Today's poet

[Hes]

I found the Rumi poem that was on my yoga dvd (Maya Fiennes doing kundalini yoga...very active yoga which is perfect for me!). It was read by Deepak Chopra and is called Bittersweet. I particularly like this excerpt:

I am your moon
and your moonlight too
I am your flower garden
and your water too

I have come all this way
eager for you
Without shoes or shawl

I want you to laugh
to kill all your worries
to love you, to nourish you

Oh Sweet Bitterness!
I will sooth you and heal you.
I will bring you roses.
I too have been covered with thorns.

[Mossdog]

may my heart always be open to little...

may my heart always be open to little
birds who are the secrets of living
whatever they sing is better than to know
and if men should not hear them men are old

may my mind stroll about hungry
and fearless and thirsty and supple
and even if it's sunday may i be wrong
for whenever men are right they are not young

and may myself do nothing usefully
and love yourself so more than truly
there's never been quite such a fool who could fail
pulling all the sky over him with one smile.


e.e. cummings

[Mossdog]

Light

I look behind and after
And find that all is right,
In my deepest sorrows
There is a soul of light.

- Swami Vivekananda

Too true.

[Hes]

Text

I tend the mobile now
like an injured bird

We text, text, text
our significant words.

I re-read your first,
your second, your third,

look for your small xx,
feeling absurd.

The codes we send
arrive with a broken chord.

I try to picture your hands,
their image is blurred.

Nothing my thumbs press
will ever be heard.

Carol Ann Duffy, from Rapture

[Hes]

Evening Mossy! I like this, I really must get myself a book of cummings poetry (and I'll try not to be cross with the jackdaws waking me up at 5am)

may my heart always be open to little...

may my heart always be open to little
birds who are the secrets of living
whatever they sing is better than to know
and if men should not hear them men are old

may my mind stroll about hungry
and fearless and thirsty and supple
and even if it's sunday may i be wrong
for whenever men are right they are not young

and may myself do nothing usefully
and love yourself so more than truly
there's never been quite such a fool who could fail
pulling all the sky over him with one smile.


e.e. cummings

[dominion]

Text

I tend the mobile now
like an injured bird

We text, text, text
our significant words.

I re-read your first,
your second, your third,

look for your small xx,
feeling absurd.

The codes we send
arrive with a broken chord.

I try to picture your hands,
their image is blurred.

Nothing my thumbs press
will ever be heard.

Carol Ann Duffy, from Rapture

This epitomises one of my pet hates at work! The number of people who walk around with their phone constantly in their hand reading texts and emails does my head in! If I send more than one text mesage a week it's too many for me!

[Hes]

That made me laugh Dominion...I used to hate mobile phones and still can't abide the way some people use their phones with complete disregard to the people that they are actually in the company of but I have to say that I have a fondness for texts and I like the way that different friends have different styles and its interesting how I adapt my style to suit them. Sometimes, a text arrives when you least expect it and totally cheers your day up...but that's just my opinion!

This epitomises one of my pet hates at work! The number of people who walk around with their phone constantly in their hand reading texts and emails does my head in! If I send more than one text mesage a week it's too many for me!

[Stevie]

I heard a poem about a yearning for ribbon tied collections of love letters over text, email, facebook etc at the weekend, and I know what the poet was getting at, but like you say Hes there is a place for texting etc, as long as it doesn't dominate your life. There has to be a balance.

[Stevie]

I hope you like this one by Paul Farley. There is a big investment in time to read it (for a forum anyway), but it does gradually work its magic.

Laws of Gravity (for Julian Turner) by Paul Farley

I found a guidebook to the port he knew
intimately - its guano-coated ledges,
its weathervanes, his bird's eye river view
of liner funnels, coal sloops and dredgers.
It helped me gain a foothold - how he felt
a hundred rungs above a fifties street,
and whether, being so high, he ever dwelt
on suicide, or flummoxed his feet
to last night's dance steps, still fresh in his head.
It's all here in his ledger's marginalia:
how he fell up the dark stairwell to bed
and projected right through to Australia;
and said a prayer for rainfall every night
so he could skip his first hungovered round.
The dates he's noted chamois frozen tight
into bucket. When he left the ground
a sense of purpose overtook and let
a different set of laws come into play:
like muezzins who ascend a minaret
to call the faithful of a town to pray.
Take one step at a time. Nover look down.
He'd seen the hardest cases freeze halfway,
the arse-flap of their overalls turn brown.
As a rule, he writes, your sense of angle
becomes a acute at height. A diagram
he's thumbnailed shows a deep drop through a triangle
if you miscalculated by a gram.
Sometimes, his senses still blunted from booze,
he'd drop his squeegee, watch it fall to earth
and he'd cling onto the grim hypoteneuse
of his own making for all he was worth.
He seems to have enjoyed working that hour
the low sun caught the glass and raised the ante
on every aerial, flue and cooling tower,
and gilded the lofts, the rooftop shanty
town, when everything was full of itself,
and for a while even the Latin plaques
ignited with the glow of squandered wealth.
At times like these I see what our world lacks,
the light of heaven on what we've produced
and here some words lost where his biro bled
then clouds of dark birds zero in to roost.
There's IOUs and debtors marked in red
and some description of the things he saw
beyond the pane - a hard-lit typing pool,
a room of faces on some vanished floor
closed off and absolute like a fixed rule.
His story of the boy butting a wall,
the secretary crying at her desk,
all happened in the air above a mall.
Each edifice, each gargoyle and grotesque,
is gone. The earliest thing I remember:
as our van dropped a gear up Brownlow Hill
I looked back at the panes of distemper
that sealed a world. We reached our overspill,
and this is where our stories overlap.
The coming of the cradle and sheet glass
was squeezing out the ladder and the slap
of leather into suds, and less and less
work came through the door. And anyway
you were getting too old for scaling heights.
Now, when I change a bulb or queue to pay
at fairs, or when I'm checking into flights,
I feel our difference bit down to the quick.
There are no guidebooks to that town you knew
and this attempt to build it, brick by brick,
descends the page. I'll hold the foot for you.

[freckle]

may my heart always be open to little...

may my heart always be open to little
birds who are the secrets of living
whatever they sing is better than to know
and if men should not hear them men are old

may my mind stroll about hungry
and fearless and thirsty and supple
and even if it's sunday may i be wrong
for whenever men are right they are not young

and may myself do nothing usefully
and love yourself so more than truly
there's never been quite such a fool who could fail
pulling all the sky over him with one smile.


e.e. cummings

one of my fave e e cummings mossy , that last line is just gorgeous!

hes i really appreciated your two choices, the rumi one in particular was sweet.

stevie i will have to get back to your post as I have to be elsewhere in 5 mins but it looks intriguing....