Cracking stuff tonight. Excuse my lazyness - I'm in consuming mode at he moment. No doubt the muse will strike sooner rather than later.
Hes! Great to see you following rising to the standard of the travelling Tup!. And Paul S - welcome and thanks for the contribution. I think it was you who put the paper round poem up - nice and relevant for me - I seem to be out most mornings with daughter number 3 reliving my teenage years with a paper bag on my shoulder!.
Last edited by Old Whippet; 11-12-2009 at 01:05 AM.
Short, 'speedy', head-torchless and moonless 6 miler tonight...inspired this ditty haiku...
Orion spectates,
it's not my running he rates
Shooting Star - explodes.
Am Yisrael Chai
love this mossy sounds like a fab run!...some great stuff on here tonight tri mind i loved your poem....i have been out for the evening on an "enchanted walk" at saltwell park, very christmassy (magical lights etc)...think i may have to turn in soon.....pooped and zapped...but will try and find something b4 i go....Originally Posted by Mossdog
Short, 'speedy', head-torchless and moonless 6 miler tonight...inspired this ditty haiku...
Orion spectates,
it's not my running he rates
Shooting Star - explodes.
SWANS MATING
MICHAEL LONGLEY
Even now I wish that you had been there
Sitting beside me on the riverbank:
The cob and his pen sailing in rhythm
Until their small heads met and the final
Heraldic moment dissolved in ripples.
This was a marriage and a baptism,
A holding of breath, nearly a drowning,
Wings spread wide for balance where he trod,
Her feathers full of water and her neck
Under the water like a bar of light.
good night all, i is soon offski
morning all!
Oatmeal
I eat oatmeal for breakfast.
I make it on the hot plate and put skimmed milk on it.
I eat it alone.
I am aware it is not good to eat oatmeal alone.
Its consistency is such that is better for your mental health.
if somebody eats it with you.
That is why I often think up an imaginary companion to have
breakfast with.
Possibly it is even worse to eat oatmeal with an imaginary
companion.
Nevertheless, yesterday morning, I ate my oatmeal porridge,
as he called it with John Keats.
Keats said I was absolutely right to invite him:
due to its glutinous texture, gluey lumpishness, hint of slime,
and unsual willingness to disintigrate, oatmeal should
not be eaten alone.
He said that in his opinion, however, it is perfectly OK to eat
it with an imaginary companion, and that he himself had
enjoyed memorable porridges with Edmund Spenser and John
Milton.
Even if eating oatmeal with an imaginary companion is not as
wholesome as Keats claims, still, you can learn something
from it.
Yesterday morning, for instance, Keats told me about writing the
"Ode to a Nightingale."
He had a heck of a time finishing it those were his words "Oi 'ad
a 'eck of a toime," he said, more or less, speaking through
his porridge.
He wrote it quickly, on scraps of paper, which he then stuck in his
pocket,
but when he got home he couldn't figure out the order of the stanzas,
and he and a friend spread the papers on a table, and they
made some sense of them, but he isn't sure to this day if
they got it right.
An entire stanza may have slipped into the lining of his jacket
through a hole in his pocket.
He still wonders about the occasional sense of drift between stanzas,
and the way here and there a line will go into the
configuration of a Moslem at prayer, then raise itself up
and peer about, and then lay \ itself down slightly off the mark,
causing the poem to move forward with a reckless, shining wobble.
He said someone told him that later in life Wordsworth heard about
the scraps of paper on the table, and tried shuffling some
stanzas of his own, but only made matters worse.
I would not have known any of this but for my reluctance to eat oatmeal
alone.
When breakfast was over, John recited "To Autumn."
He recited it slowly, with much feeling, and he articulated the words
lovingly, and his odd accent sounded sweet.
He didn't offer the story of writing "To Autumn," I doubt if there
is much of one.
But he did say the sight of a just-harvested oat field go thim started
on it, and two of the lines, "For Summer has o'er-brimmed their
clammy cells" and "Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours,"
came to him while eating oatmeal alone.
I can see him drawing a spoon through the stuff, gazing into the glimmering
furrows, muttering.
Maybe there is no sublime; only the shining of the amnion's tatters.
For supper tonight I am going to have a baked potato left over from lunch.
I am aware that a leftover baked potato is damp, slippery, and simultaneaously
gummy and crumbly, and therefore I'm going to invite Patrick Kavanagh
to join me.
Galway Kinnell
Standing in a foggy, frosty field of stubble this morning, just before light, with the dogs running around i was reminded of this....the 1st of 42 verses. (I'll spare you the rest).
The Eve of St. Agnes
John Keats
St. Agnes' Eve - Ah, bitter chill it was!
The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold;
The hare limp'd trembling through the frozen grass,
And silent was the flock in woolly fold:
Numb were the Beadsman's fingers, while he told
His rosary, and while his frosted breath,
Like pious incense from a censer old,
Seem'd taking flight for heaven, without a death,
Past the sweet Virgin's picture, while his prayer he saith.
Probably a bit warmer in Mumbai.
Last edited by Old Whippet; 11-12-2009 at 01:02 PM.
and as this old moon fades...we get the new moon on 16/12....
To the Moon
By Giacomo Leopardi
I remember, gracious, graceful moon
When just a year ago, upon the hill
I came, filled with pain, to gaze at you
And you were hanging then above that woods
As you are now, and brightening everything.
Your face, however, then looked dim and trembling
To me, because I saw it through the tears
Rising to my eyes, my life was so
Unhappy, and still is, and doesn't change
O my beloved moon. And yet it pleases me
This memory, and to feel again the time
Of my unhappiness. How good it is
In youthful years, when hope is still far-reaching
And memory does not go back so far
To go back to past things, even when those things
Are sad, and when the sadness has not ended!
How utterly breathtakingly beautiful is this poem which I have never come across before...don't ya just love the moon?....thank you OW and hope to bump into you at simonside cairns sunday along with my bruv, you never know I might even fit a snecklifter in if I am still standing!!!!...
well, that's it i'm just in a moon mood now!.......
By Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)
The moving Moon went up the sky.
And nowhere did abide;
Softly she was going up,
And a star or two beside-
THE HALF MOON SHOWS
A FACE OF PLAINTIVE SWEETNESS
The half moon shows a face of plaintive sweetness
Ready and poised to wax or wane;
A fire of pale desire in incompleteness,
Tending to pleasure or to pain:-
Lo, while we gaze she rolleth on in fleetness
To perfect loss or perfect gain.
Half bitterness we know, we know half sweetness;
This world is all on wax, on wane:
When shall completeness round time's incompleteness,
Fulfilling joy, fulfilling pain?-
Lo, while we ask, life rolleth on in fleetness
To finished loss or finished gain.
C. Rossetti
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