I need to dedicate more time to this thread
I need to dedicate more time to this thread
snowy white egrets
patrolling boggy margins
Mekong Delta
pair of wheeling swifts
sickle shaped, highly mobile
greying Saigon skies
Pair of traffic conesOriginally Posted by Derby Tup
submerged and covered in sludge
sunny Leeds Liverpool canal
Now this is what I like to see, three haikus in a row with the last from the stollster! nice onePair of traffic cones
submerged and covered in sludge
sunny Leeds Liverpool canal
I like it Stolly (and yours too DT). Can't help but procrastinate a little....
ink in strange places
getting high on solvent fumes
but prints nearly done
Pair of traffic cones
submerged and covered in sludge
sunny Leeds Liverpool canal
Hiya Freckle, my yoga classes have been brilliant but embarrassing, I'm the fittest but least flexible in the group and can't help making squeaking and groaning noises whenever my hamstrings are involved. Last week I got hiccups doing 'body drops'...could have been worse I suppose!
WHAT IS IT, THEN?
What is it, then, to love the world
sipping its colour-patched enchantment
from nub and frond, sepal or wavelet,
to pierce unutterable blurring
and perceive things clear?
To do so will not stop the bombs
nor silence fatal scripture-freaks.
Oh, no. Seeing this fretwork patterning
of jacaranda on macadam
is no more than good in itself.
To lounge and think about beauty,
"the unplumbed salt estranging sea",
or a spider's wiry legs, twitching,
only means owning art's eye,
so there some of us are:
neither a diplomat nor a killer be -
a good thing, on the whole -
but we claim our planetary vote
in flashes or yearnings of
ostensible peace. And so there.
by Chris Wallace-Crabbe
In the interest of furthering my artistic knowledge (honest gov) I was trawling the net and came across a blog with an article about a poet who has written poems based on the life of the artist Frida Kahlo, a favourite of mine. The stuff on the blog is mainly very powerful excerpts on her accident, sex and death but here one based on one of her paintings.
Self-Portrait with Monkey
The bristles on my brushes work
like furtive birds. Hours pass.
When the painting starts to rustle,
Fulang-Chang grips my neck,
too frightened even to yelp. As if
the leaves are hiding a forest floor
where I have buried a troop of monkeys
alive. As if the only sound in this
whole house is the breathing of animals
through thin straws, even tonight,
when it’s too late, and I am long dead.
And you, brave viewer, meet my gaze.
Katrina Naomi
This was on R3 late last night and reviewed by Andrew Motion. The poet is Elizabeth Bishop and I think she spent quite some timein Brazil - quite interesting anyway.
Questions of Travel
There are too many waterfalls here; the crowded streams
hurry too rapidly down to the sea,
and the pressure of so many clouds on the mountaintops
makes them spill over the sides in soft slow-motion,
turning to waterfalls under our very eyes.
--For if those streaks, those mile-long, shiny, tearstains,
aren't waterfalls yet,
in a quick age or so, as ages go here,
they probably will be.
But if the streams and clouds keep travelling, travelling,
the mountains look like the hulls of capsized ships,
slime-hung and barnacled.
Think of the long trip home.
Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?
Where should we be today?
Is it right to be watching strangers in a play
in this strangest of theatres?
What childishness is it that while there's a breath of life
in our bodies, we are determined to rush
to see the sun the other way around?
The tiniest green hummingbird in the world?
To stare at some inexplicable old stonework,
inexplicable and impenetrable,
at any view,
instantly seen and always, always delightful?
Oh, must we dream our dreams
and have them, too?
And have we room
for one more folded sunset, still quite warm?
But surely it would have been a pity
not to have seen the trees along this road,
really exaggerated in their beauty,
not to have seen them gesturing
like noble pantomimists, robed in pink.
--Not to have had to stop for gas and heard
the sad, two-noted, wooden tune
of disparate wooden clogs
carelessly clacking over
a grease-stained filling-station floor.
(In another country the clogs would all be tested.
Each pair there would have identical pitch.)
--A pity not to have heard
the other, less primitive music of the fat brown bird
who sings above the broken gasoline pump
in a bamboo church of Jesuit baroque:
three towers, five silver crosses.
--Yes, a pity not to have pondered,
blurr'dly and inconclusively,
on what connection can exist for centuries
between the crudest wooden footwear
and, careful and finicky,
the whittled fantasies of wooden footwear
and, careful and finicky,
the whittled fantasies of wooden cages.
--Never to have studied history in
the weak calligraphy of songbirds' cages.
--And never to have had to listen to rain
so much like politicians' speeches:
two hours of unrelenting oratory
and then a sudden golden silence
in which the traveller takes a notebook, writes:
"Is it lack of imagination that makes us come
to imagined places, not just stay at home?
Or could Pascal have been not entirely right
about just sitting quietly in one's room?
Continent, city, country, society:
the choice is never wide and never free.
And here, or there . . . No. Should we have stayed at home,
wherever that may be?"
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