Today's poet

[freckle]

lovely lttle interview iwth jo shapcott her on the importance of poetry here...

http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetrya...terviewId=6754

like simon armitage, i could listen to her calming voice for hours!

[freckle]

friday nights used to be filled with pablo neruda! ....i'll do my bit !

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFG66...layer_embedded

I like for you to be still
Pablo Neruda


I like for you to be still: it is as though you were absent,
and you hear me from far away and my voice does not touch you.
It seems as though your eyes had flown away
and it seems that a kiss had sealed your mouth.

As all things are filled with my soul
you emerge from the things, filled with my soul.
You are like my soul, a butterfly of dream,
and you are like the word Melancholy.

I like for you to be still, and you seem far away.
It sounds as though you were lamenting, a butterfly cooing like a dove.
And you hear me from far away, and my voice does not reach you:
Let me come to be still in your silence.

And let me talk to you with your silence
that is bright as a lamp, simple as a ring.
You are like the night, with its stillness and constellations.
Your silence is that of a star, as remote and candid.

I like for you to be still: it is as though you were absent,
distant and full of sorrow as though you had died.
One word then, one smile, is enough.
And I am happy, happy that it's not true.

[Hes]

ha ha ha...love the McGonagall style offering OW...much better than that Cavafy chap. I know what you mean about poetry and contentment...to be honest, I have been quite happy of late and have found that my poetry skills (if you can call them that) have really dropped off. Still, there's plenty of great poetry already written to tide us over until our next bouts of misery & angst:wink:

I'm very envious of you in the Ionian isles...I'm longing for a holiday and have been dreaming of Greek islands but might have to wait till next year now. Not to worry, there's plenty of good things here at home to be happy about.

If it's any consolation, contentment can seriously damage your poetry skills. And though the jury is out (as they say) race times may suffer too from a lack of misery and angst.

Look at this, as proof. (not of the times. That evidence is elsewhere).

A hound with a penchant for booze-o(sorry)
Did go to the land of the ouzo
With a spot of Metaxa,
Became quite a relaxer (sorry again)
With very little in common with Robinson Crusoe (I know – unforgivable)


I did find a poem about the area where I am temporarily basking, but I reckon it's even worse than mine....on many levels!

Ionian




Just because we've torn their statues down,
and cast them from their temples,
doesn't for a moment mean the gods are dead.
Land of Ionia, they love you yet,

their spirits still remember you.
When an August morning breaks upon you
a vigour from their lives stabs through your air;
and sometimes an ethereal and youthful form
in swiftest passage, indistinct,

passes up above your hills.


Constantine P Cavafy

Now that really is crap

[Hes]

Thanks for the posts Freckle, Neruda was just the right tone before bed.
I'll listen to Jo Shapcott tomorrow though as its getting late and I want to be up early for a big bike ride.x

[IanDarkpeak]

I got heavily bitten by midges last week and I quoted a line from a poem which has always seemed right but I've been unable to find the full version..any one reconises it..

I long for the ridges,
away from the midges.
up where the eagles fly.....

[Nathaniel Lee]

Diary of a Playwright.

Here amongst this noise,
It could drive a man who hast his wits out of them,
Cat 'o' nine tails are Gaolers joys,
This rank cesspool that is Bethlem.

Shackled cold, wet and witless,
For a penny they ogle my tortured soul,
I spring forward scare them shitless,
Then i shrink back inside my hole.

Nathaniel Lee.

[Hes]

Ahhh....what a lovely poem...

Romantics
BY LISEL MUELLER
Johannes Brahms and
Clara Schumann 

The modern biographers worry
“how far it went,” their tender friendship.
They wonder just what it means
when he writes he thinks of her constantly,
his guardian angel, beloved friend.
The modern biographers ask
the rude, irrelevant question
of our age, as if the event
of two bodies meshing together
establishes the degree of love,
forgetting how softly Eros walked
in the nineteenth-century, how a hand
held overlong or a gaze anchored
in someone’s eyes could unseat a heart,
and nuances of address not known
in our egalitarian language
could make the redolent air
tremble and shimmer with the heat
of possibility. Each time I hear
the Intermezzi, sad
and lavish in their tenderness,
I imagine the two of them
sitting in a garden
among late-blooming roses
and dark cascades of leaves,
letting the landscape speak for them,
leaving us nothing to overhear.

[Hes]

I have tried my best googling and to no avail....hope someone else can help!

I got heavily bitten by midges last week and I quoted a line from a poem which has always seemed right but I've been unable to find the full version..any one reconises it..

I long for the ridges,
away from the midges.
up where the eagles fly.....

[Hes]

Geology
BY BOB KING

I know the origin of rocks, settling
out of water, hatching crystals
from fire, put under pressure
in various designs I gathered
pretty, picnic after picnic.

And I know about love, a little,
igneous lust, the slow affections
of the sedimentary, the pressure
on earth out of sight to rise up
into material, something solid
you can hold, a whole mountain,
for example, or a loose collection
of pebbles you forgot you were keeping.

[Nathaniel Lee]

Day 1 Only 364 Days to go.

I lay cold in this unholy place,
Resting in my own filth,
Blood and scars mark my face,
Losing weight and my health.

Cruel gaolers spit in my gruel,
I must try to keep my wits,
Screams from the tortured fools,
Chained up against my wall in fits.

Nathaniel Lee.