weekend. Good luck...may you run like the wind! :-)
Quote:
Originally Posted by freckle
Great choice freckle and I hope it inspired you at the Anni Waltz yesterday.Quote:
Originally Posted by freckle
SOUNDS OF THE DAY
When a clatter came,
it was horses crossing the ford.
When the air creaked, it was
a lapwing seeing us off the premises
of its private marsh. A snuffling puff
ten yards from the boat was the tide blocking and
unblocking a hole in a rock.
When the black drums rolled, it was water
falling sixty feet into itself.
When the door
scraped shut, it was the end
of all the sounds there are.
You left me
beside the quietest fire in the world.
I thought I was hurt in my pride only,
forgetting that,
when you plunge your hand in freezing water,
you feel
a bangle of ice around your wrist
before the whole hand goes numb.
Norman Maccaig
Like it freckle, life is for living, hope you had a good Waltz:thumbup:Quote:
Originally Posted by freckle
I Have Longed to Move Away
I have longed to move away
From the hissing of the spent lie
And the old terrors' continual cry
Growing more terrible as the day
Goes over the hill into the deep sea;
I have longed to move away
From the repetition of salutes,
For there are ghosts in the air
And ghostly echoes on paper,
And the thunder of calls and notes.
I have longed to move away but am afraid;
Some life, yet unspent, might explode
Out of the old lie burning on the ground,
And, crackling into the air, leave me half-blind.
Neither by night's ancient fear,
The parting of hat from hair,
Pursed lips at the receiver,
Shall I fall to death's feather.
By these I would not care to die,
Half convention and half lie.
Dylan Thomas
Oooo a slick choice there alf...the delayed reaction of loss so succintly described in the last two lines...lush imagery!Quote:
Originally Posted by Alf
"I AM IN AGONY!"......following staurdays anniversary waltz, every inch of me is sore...sore feet, knacky calves and even a sore arm (how?)....but i "improved" somewhat (largely by turning left), drank free beer and even saw the mighty Joss at the end!...what more can a gal want?
here is a poem....
"I Am"
by John Clare
I am: yet what I am no one cares or knows;
My friends forsake me like a memory lost:
I am the self-consumer of my woes—
They rise and vanish in oblivious host,
Like shadows in love’s frenzied, stifled throes—
And yet I am, and live—like vapors tossed
Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life or joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my life’s esteems;
Even the dearest, that I love the best,
Are strange—nay, rather stranger than the rest.
I long for scenes, where man has never trod,
A place where woman never smiled or wept—
There to abide with my Creator God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept,
Untroubling, and untroubled where I lie,
The grass below—above the vaulted sky.
John Clare wrote “I Am” late in life, after release from a mental institution, apparently during his time there he claimed to be Shakespeare and Lord Byron, with volumes of their work re-written to prove his case. I think this poem eloquently described the disorientating experience of suffering from acute mental distress and I find his longing for the days before he was ill (as a child) very touching.
For the Kinder Trespassers
Taken from ‘A Man in Assynt '
Who owns this landscape?
Has owning anything to do with love?
For it and I have a love-affair, so nearly human
we even have quarrels. –
When I intrude too confidently
it rebuffs me with a wind like a hand
or puts in my way
a quaking bog or a loch
where no loch should be. Or I turn stonily
away, refusing to notice
the rouged rocks, the mascara
under a dripping ledge, even
the tossed, the stony limbs waiting.
I can’t pretend
it gets sick for me in my absence,
though I get
sick for it. Yet I love it
with special gratitude, since
it sends me no letters, is never
jealous and, expecting nothing
from me, gets nothing but
cigarette packets and footprints.
Norman MacCaig