Today's poet

Here's another one that resonates well with fell running -especially verse 2

Sylvia Plath - Wuthering Heights

The horizons ring me like faggots,
Tilted and disparate, and always unstable.
Touched by a match, they might warm me,
And their fine lines singe
The air to orange
Before the distances they pin evaporate,
Weighting the pale sky with a soldier color.
But they only dissolve and dissolve
Like a series of promises, as I step forward.

There is no life higher than the grasstops
Or the hearts of sheep, and the wind
Pours by like destiny, bending
Everything in one direction.
I can feel it trying
To funnel my heat away.
If I pay the roots of the heather
Too close attention, they will invite me
To whiten my bones among them.

The sheep know where they are,
Browsing in their dirty wool-clouds,
Gray as the weather.
The black slots of their pupils take me in.
It is like being mailed into space,
A thin, silly message.
They stand about in grandmotherly disguise,
All wig curls and yellow teeth
And hard, marbly baas.

I come to wheel ruts, and water
Limpid as the solitudes
That flee through my fingers.
Hollow doorsteps go from grass to grass;
Lintel and sill have unhinged themselves.
Of people and the air only
Remembers a few odd syllables.
It rehearses them moaningly:
Black stone, black stone.

The sky leans on me, me, the one upright
Among all horizontals.
The grass is beating its head distractedly.
It is too delicate
For a life in such company;
Darkness terrifies it.
Now, in valleys narrow
And black as purses, the house lights
Gleam like small change.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by freckle

Right now what I know as certain and right
Is that you are the sun, the source of my light
I don't need many things expensive or new
What I need is your time, your love and you.

xxx

---

dear mountain goatess...this is so lovely i came close to blubbing at this last paragraph.....

loved everyone's stuff today...keep it coming :)[/QUOTE]

I know...it gets my bottom lip quivering every time! ha

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Mossdog

Here's another one that resonates well with fell running -especially verse 2

This poem is AWESOME....especially this bit....

If I pay the roots of the heather
Too close attention, they will invite me
To whiten my bones among them.

and...

The sky leans on me, me, the one upright
Among all horizontals.
The grass is beating its head distractedly.
It is too delicateFor a life in such company;
Darkness terrifies it.

and oh......finally

Now, in valleys narrow
And black as purses, the house lights
Gleam like small change.

---

thank you :)

Ozymandias

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away

(Percy Bysshe) Shelley

Fantastic! (though nothing to do with fell running...)

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by freckle

[/COLOR][/COLOR]
thank you :)

---

Pleasure :)

this one isn't to do with fell running but i love it nevertheless.....gets me everytime....

The threadby Don Peterson

Jamie made his landing in the world
so hard he ploughed straight back into the earth.
They caught him by the thread of his one breath
and pulled him up. They don't know how it held.
And so today I thank what higher will
brought us to here, to you and me and Russ,
the great twin-engined swaying wingspan of us
roaring down the back of Kirrie Hill

and your two-year-old lungs somehow out-revving
every engine in the universe.
All that trouble just to turn up dead
was all I thought that long week. Now the thread
is holding all of us: look at our tiny house,
son, the white dot of your mother waving.

:)

It is about the traumatic birth of his son and so much more...i love that last line....

When travelling from Bradford,
To Bristol Templemeads.
You don't have to change yourunderpants,
But you have to change at Leeds.

John Hegley beats Wordsworth any day of the week!

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Harry H Howgill

When travelling from Bradford,
To Bristol Templemeads.
You don't have to change yourunderpants,
But you have to change at Leeds.

John Hegley beats Wordsworth any day of the week!

---

tee hee!

There are a few books about the poetry of athletics:

"Running in Literature" by Roger Robinson ( 2003) is the best general book that contains a number of poems about athletics. There are many other books containing individual poems.

Quote:

---

1993 A Time To Reflect(Travis, Peter)
1987 Sporting Literature. An Anthology (Scannell, Vernon; Editor)
1986 One Track Mind. A Runner's Primer Of Poetry (Obeng, Ernest)
1982 Pindar. The Odes (Penguin Classics) (Bowra, C M)
1979 Athletics Is My Joy, My One And Only Love And Other Poems (Johnson, Derek J N)
1977 Run to Reality (Eischens, Roger R; Greist, John H and McInvaille, Tom)
1973 Poems Of a Long Distance Runner (Spino, Mike)
1970 Cotswold Games, Annalia Dubrensia (Vyvyan, E R Editor)
1965 Sprints And Distance. Sports In Poetry And The Poetry Of Sports (Morrison, Lillian)
1964 Pindar (Bowra, C A)
1937 Track And Field (Bostelmann, Carl John)
1930 Anthology Of Sporting Verse (Osborn, E B)
1912 Vergil's Athletic Sports. Selected from Vergil's Aeneid (Winbolt, S E Editor)
1905 The Athlete's Garland (Rice, Grantland)
1903 The Olympic And Pythian Odes Of Pindar (Dole, Nathan Haskell)
1896 A Shropshire Lad. To An Athlete Dying Young (Poem XIX) (Housman, Alfred Edward)
1888 Atalanta's Race And Other Tales from The Earthly Paradise by (William Morris Adams, Oscar Fay and Rolfe,
William J Editors)
1883 Pindar's Nemean And Isthmian Odes (Fennell, C A M (Editor)
1879 Dramatic Idylls (1st Series. Includes The poem "Pheidippides") (Browning, Robert)
1775 Six Olympic Odes Of Pindar, etc. (Pye, Henry James)
1748 Pastorals, Epistles, Odes, And Other Original Poems (Philips, Ambrose)
1740 Hobbinol Or The Rural Games. A Burlesque Poem In Blank Verse (Somerville, William)
1713 Olympic Odes Of Pindar (Sternhold and Hopkins)

---

Pure Peace Music
Li Po

The mist is deep, the waters are broad;
Tidings and letters have no way to reach him.
Only in the azure sky there is the moon beyond the clouds,
Minded to shine on the love lorn pair so far apart.
All day things remind me and wound my heart;
My sad eyebrows are like a lock that's hard to open.
Night after night I ever keep for him the half of my quilt
In expectation of his spirit-coming back to me in a dream.

old chinese poem (T'ang dynasty)