A Haiku in every port made me smile Alf
Tiger beer is a huge international brand and the beer with the Elephant on is Chang. I'm with Hes, and prefer Chang to Shinga, which has a Lion on the label and which I always find a bit fizzy; not that it's ever stopped me guzzling it!![]()
I am reading this at the moment freckle http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2003...uardianreview5 and its very good(£7 paperback new free delivery Amazon)
He is buried in Helpston churchyard near Peterborough and the inscription on his gravestone reads:
"A Poet is born not made"![]()
Japan
Today I pass the time reading
a favorite haiku,
saying the few words over and over.
It feels like eating
the same small, perfect grape
again and again.
I walk through the house reciting it
and leave its letters falling
through the air of every room.
I stand by the big silence of the piano and say it.
I say it in front of a painting of the sea.
I tap out its rhythm on an empty shelf.
I listen to myself saying it,
then I say it without listening,
then I hear it without saying it.
And when the dog looks up at me,
I kneel down on the floor
and whisper it into each of his long white ears.
It's the one about the one-ton temple bell
with the moth sleeping on its surface,
and every time I say it, I feel the excruciating
pressure of the moth
on the surface of the iron bell.
When I say it at the window,
the bell is the world
and I am the moth resting there.
When I say it at the mirror,
I am the heavy bell
and the moth is life with its papery wings.
And later, when I say it to you in the dark,
you are the bell,
and I am the tongue of the bell, ringing you,
and the moth has flown
from its line
and moves like a hinge in the air above our bed
Billy Collins
on the one ton temple bell
a moon-moth, folded into sleep,
sits still
Taniguchi Buson
On Reading Another Poet
I think we are being given the same messages
that oracles are speaking in our dreams
warning admonition code
syllables of unknown meaning.
We are not in competition.
If I say the same thing
it is not because I copy
but because the voice says so.
Maybe there will be hundreds of us
like choric echoes.
It will not matter
that the words repeat themselves
so long as what is said
rises like the tide in all our separate waves
and beats upon and shapes the dreaming shore
Elizabeth Brewster
This is a very touching, heartfelt poem Hes. Your dilemma reminded me of this Larkin poem:
Philip Larkin - Love, We Must Part Now
Love, we must part now: do not let it be
Calamitious and bitter. In the past
There has been too much moonlight and self-pity:
Let us have done with it: for now at last
Never has sun more boldly paced the sky,
Never were hearts more eager to be free,
To kick down worlds, lash forests; you and I
No longer hold them; we are husks, that see
The grain going forward to a different use.
There is regret. Always, there is regret.
But it is better that our lives unloose,
As two tall ships, wind-mastered, wet with light,
Break from an estuary with their courses set,
And waving part, and waving drop from sight.
Am Yisrael Chai
7 posts short of the 10,000 on this thread!
A foolish idea Freckle, that was never going to catch on.