Poetry

[Harp]

Oh Barcelona, queen of Europe's cities,
From dulcet thoughts of you my guts are twisted
With bitter pain of longing for your sights,
And for your hills, your picturesque glory singing,
My feet are mutinous, mine eyes are misted.
Upon my happy thoughts your harbor lights
Are shimmering like bells melodious ringing
With sweet cadenzas of flanenco ditties.

Claude McKay, Barcelona

Robert Hughes' Barcelona escaped my clutches and remains unread.
McKay's poem serves sufficient reminder and the December 2010 National Geographic features the Sagrada Familia.
Cannot wait to see this town.

 

[Harp]

Anyhow you had to perish Hamlet you were not for life
you believed in crystal notions not in human clay
always twitching as if asleep you hunted chimeras...
you chose the easier part an elegant thrust
but what is heroic death compared with eternal watching
with a cold apple in one's hand on a narrow chair
with a view of the ant-hill and the clock's dial

Zbigniew Herbert, Elegy of Fortinbras

 

[John Boyer]

Yes
even when I don't believe
there is a place in me inaccessible to unbelief
a patch of wild grace
a stubborn preserve
impenetrable
pain untouched sleeping in the body
music that builds its nest in silence

-Anna Kamienska

 

[Harp]

'Like thieves'-in Simone Weil's wonderful words-
'on the cross of space and time
we human beings are nailed.'
I drift off, and the splinters shock me awake....

Janos Pilinszky, Extract From A Diary

 

[Harp]

Not that great German master in his dreams
Of harmonies that thundered amongst the stars
At the creation, ever heard a theme
Nobler than "Go Down Moses." Mark its bars
How like a mighty trumpet call they stir
The Blood. Such are the notes that men have sung
Going to valorous deeds; such tones there were
That helped make History when Time was young.

James Weldon Johnson, O Black and Unknown Bards

 

[Harp]

No single thing abides, but all things flow.
Fragment to fragment clings; the things thus grow.
Until we know and name them. By degrees
They melt, and are no more the things we know.

Lucretius

 

[John Boyer]

The Rest is Grace

Fear and dream
were my father and mother.
The corridor was the
opening landscape.

That's how I lived. How shall I die?
How am I going to perish?

Earth will betray me. She'll take me in her arms.
The rest is grace.

-Janos Pilinszky

 

[Harp]

John:

I keep your gift, The Poetry of Survival close for daily reference.
Such an elegiac collection of souls....

 

[John Boyer]

John:

I keep your gift, The Poetry of Survival close for daily reference.
Such an elegiac collection of souls....

Harp:

I am delighted you are enjoying The Poetry of Survival; it is a wonderful anthology. Also, I am happy you have reintroduced me to Janos Pilinszky . Would you happen to have a title for your earlier post from Pilinszky"s diary? I may want to order this book. John

 

[Harp]

Crater. Poems 1974-75, trans. Peter Jay. London: Anvil Press Poetry, 1978.

 

[John Boyer]

Tasting Heaven

Some people say that every poem should have
God in it somewhere. But of course Wallace Stevens
Wasn't one of those. We live, he said, "in a world
Without heaven to follow." Shall we agree

That we taste heaven only once, when we see
Her at fifteen walking among falling leaves?
It's possible. And yet Stevens lay dying
He invited the priest in. There, I've said it.

The priest is not an argument, only an instance.
But our gusty emotions say to me that we have
Tasted heaven many times: these delicacies
Are left over from some larger party.

-Robert Bly

 

[Harp]

It whistles off the stars
And the existential, stark
Face of the cosmic dark.

Derek Mahon, 'North Wind: Portrush'

 

[John Boyer]

Perfect Reverence

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world;
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

-W.B. Yeats, "The Second Coming")

 

[rue]

If you were coming in the Fall,
I'd brush the Summer by
With half a smile, and half a spurn,
As Housewives do, a Fly.
If I could see you in a year,
I'd wind the months in balls—
And put them each in separate Drawers,
For fear the numbers fuse—
If only Centuries, delayed,
I'd count them on my Hand,
Subtracting, till my fingers dropped
Into Van Dieman's Land.
If certain, when this life was out—
That your's and mine, should be—
I'd toss it yonder, like a Rind,
And take Eternity—
But now, uncertain of the length
Of this, that is between,
It goads me, like the Goblin Bee—
That will not state—its sting.

Emily Dickinson

 

[John Boyer]

Loving him, the mother takes thread in hand;
Leaving her, he'll have this coat on his shoulders.
Now that he's about to go, she mends with fine, fine stitches;
She knows the fear that he'll be gone a long, long time.
Who would say the heart of a tiny blade of grass
Could repay the sun for all the warmth of spring?

-Meng Chiao (751-814 CE Tang Dynasty)

 

[Harp]

I do confess it Faustus, and rejoice.
'Twas I, that when thou wert i' the way to heaven
Damned up thy passage. When thou took'st the book
To view the scriptures, then I turned the leaves
And led thine eye.

Mephostophilis' Reply

 

[John Boyer]

"Sonnet"

Caught-the bubble
in the spirit-level,
a creature divided;
and the compass needle
wobbling and wavering,
undecided.
Freed-the broken
thermometer's mercury
running away;
and the rainbow-bird
from the narrow bevel
of the empty mirror,
flying wherever
if feels like, gay!

-Elizabeth Bishop

 

[Harp]

The man who searches deeply for the truth,
and wishes to avoid being deceived by false leads,
must turn the light of his inner vision upon himself.
He must guide his soaring thoughts back again
and teach his spirit that it possesses hidden
among its own treasures
whatever it seeks outside itself.

Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy; Bk III, Poem XI

 

[John Boyer]

I thought of walking round and round a space
Utterly empty, utterly a source
Where the decked chestnut tree had lost its place
In our front hedge above the wallflowers.
The white chips jumped and jumped and skited high.
I heard the hatchet's differentiated
Accurate cut, the crack, the sigh
And collapse of what luxuriated
Through the shocked tips and wreckage of it all.
Deep planted and long gone, my coeval
Chestnut from a jam jar in a hole,
Its heft and hush become a bright nowhere,
A soul ramifying and forever
Silent, beyond silence listened for.

-Seamus Heaney

 

[Harp]

They say there's a secret charm which lies
In some wild floweret's bell,
That grows in a vale where the west wind sighs,
And where secrets best may dwell;

And they who can find the fairy flower,
A treasure possess that might grace a throne;
For, oh! they can rule with the softest power
The heart they would make their own.

Samuel Lover, The Charm