The Gabster

Love said so wisely

28 Oct 06 @ 05:18 PM  category » poetry

This is a poem my sister Anne wrote out in Sunny's wedding book, which she had been given at her own wedding.

Author unknown, but quite simply beautiful.

I know only this, in all simplicity, I am a book
Thou hast chosen from the vast library of women.
Open me, I lie open.  The wind may lose my place,
But not another reader.  I, like all volumes, have secrets
To be read between the lines, but the words are there as well.
Unread, I am not worth the binding,
Unfinished, I am not worth beginning.
Read, I surrender what rewards I may.
Understood, I am life’s companion.
Rewritten, I may yet be improved upon.
Lent to an illiterate, I go to waste.
I cannot bring myself to life.  Only who reads me well
Will know what is written there, and knowing what is written,
Will know also that which destiny has failed to write.
But be not hard.  Judge me not always by perfection’s rote.
Think, instead, and humbly, how wonderful it is
The pages are not blank.  One final word:
Read not with impatience, for though life, they say, is short,
At moments, it seems long, and time will turn my pages
Soon enough……..

Not Even The Rain

29 Oct 05 @ 12:43 PM  category » poetry

One of ee cummings' poems that my friend David loves and from which he has taken "Not Even The Rain" as the name of his band.

somehwere i have never travelled,gladly beyond

any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose

or if your wish be to close me,i and
my life will shut very beautifully,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the colour of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain, has such small hands

        e.e.cummings

Auden

12 Sep 05 @ 01:03 PM  category » poetry

Nick was asked to give a reading at Dave and Justine's humanist wedding in France last weekend - but it had to be completely non-religious as Dave is an avowed atheist. Dawkins is one of Dave's favourite writers, but try as he could, Nick couldn't find anything suitable from his ouevre. Rather panicked, Nick spent the morning of the wedding searching for something right. We looked at all the standard stuff - Gilbran, Rumi, Khayyam, Shakespeare, ec - but Nick is not capable of recitng anything remotely sentimental, so those were struck out toute de suite.

Then we found a lovely Auden poem,  Lullabye, which seemed to hit all the right notes. The problem was, it is extremely hard to scan and read clearly and Nick found that he couldn't quite make sense of it. Nor can I, perhaps, but I like it enormously nonetheless.

"Lullabye" by W. H. Auden

Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm:
Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from
Thoughtful children, and the grave
Proves the child ephemeral:
But in my arms till break of day
Let the living creature lie,
Mortal, guilty, but to me
The entirely beautiful.

Soul and body have no bounds:
To lovers as they lie upon
Her tolerant enchanted slope
In their ordinary swoon,
Grave the vision Venus sends
Of supernatural sympathy,
Universal love and hope;
While an abstract insight wakes
Among the glaciers and the rocks
The hermit's carnal ecstacy.

Certainty, fidelity
On the stroke of midnight pass
Like vibrations of a bell
And fashionable madmen raise
Their pedantic boring cry:
Every farthing of the cost.
All the dreaded cards foretell.
Shall be paid, but from this night
Not a whisper, not a thought.
Not a kiss nor look be lost.

Beauty, midnight, vision dies:
Let the winds of dawn that blow
Softly round your dreaming head
Such a day of welcome show
Eye and knocking heart may bless,
Find our mortal world enough;
Noons of dryness find you fed
By the involuntary powers,
Nights of insult let you pass
Watched by every human love.

Update: after a conversation last night with an apparent expert on the subject of Auden, I've discovered that this was in fact written by Auden for his gay lover. News to me: his poetry does not show an overtly gay character. But I thus suppose it was no coincidence that the scriptwriter of Four Weddings and a Funeral - who arguably has made Auden's Funeral Blues (you know, "Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone...") one of the most famous, and now over-used, funeral poems of recent years - chose that particular tribute. I wonder how many homophobic old geezers in England have been turning in their coffins to hear these words spoken by their blissfully unaware loved ones?

Ozymandias

01 Sep 05 @ 01:15 PM  category » poetry

Re-reading this the other day reminded me of the ruins of Cyrus the Great at Pasargardae.

"Ozymandias" by Percy Bysshe Shelley

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert.  Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains.  Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Romanticism Then and Now

29 Aug 05 @ 01:20 PM  category » poetry

A good collection of great romantic poems: Romanticism Then and Now

Another favourite from Frost

25 Aug 05 @ 01:17 PM  category » poetry

"Acquainted With The Night" by Robert Frost

I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain--and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.
I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.
I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,
But not to call me back or say good-by;
And further still at an unearthly height,
One luminary clock against the sky
Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.

Light Breaks Where No Sun Shines

03 Apr 05 @ 09:36 PM  category » poetry

Dylan Thomas

Light breaks where no sun shines;
Where no sea runs, the waters of the heart
Push in their tides;
And, broken ghosts with glow-worms in their heads,
The things of light
File through the flesh where no flesh decks the bones.

A candle in the thighs
Warms youth and seed and burns the seeds of age;
Where no seed stirs,
The fruit of man unwrinkles in the stars,
Bright as a fig;
Where no wax is, the candle shows its hairs.

Dawn breaks behind the eyes;
From poles of skull and toe the windy blood
Slides like a sea;
Nor fenced, nor staked, the gushers of the sky
Spout to the rod
Divining in a smile the oil of tears.

Night in the sockets rounds,
Like some pitch moon, the limit of the globes;
Day lights the bone;
Where no cold is, the skinning gales unpin
The winter's robes;
The film of spring is hanging from the lids.

Light breaks on secret lots,
On tips of thought where thoughts smell in the rain;
When logics dies,
The secret of the soil grows through the eye,
And blood jumps in the sun;
Above the waste allotments the dawn halts.

My Favourite Love Poems

17 Mar 05 @ 03:52 PM  category » poetry

Leigh Hunt ::: Rondeau
Shelley ::: Love's Philosophy
Elizabeth Barrett Browning ::: Sonnet X1V
Yeats ::: He wishes for Cloths of Heaven
Byron ::: When We Two Parted
Rossetti ::: Remember
John Clare ::: First Love
John Clare ::: The Secret
Auden ::: Stop All the Clocks
Dorothy Parker ::: Unfortunate Coincidence
Rossetti ::: The First Day
George Herbert ::: Love
Kalil Gibran ::: Marriage
Carol Ann Duffy ::: Words, Wide Night
Edwin Muir ::: Confirmation
John Fuller ::: Valentine
Wendy Cope ::: Valentine

Horace

06 Mar 05 @ 09:28 PM  category » poetry

Odes, Bk II

He that holds fast the golden mean,
And lives contently between
The little and the great
Feels not the wants that pinch the poor
Nor plagues that haunt the rich man’s door
Embittering all his state.

Poetry, Please...

20 Jan 05 @ 03:05 PM  category » poetry

Find the text of lots of great poems at the Everypoet archive.

Robert Desnos

19 Jan 05 @ 09:25 PM  category » poetry

I have so fiercely dreamed of you
And walked so far
And spoken of you so
Loved a shade of you so hard
That now I’ve no more left of you
I’m left to be a shade among the shades
A hundred times more shade than shade
To be cast again, time after time
Into your sun-transfigured life.

[RD was a French freedom figher in the Resistance, who died of typhus at 26]

Pablo Neruda II

13 Dec 04 @ 08:03 PM  category » poetry

Poetry

And it was at that age...Poetry arrived
in search of me. I don't know, I don't know where
it came from, from winter or a river.
I don't know how or when,
no, they were not voices, they were not words, nor silence,
but from a street I was summoned,
from the branches of night,
abruptly from the others,
among violent fires
or returning alone,
there I was without a face,
and it touched me.

I did not know what to say, my mouth
had no way with names
my eyes were blind,
and something started in my soul,
fever or forgotten wings,
and I made my own way,
deciphering that fire
and I wrote the first faint line,
faint, without substance,
pure nonsense, pure wisdom
of someone who knows nothing,
and suddenly I saw
the heavens unfastened
and open, planets,
palpitating plantations,
shadow perforated,
riddled with arrows, fire and flowers,
the winding night, the universe.

And I, infinitesimal being,
drunk with the great starry void,
likeness, image of mystery,
I felt myself a pure part
of the abyss.

I wheeled with the stars,
my heart broke free on the open sky.

Wendy Cope

04 Nov 04 @ 09:26 PM  category » poetry

I can’t forgive you.
Even if I could
You wouldn’t pardon me
For seeing through you.
And yet I cannot cure myself of love
For what I was before I knew you.

Robert Herrick

25 Oct 04 @ 09:29 PM  category » poetry

 

Love is a circle that doth restless move
In the same sweet eternity of love.

Pablo Neruda I

07 Oct 04 @ 09:57 PM  category » poetry

My favourite Neruda poem is

Every Day You Play

Every day you play with the light of the universe.
Subtle visitor, you arrive in the flower and the water.
You are more than this white head that I hold tightly
as a cluster of fruit, every day, between my hands.

You are like nobody since I love you.
Let me spread you out among yellow garlands.
Who writes your name in letters of smoke among the stars of the south?
Oh let me remember you as you were before you existed.

Suddenly the wind howls and bangs at my shut window.
The sky is a net crammed with shadowy fish.
Here all the winds let go sooner or later, all of them.
The rain takes off her clothes.

The birds go by, fleeing.
The wind. The wind.
I can contend only against the power of men.
The storm whirls dark leaves
and turns loose all the boats that were moored last night to the sky.

You are here. Oh, you do not run away.
You will answer me to the last cry.
Cling to me as though you were frightened.
Even so, at one time a strange shadow ran through your eyes.

Now, now too, little one, you bring me honeysuckle,
and even your breasts smell of it.
While the sad wind goes slaughtering butterflies I love you,
and my happiness bites the plum of your mouth.
How you must have suffered getting accustomed to me,
my savage, solitary soul, my name that sends them all running.
So many times we have seen the morning star burn, kissing our eyes,
and over our heads the gray light unwind in turning fans.

My words rained over you, stroking you.
A long time I have loved the sunned mother-of-pearl of your body.
I go so far as to think that you own the universe.
I will bring you happy flowers from the mountains,
bluebells, dark hazels, and rustic baskets of kisses.
I want to do with you what spring does to the cherry trees.

Rumi: On Love

04 Sep 04 @ 09:30 PM  category » poetry

The minute I heard my first love story
I started looking for you
Not knowing how blind that was.
Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere –
They are in each other all along.

Unbearable Cruelty?

09 Jun 04 @ 07:54 AM  category » poetry | woes

Unbearable Cruelty?

It's still there, and still alive.

A cockroach crawled out of a corner,
And wiggled his whiskers at me,
He said, "Are you Little Jack Horner?",
"And what have you got for your tea?"
I said, "I haven't a notion;
And, anyway, what's in a name?
So, kindly contain your emotion,
And let me get on with my game."
He let out a horrible whimper,
And scurried all over the floor;
Then said, in a terrible temper:
"I simply can't stand any more!"

That poem was written by my mother years and years ago. I still remember it perfectly from childhood. It made me laugh then, and I don't remember any particular childhood cockroach traumas. I do, however, have vivid memories of something crawling across my face one night in Sri Lanka (stupidly, we were not using the mosquito net) and me, waking up, saying "What was that?" and my boyfriend, sleepily, responding "Oh, that must have been the cockroach that just crawled across my arm." Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat? Oh yes, I remember that quite clearly.

Anyway, I forgot to get the Raid, and this poem makes it impossible for me to lift the cup (it's clear so I can see what is going on). Why? Well, clearly, even though it is struggling and seems weak, in truth it is really only playing at being mostly dead, and I know that, were I to lift the cup to put it out of its misery, it would fly up, hit me in the face and say, "No so fast, missy! Fooled you! We're immortal, don't you know?" and then it will proceed to wail and whimper and torment me for my intolerable cruelty and will hide away again, only to run across my face every night to punish me.

No, I most definitely can not lift the cup.

El Senor de Anillos

21 Dec 03 @ 04:26 PM  category » poetry | travel

Well, I am in Santiago. Middle of summer, gloriously sunny. And what did I do on my first night in Chile?  See The Return of the King, of course.  I was disappointed that I wouldn't get to see it until January, true - and had even contemplated a midnight showing the night before I left New York.  But I needn't have worried - there's an even bigger fan than me looking out for me, and that's my sister Alex. She bought tickets for us because "a good movie does wonders for jet lag, you know".  Of course it does. Too long, too cheesy at the end, but still, it had to be done. the Chilenos love it too - cinema totally packed at 11pm and whoops and cheers at all the expected bits.

We spent the weekend on the coast - primarily to visit Pablo Neruda's house on the cliff at La Isla Negra. My favourite poet, a man of many contradictions, and an obsessive collector - all of which made for an interesting place full of intriguing stories.  An added twist to our day involved an extremely heavily pregnant Chilean woman with her American husband and his parents, who were touring at the same time as us. It turned out she is Neruda's great-niece and her baby was due that day. She said she was hoping the poet's spirit would bring on the baby since she was very bored of carrying it any longer!

We also went riding along the beach at sunset. Yeah, yeah, very cheesy and the horses were...well, they were beach horses, but it was still beautiful. We'll get real horses in Patagonia...

Got to go, catch a plane and head south to the snows.  God knows when I'll be near a computer again.

Poetry

10 Sep 02 @ 05:16 PM  category » poetry

A charming article from Rosecrans Baldwin.  A poetic name in itself.
The Art Of Writing Beautiful Poetry

An Ode to Barnonia

03 Aug 01 @ 09:24 PM  category » poetry

100 degrees in the city
Some folks couldn’t take any more
So they hopped on a train to the Hamptons
And ‘rived at Barnonia’s door

The doors of the Barn were wide open
There was a buzz as of bees in the air
Of all of the antics of all of the talents
Busying themselves deep in there

And lo, did you see the creations?
The fabulous things that were made?
Haaken’s wings – an object of beauty
And the mud pit – well what can one say?

Mud Queen Susannah was raving
Of the joys of squelching in clay
How right she was, as many found out
As they slipped themselves into the fray

The hot tub, an object quite blissful
As the rains came tumbling down
Who cares if it’s wet when you’re naked
And warmed by the luurve that’s around? (ok that is a bit too cheesy, I’m working on it)

Glitter streaks and muddy peaks,
Tents on cliffs and down in valleys
Theatre on the bluff and swimming in the buff
Arms and legs and bodies tumbling on the raft
Slip sliding tarp and blindfold kicks
Poetic justice, dancing chicks
3 minute theatre, rocky yonder
Glitter’d bodies full of wonder
Fabulous DJs, dancing sashays
Endless nights and dreamy days

What more could you ask for?
Barnonia 2002, bring on the encore!