PearlySpencer
New Member
Great poem Mrs M. I like that a lot
*Poem of the day thread
- Thread starter RubyToogood
- Start date
Mrs Magpie
On a bit of break...
another Wendell Berry poem then.......
"TESTAMENT"
by Wendell Berry
And now to the Abyss I pass
Of that Unfathomable Grass...
1.
Dear relatives and friends, when my last breath
Grows large and free in air, don't call it death --
A word to enrich the undertaker and inspire
His surly art of imitating life; conspire
Against him. Say that my body cannot now
Be improved upon; it has no fault to show
To the sly cosmetician. Say that my flesh
Has a perfect compliance with the grass
Truer than any it could have striven for.
You will recognize the earth in me, as before
I wished to know it in myself: my earth
That has been my care and faithful charge from birth,
And toward which all my sorrows were surely bound,
And all my hopes. Say that I have found
A good solution, and am on my way
To the roots. And say I have left my native clay
At last, to be a traveler; that too will be so.
Traveler to where? Say you don't know.
2.
But do not let your ignorance
Of my spirit's whereabouts dismay
You, or overwhelm your thoughts.
Be careful not to say
Anything too final. Whatever
Is unsure is possible, and life is bigger
Than flesh. Beyond reach of thought
Let imagination figure
Your hope. That will be generous
To me and to yourselves. Why settle
For some know-it-all's despair
When the dead may dance to the fiddle
Hereafter, for all anybody knows?
And remember that the Heavenly soil
Need not be too rich to please
One who was happy in Port Royal.
I may be already heading back,
A new and better man, toward
That town. The thought's unreasonable,
But so is life, thank the Lord!
3.
So treat me, even dead,
As a man who has a place
To go, and something to do.
Don't muck up my face
With wax and powder and rouge
As one would prettify
An unalterable fact
To give bitterness the lie.
Admit the native earth
My body is and will be,
Admit its freedom and
Its changeability.
Dress me in the clothes
I wore in the day's round.
Lay me in a wooden box.
Put the box in the ground.
4.
Beneath this stone a Berry is planted
In his home land, as he wanted.
He has come to the gathering of his kin,
Among whom some were worthy men,
Farmers mostly, who lived by hand,
But one was a cobbler from Ireland,
Another played the eternal fool
By riding on a circus mule
To be remembered in grateful laughter
Longer than the rest. After
Doing that they had to do
They are at ease here. Let all of you
Who yet for pain find force and voice
Look on their peace, and rejoice.
"TESTAMENT"
by Wendell Berry
And now to the Abyss I pass
Of that Unfathomable Grass...
1.
Dear relatives and friends, when my last breath
Grows large and free in air, don't call it death --
A word to enrich the undertaker and inspire
His surly art of imitating life; conspire
Against him. Say that my body cannot now
Be improved upon; it has no fault to show
To the sly cosmetician. Say that my flesh
Has a perfect compliance with the grass
Truer than any it could have striven for.
You will recognize the earth in me, as before
I wished to know it in myself: my earth
That has been my care and faithful charge from birth,
And toward which all my sorrows were surely bound,
And all my hopes. Say that I have found
A good solution, and am on my way
To the roots. And say I have left my native clay
At last, to be a traveler; that too will be so.
Traveler to where? Say you don't know.
2.
But do not let your ignorance
Of my spirit's whereabouts dismay
You, or overwhelm your thoughts.
Be careful not to say
Anything too final. Whatever
Is unsure is possible, and life is bigger
Than flesh. Beyond reach of thought
Let imagination figure
Your hope. That will be generous
To me and to yourselves. Why settle
For some know-it-all's despair
When the dead may dance to the fiddle
Hereafter, for all anybody knows?
And remember that the Heavenly soil
Need not be too rich to please
One who was happy in Port Royal.
I may be already heading back,
A new and better man, toward
That town. The thought's unreasonable,
But so is life, thank the Lord!
3.
So treat me, even dead,
As a man who has a place
To go, and something to do.
Don't muck up my face
With wax and powder and rouge
As one would prettify
An unalterable fact
To give bitterness the lie.
Admit the native earth
My body is and will be,
Admit its freedom and
Its changeability.
Dress me in the clothes
I wore in the day's round.
Lay me in a wooden box.
Put the box in the ground.
4.
Beneath this stone a Berry is planted
In his home land, as he wanted.
He has come to the gathering of his kin,
Among whom some were worthy men,
Farmers mostly, who lived by hand,
But one was a cobbler from Ireland,
Another played the eternal fool
By riding on a circus mule
To be remembered in grateful laughter
Longer than the rest. After
Doing that they had to do
They are at ease here. Let all of you
Who yet for pain find force and voice
Look on their peace, and rejoice.
PearlySpencer
New Member
Nah for some reason I don't like that one as much.
Down By the River
"The path of progress in psychiatry is circular,
periodically returning to it's starting point."
Thomas Szasz, MD., The Manufacture of Madness
Here we are, ready
to plunge into this institution
by the river where everything
is the same and yet
so different. Another
state, an unknown set of rules,
and this new thing she's done,
this direct statement:
I do not want to live.
We are afraid and we do not want
know what it is we can or
can't do, but we agree on this:
no shock treatments, never again,
and home as soon as possible,
maybe today, if we talk loud
and fast enough
and do not listen to the
roaring in our heads.
Professor Ugo Cerletti, inventor
of electric shock therapy, recalling
the first time he used the treatment
on a human being, "When I saw the patients reaction, I thought to myself,
"This ought to be abolished!"
A mockingbird sings
from a low branch; we open
our mouths and gulp a last
lungful of free air. We are
three humans, flesh
against stone.
When we push through the door
to the lobby, we are immersed
in a deep channel of water.
Lost creatures slide by us.
We are almost to the front desk
before someone calls out,
smelling fear and pity
pouring off us like sweat.
We feel something inside
ourselves turn on its back,
belly to the ceiling.
We sign our individual names
and relationships, but we know
we are family
and we do not agree
to this place.
We walk past offices, empty,
unlit treatment rooms, incomprehensible
machines. We wonder where
the torture takes place
and know it is deliberately
kept from us.
We surprise ourselves.
How is it each of us has decided
not to play Judas?
When we kiss her this time,
we will be shouting welcome:
Hello to the lost, lonely,
these heretics and modern-day witches,
the oppressed: our mother, our wife.
1851. Illinois commitment statute
enacted. 'Married women. . . may be
entered or detained in the hospital
at the request of the husband
of the woman. . . without evidence
of insanity required in other cases.'
We are certain
if we turn away from her,
we turn away from our selves.
We are on the ward;
there she is;
a skinny old woman,
locked away and muttering
to herself. When she sees us,
her eyes flame.
She comes to us drugged,
rigid, begging to go home.
We sit with her, a temporary island,
making conversation, trying
to ignore the swell and ripple
around us.
A man visits his wife.
The woman is too loud,
she says damn
and FUCK and smokes
cigarette after cigarette.
He is gawky,
not enough chin
and too much Adam's apple.
Her jeans hang on her body.
He is dressed in chinos
and a thin, cotton shirt.
He hands her a package.
She rips the wrapping off:
a picture of Jesus in the
Garden of Olives. She waves
his offering and shouts:
JEy-ZU-uS KRi-I-sST from K-Mart,
for 67 cents. The figure in the print
is kneeling, robed in purple
and alone.
From the bricked-in-garden
just off the ward,
a black man gestures to us.
He smiles. He is wearing
pajamas, a robe and slippers,
though it is well past noon
and lunch has been served.
He walks past us,
a living piece of flotsam
cast up by the river.
He is polite and tells us
his name is Richard.
This is our first clue
we have entered another landscape
where nothing is accidental.
We introduce him to the Richard
in our family. The black Richard
grins at the white Richard,
and leans over and asks my mother,
will she free him, too?
She clenches her fists
and hisses, "Yes!"
1955. Egas Moniz is awarded
the Nobel Prize for the treatment
of schizophrenia by prefontal
lobotomy.
I am caught by the drowned snags
of the river at last.
I walk to the nurses' station,
the territory marking the border
between the visitor's lobby and the ward.
I glance up
stare across a sudden expanse
of barbed wire,
into a woman's face.
She is walnut-skinned,
her eyes come at me
like deer.
Someone tells me
this is our Christina.
I nod. I know her.
My head hums. I ask her
where she lives
but I cannot understand
her dialect, her black rural
southern speech.
I wrap my arms
around her
with my eyes.
I want to throw my arms around
them all and shout:
we are locked in here
whether we are inside
these walls or not,
when can we be free?
I want to sing out:
let us go down
to the river
each and every one,
where we can walk
and run and move
our limbs in the ripe sun
and wait for the thunder, down
by the river flowing
out of the high green hills
to where the mockingbird sings.
We will listen
for the thunder
and pray the walls
crumble.
Christina Pacosz
Down By the River
"The path of progress in psychiatry is circular,
periodically returning to it's starting point."
Thomas Szasz, MD., The Manufacture of Madness
Here we are, ready
to plunge into this institution
by the river where everything
is the same and yet
so different. Another
state, an unknown set of rules,
and this new thing she's done,
this direct statement:
I do not want to live.
We are afraid and we do not want
know what it is we can or
can't do, but we agree on this:
no shock treatments, never again,
and home as soon as possible,
maybe today, if we talk loud
and fast enough
and do not listen to the
roaring in our heads.
Professor Ugo Cerletti, inventor
of electric shock therapy, recalling
the first time he used the treatment
on a human being, "When I saw the patients reaction, I thought to myself,
"This ought to be abolished!"
A mockingbird sings
from a low branch; we open
our mouths and gulp a last
lungful of free air. We are
three humans, flesh
against stone.
When we push through the door
to the lobby, we are immersed
in a deep channel of water.
Lost creatures slide by us.
We are almost to the front desk
before someone calls out,
smelling fear and pity
pouring off us like sweat.
We feel something inside
ourselves turn on its back,
belly to the ceiling.
We sign our individual names
and relationships, but we know
we are family
and we do not agree
to this place.
We walk past offices, empty,
unlit treatment rooms, incomprehensible
machines. We wonder where
the torture takes place
and know it is deliberately
kept from us.
We surprise ourselves.
How is it each of us has decided
not to play Judas?
When we kiss her this time,
we will be shouting welcome:
Hello to the lost, lonely,
these heretics and modern-day witches,
the oppressed: our mother, our wife.
1851. Illinois commitment statute
enacted. 'Married women. . . may be
entered or detained in the hospital
at the request of the husband
of the woman. . . without evidence
of insanity required in other cases.'
We are certain
if we turn away from her,
we turn away from our selves.
We are on the ward;
there she is;
a skinny old woman,
locked away and muttering
to herself. When she sees us,
her eyes flame.
She comes to us drugged,
rigid, begging to go home.
We sit with her, a temporary island,
making conversation, trying
to ignore the swell and ripple
around us.
A man visits his wife.
The woman is too loud,
she says damn
and FUCK and smokes
cigarette after cigarette.
He is gawky,
not enough chin
and too much Adam's apple.
Her jeans hang on her body.
He is dressed in chinos
and a thin, cotton shirt.
He hands her a package.
She rips the wrapping off:
a picture of Jesus in the
Garden of Olives. She waves
his offering and shouts:
JEy-ZU-uS KRi-I-sST from K-Mart,
for 67 cents. The figure in the print
is kneeling, robed in purple
and alone.
From the bricked-in-garden
just off the ward,
a black man gestures to us.
He smiles. He is wearing
pajamas, a robe and slippers,
though it is well past noon
and lunch has been served.
He walks past us,
a living piece of flotsam
cast up by the river.
He is polite and tells us
his name is Richard.
This is our first clue
we have entered another landscape
where nothing is accidental.
We introduce him to the Richard
in our family. The black Richard
grins at the white Richard,
and leans over and asks my mother,
will she free him, too?
She clenches her fists
and hisses, "Yes!"
1955. Egas Moniz is awarded
the Nobel Prize for the treatment
of schizophrenia by prefontal
lobotomy.
I am caught by the drowned snags
of the river at last.
I walk to the nurses' station,
the territory marking the border
between the visitor's lobby and the ward.
I glance up
stare across a sudden expanse
of barbed wire,
into a woman's face.
She is walnut-skinned,
her eyes come at me
like deer.
Someone tells me
this is our Christina.
I nod. I know her.
My head hums. I ask her
where she lives
but I cannot understand
her dialect, her black rural
southern speech.
I wrap my arms
around her
with my eyes.
I want to throw my arms around
them all and shout:
we are locked in here
whether we are inside
these walls or not,
when can we be free?
I want to sing out:
let us go down
to the river
each and every one,
where we can walk
and run and move
our limbs in the ripe sun
and wait for the thunder, down
by the river flowing
out of the high green hills
to where the mockingbird sings.
We will listen
for the thunder
and pray the walls
crumble.
Christina Pacosz
Mrs Magpie
On a bit of break...
Ah, but I'm a grandmother of five (six in February!) so I think of stuff like funerals and headstones more than you do.........plus I'm always being approached to be an executor of wills.......it must be my sensible shoes and brisk businesslike air........
PearlySpencer
New Member
I think it takes a couple of reads to appreciate it. It's another good one Mrs. M
And throw those sensible shoes in the bin
And throw those sensible shoes in the bin
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
Here's one from Lorca to commemorate the 69th anniversary of the Asturias uprising (a couple of days late actually):
The Weeping
I have shut my windows.
I do not want to hear the weeping.
But from behind the grey walls.
Nothing is heard but the weeping.
There are few angels that sing.
There are few dogs that bark.
A thousand violins fit in the palm of the hand.
But the weeping is an immense angel.
The weeping is an immense dog.
The weeping is an immense violin.
Tears strangle the wind.
Nothing is heard but the weeping.
The Weeping
I have shut my windows.
I do not want to hear the weeping.
But from behind the grey walls.
Nothing is heard but the weeping.
There are few angels that sing.
There are few dogs that bark.
A thousand violins fit in the palm of the hand.
But the weeping is an immense angel.
The weeping is an immense dog.
The weeping is an immense violin.
Tears strangle the wind.
Nothing is heard but the weeping.
This is rather a long one and it'll take two posts.
It's the tale of Peter Grimes, which is one of the poems in The Borough by George Crabbe.
Old Peter Grimes made fishing his employ,
His wife he cabined with him and his boy,
And seemed that life laborious to enjoy:
To town came quiet Peter with his fish,
And had of all a civil word and wish.
He left his trade upon the Sabbath day,
And took young Peter in his hand to pray;
But soon the stubborn boy from care broke loose,
At first refused, then added his abuse;
His father's love he scorned, his power defied,
But, being drunk, wept sorely when he died.
Yes! then he wept, and to his mind there came
Much of his conduct, and he felt the shame:
How he had oft the good old man reviled,
And never paid the duty of a child;
How, when the father in his Bible read,
He in contempt and anger left the shed;
"It is the word of life," the parent cried;
"This is the life itself," the boy replied;
And while old Peter in amazement stood,
Gave the hot spirit to his boiling blood:
How he, with oath and furious speech, began
To prove his freedom and assert the man;
And when the parent checked his impious rage,
How he had cursed the tyranny of age—
Nay, once had dealt the sacrilegious blow
On his bare head, and laid his parent low:
The father groaned—"If thou art old," said he,
"And hast a son—thou wilt remember me;
Thy mother left me in a happy time,
Thou kill'dst not her—Heaven spares the double crime."
On an inn-settle, in his maudlin grief,
This he revolved, and drank for his relief.
Now lived the youth in freedom, but debarred
From constant pleasure, and he thought it hard;
Hard that he could not every wish obey,
But must awhile relinquish ale and play;
Hard! that he could not to his cards attend,
But must acquire the money he would spend.
With greedy eye he looked on all he saw,
He knew not justice, and he laughed at law;
On all he marked he stretched his ready hand;
He fished by water, and he filched by land.
Oft in the night has Peter dropped his oar,
Fled from his boat and sought for prey on shore;
Oft up the hedgerow glided, on his back
Bearing the orchard's produce in a sack,
Or farmyard load, tugged fiercely from the stack;
And as these wrongs to greater numbers rose,
The more he looked on all men as his foes.
He built a mud-walled hovel, where he kept
His various wealth, and there he ofttimes slept;
But no success could please his cruel soul,
He wished for one to trouble and control;
He wanted some obedient boy to stand
And bear the blow of his outrageous hand;
And hoped to find in some propitious hour
A feeling creature subject to his power.
Peter had heard there were in London then—
Still have they being! — workhouse-clearing men,
Who, undisturbed by feelings just or kind,
Would parish boys to needy tradesmen bind;
They in their want a trifling sum would take,
And toiling slaves of piteous orphans make.
Such Peter sought, and when a lad was found,
The sum was dealt him, and the slave was bound.
Some few in town observed in Peter's trap
A boy, with jacket blue and woolen cap;
But none inquired how Peter used the rope,
Or what the bruise, that made the stripling stoop;
None could the ridges on his back behold,
None sought him shivering in the winter's cold;
None put the question, "Peter, dost thou give
The boy his food? — What, man! the lad must live.
Consider, Peter, let the child have bread,
He'll serve thee better if he's stroked and fed."
None reasoned thus — and some, on hearing cries,
Said calmly, "Grimes is at his exercise."
Pined, beaten, cold, pinched, threatened, and abused—
His efforts punished and his food refused—
Awake tormented—soon aroused from sleep—
Struck if he wept, and yet compelled to weep,
The trembling boy dropped down and strove to pray,
Received a blow, and trembling turned away,
Or sobbed and hid his piteous face; while he,
The savage master, grinned in horrid glee.
He'd now the power he ever loved to show,
A feeling being subject to his blow.
Thus lived the lad, in hunger, peril, pain,
His tears despised, his supplications vain;
Compelled by fear to lie, by need to steal,
His bed uneasy and unblessed his meal,
For three sad years the boy his tortures bore,—
And then his pains and trials were no more.
"How died he, Peter?" when the people said,
He growled — "I found him lifeless in his bed";
Then tried for softer tone, and sighed, "Poor Sam is dead.''
Yet murmurs were there, and some questions asked—
How he was fed, how punished, and how tasked?
Much they suspected, but they little proved,
And Peter passed untroubled and unmoved.
Another boy with equal ease was found,
The money granted, and the victim bound;
And what his fate? One night it chanced he fell
From the boat's mast and perished in her well,
Where fish were living kept, and where the boy
(So reasoned men) could not himself destroy:—
"Yes! so it was," said Peter, "in his play
(For he was idle both by night and day),
He climbed the mainmast and then fell below";
Then showed his corpse and pointed to the blow.
'What said the jury?" They were long in doubt,
But sturdy Peter faced the matter out.
So they dismissed him, saying at the time,
"Keep fast your hatchway when you've boys who climb."
This hit the conscience, and he colored more
Than for the closest questions put before.
Thus all his fears the verdict set aside,
And at the slave shop Peter still applied.
Then came a boy, of manners soft and mild—
Our seamen's wives with grief beheld the child;
All thought (the poor themselves) that he was one
Of gentle blood, some noble sinner's son,
Who hail, belike, deceived some humble maid,
Whom he had first seduced and then betrayed.
However this, he seemed a gracious lad,
In grief submissive and with patience sad.
Passive he labored, till his slender frame
Bent with his loads, and he at length was lame:
Strange that a frame so weak could bear so long
The grossest insult and the foulest wrong;
But there were causes—in the town they gave
Fire, food, and comfort, to the gentle slave;
And though stern Peter, with a cruel hand,
And knotted rope, enforced the rude command,
Yet he considered what he'd lately felt,
And his vile blows with selfish pity dealt.
One day such draughts the cruel fisher made,
He could not vend them in his borough trade,
But sailed for London mart; the boy was ill,
But ever humbled to his master's will;
And on the river, where they smoothly sailed,
He strove with terror and awhile prevailed;
But new to danger on the angry sea,
He clung affrightened to his master's knee:
The boat grew leaky and the wind was strong,
Rough was the passage and the time was long;
His liquor failed, and Peter's wrath arose—
No more is known—the rest we must suppose,
Or learn of Peter—Peter says, he 'spied
The stripling's danger and for harbor tried;
Meantime the fish, and then th' apprentice died."
The pitying women raised a clamor round,
And weeping said "Thou hast this Prentice drowned."
Now the stern man was summoned to the hall,
To tell his tale before the burghers all:
He gave th' account; professed the lad he loved,
And kept his brazen features all unmoved.
The mayor himself with tone severe replied,
"Thenceforth with thee shall never boy abide;
Hire thee a freeman, whom thou durst not beat,
But who, in thy despite, will sleep and eat;
Free thou art now! — again shouldst thou appear,
Thou'lt find thy sentence, like thy soul, severe."
Alas! for Peter not a helping hand,
So was he hated, could he now command;
Alone he rowed his boat, alone he cast
His nets beside, or made his anchor fast;
To hold a rope or hear a curse was none—
He toiled and railed, he groaned and swore alone
It's the tale of Peter Grimes, which is one of the poems in The Borough by George Crabbe.
Old Peter Grimes made fishing his employ,
His wife he cabined with him and his boy,
And seemed that life laborious to enjoy:
To town came quiet Peter with his fish,
And had of all a civil word and wish.
He left his trade upon the Sabbath day,
And took young Peter in his hand to pray;
But soon the stubborn boy from care broke loose,
At first refused, then added his abuse;
His father's love he scorned, his power defied,
But, being drunk, wept sorely when he died.
Yes! then he wept, and to his mind there came
Much of his conduct, and he felt the shame:
How he had oft the good old man reviled,
And never paid the duty of a child;
How, when the father in his Bible read,
He in contempt and anger left the shed;
"It is the word of life," the parent cried;
"This is the life itself," the boy replied;
And while old Peter in amazement stood,
Gave the hot spirit to his boiling blood:
How he, with oath and furious speech, began
To prove his freedom and assert the man;
And when the parent checked his impious rage,
How he had cursed the tyranny of age—
Nay, once had dealt the sacrilegious blow
On his bare head, and laid his parent low:
The father groaned—"If thou art old," said he,
"And hast a son—thou wilt remember me;
Thy mother left me in a happy time,
Thou kill'dst not her—Heaven spares the double crime."
On an inn-settle, in his maudlin grief,
This he revolved, and drank for his relief.
Now lived the youth in freedom, but debarred
From constant pleasure, and he thought it hard;
Hard that he could not every wish obey,
But must awhile relinquish ale and play;
Hard! that he could not to his cards attend,
But must acquire the money he would spend.
With greedy eye he looked on all he saw,
He knew not justice, and he laughed at law;
On all he marked he stretched his ready hand;
He fished by water, and he filched by land.
Oft in the night has Peter dropped his oar,
Fled from his boat and sought for prey on shore;
Oft up the hedgerow glided, on his back
Bearing the orchard's produce in a sack,
Or farmyard load, tugged fiercely from the stack;
And as these wrongs to greater numbers rose,
The more he looked on all men as his foes.
He built a mud-walled hovel, where he kept
His various wealth, and there he ofttimes slept;
But no success could please his cruel soul,
He wished for one to trouble and control;
He wanted some obedient boy to stand
And bear the blow of his outrageous hand;
And hoped to find in some propitious hour
A feeling creature subject to his power.
Peter had heard there were in London then—
Still have they being! — workhouse-clearing men,
Who, undisturbed by feelings just or kind,
Would parish boys to needy tradesmen bind;
They in their want a trifling sum would take,
And toiling slaves of piteous orphans make.
Such Peter sought, and when a lad was found,
The sum was dealt him, and the slave was bound.
Some few in town observed in Peter's trap
A boy, with jacket blue and woolen cap;
But none inquired how Peter used the rope,
Or what the bruise, that made the stripling stoop;
None could the ridges on his back behold,
None sought him shivering in the winter's cold;
None put the question, "Peter, dost thou give
The boy his food? — What, man! the lad must live.
Consider, Peter, let the child have bread,
He'll serve thee better if he's stroked and fed."
None reasoned thus — and some, on hearing cries,
Said calmly, "Grimes is at his exercise."
Pined, beaten, cold, pinched, threatened, and abused—
His efforts punished and his food refused—
Awake tormented—soon aroused from sleep—
Struck if he wept, and yet compelled to weep,
The trembling boy dropped down and strove to pray,
Received a blow, and trembling turned away,
Or sobbed and hid his piteous face; while he,
The savage master, grinned in horrid glee.
He'd now the power he ever loved to show,
A feeling being subject to his blow.
Thus lived the lad, in hunger, peril, pain,
His tears despised, his supplications vain;
Compelled by fear to lie, by need to steal,
His bed uneasy and unblessed his meal,
For three sad years the boy his tortures bore,—
And then his pains and trials were no more.
"How died he, Peter?" when the people said,
He growled — "I found him lifeless in his bed";
Then tried for softer tone, and sighed, "Poor Sam is dead.''
Yet murmurs were there, and some questions asked—
How he was fed, how punished, and how tasked?
Much they suspected, but they little proved,
And Peter passed untroubled and unmoved.
Another boy with equal ease was found,
The money granted, and the victim bound;
And what his fate? One night it chanced he fell
From the boat's mast and perished in her well,
Where fish were living kept, and where the boy
(So reasoned men) could not himself destroy:—
"Yes! so it was," said Peter, "in his play
(For he was idle both by night and day),
He climbed the mainmast and then fell below";
Then showed his corpse and pointed to the blow.
'What said the jury?" They were long in doubt,
But sturdy Peter faced the matter out.
So they dismissed him, saying at the time,
"Keep fast your hatchway when you've boys who climb."
This hit the conscience, and he colored more
Than for the closest questions put before.
Thus all his fears the verdict set aside,
And at the slave shop Peter still applied.
Then came a boy, of manners soft and mild—
Our seamen's wives with grief beheld the child;
All thought (the poor themselves) that he was one
Of gentle blood, some noble sinner's son,
Who hail, belike, deceived some humble maid,
Whom he had first seduced and then betrayed.
However this, he seemed a gracious lad,
In grief submissive and with patience sad.
Passive he labored, till his slender frame
Bent with his loads, and he at length was lame:
Strange that a frame so weak could bear so long
The grossest insult and the foulest wrong;
But there were causes—in the town they gave
Fire, food, and comfort, to the gentle slave;
And though stern Peter, with a cruel hand,
And knotted rope, enforced the rude command,
Yet he considered what he'd lately felt,
And his vile blows with selfish pity dealt.
One day such draughts the cruel fisher made,
He could not vend them in his borough trade,
But sailed for London mart; the boy was ill,
But ever humbled to his master's will;
And on the river, where they smoothly sailed,
He strove with terror and awhile prevailed;
But new to danger on the angry sea,
He clung affrightened to his master's knee:
The boat grew leaky and the wind was strong,
Rough was the passage and the time was long;
His liquor failed, and Peter's wrath arose—
No more is known—the rest we must suppose,
Or learn of Peter—Peter says, he 'spied
The stripling's danger and for harbor tried;
Meantime the fish, and then th' apprentice died."
The pitying women raised a clamor round,
And weeping said "Thou hast this Prentice drowned."
Now the stern man was summoned to the hall,
To tell his tale before the burghers all:
He gave th' account; professed the lad he loved,
And kept his brazen features all unmoved.
The mayor himself with tone severe replied,
"Thenceforth with thee shall never boy abide;
Hire thee a freeman, whom thou durst not beat,
But who, in thy despite, will sleep and eat;
Free thou art now! — again shouldst thou appear,
Thou'lt find thy sentence, like thy soul, severe."
Alas! for Peter not a helping hand,
So was he hated, could he now command;
Alone he rowed his boat, alone he cast
His nets beside, or made his anchor fast;
To hold a rope or hear a curse was none—
He toiled and railed, he groaned and swore alone
Thus by himself compelled to live each day,
To wait for certain hours the tide's delay;
At the same times the same dull views to see,
The bounding marshbank and the blighted tree;
The water only, when the tides were high,
When low, the mud half-covered and half-dry;
The sunburnt tar that blisters on the planks,
And bankside stakes in their uneven ranks;
Heaps of entangled weeds that slowly float,
As the tide rolls by th' impeded boat.
When tides were neap, and, in the sultry day,
Through the tall bounding mudbanks made their way,
Which on each side rose swelling, and below
The dark warm flood ran silently and slow;
There anchoring, Peter chose from man to hide,
There hang his head, and view the lazy tide
In its hot slimy channel slowly glide;
Where the small eels that left the deeper way
For the warm shore, within the shallows play;
Where gaping mussels, left upon the mud,
Slope their slow passage to the fallen flood;
Here dull and hopeless he'd lie down and trace
How sidelong crabs had scrawled their crooked race;
Or sadly listen to the tuneless cry
Of fishing gull or clanging goldeneye;
What time the sea birds to the marsh would come,
And the loud bittern, from the bulrush home,
Gave from the salt-ditch side the bellowing boom.
He nursed the feelings these dull scenes produce,
And loved to stop beside the opening sluice,
Where the small stream, confined in narrow bound,
Ran with a dull, unvaried, saddening sound;
Where all presented to the eye or ear
Oppressed the soul with misery, grief, and fear.
Besides these objects, there were places three,
Which Peter seemed with certain dread to see;
When he drew near them he would turn from each,
And loudly whistle till he passed the reach.
A change of scene to him brought no relief;
In town, 'twas plain, men took him for a thief;
The sailors' wives would stop him in the street,
And say, "Now, Peter, thou'st no boy to beat";
Infants at play, when they perceived him, ran,
Warning each other, "That's the wicked man."
He growled an oath, and in an angry tone
Cursed the whole place and wished to be alone.
Alone he was, the same dull scenes in view,
And still more gloomy in his sight they grew.
Though man he hated, yet employed alone
At bootless labor, he would swear and groan,
Cursing the shoals that glided by the spot,
And gulls that caught them when his arts could not.
Cold nervous tremblings shook his sturdy frame,
And strange disease — he couldn't say the name;
Wild were his dreams, and oft he rose in fright,
Waked by his view of horrors in the night—
Horrors that would the sternest minds amaze,
Horrors that demons might be proud to raise;
And though he felt forsaken, grieved at heart,
To think he lived from all mankind apart;
Yet, if a man approached, in terrors he would start.
A winter passed since Peter saw the town,
And summer lodgers were again come down;
These, idly curious, with their glasses spied
The ships in bay as anchored for the tide,
The river's craft, the bustle of the quay,
And seaport views, which landmen love to see.
One, up the river, had a man and boat
Seen day by day, now anchored, now afloat;
Fisher he seemed, yet used no net nor hook;
Of seafowl swimming by, no heed he took,
But on the gliding waves still fixed his lazy look:
At certain stations he would view the stream,
As if he stood bewildered in a dream,
Or that some power had chained him for a time,
To feel a curse or meditate on crime.
This known, some curious, some in pity went,
And others questioned, "Wretch, dost thou repent?"
He heard, he trembled, and in fear resigned
His boat; new terror filled his restless mind,
Furious he grew, and up the country ran,
And there they seized him — a distempered man.
Him we received, and to a parish-bed,
Followed and cursed, the groaning man was led.
Here when they saw him, whom they used to shun,
A lost, lone man, so harassed and undone,
Our gentle females, ever prompt to feel,
Perceived compassion on their anger steal;
His crimes they could not from their memories blot,
But they were grieved, and trembled at his lot.
A priest too came, to whom his words are told,
And all the signs they shuddered to behold.
"Look! look!" they cried, "his limbs with horror shake,
And as he grinds his teeth, what noise they make!
How glare his angry eyes, and yet he's not awake.
See! what cold drops upon his forehead stand,
And how he clenches that broad bony hand."
The priest attending, found he spoke at times
As one alluding to his fears and crimes: "
It was the fall," he muttered, "I can show
The manner how — I never struck a blow."
And then aloud — "Unhand me, free my chain;
On oath, he fell — it struck him to the brain—
Why ask my father?—that old man will swear
Against my life; besides, he wasn't there—
What, all agreed? — Am I to die today? —
My Lord, in mercy, give me time to pray."
Then as they watched him, calmer he became,
And grew so weak he couldn't move his frame,
But murmuring spake, while they could see and hear
The start of terror and the groan of fear;
See the large dew-beads on his forehead rise,
And the cold death-drop glaze his sunken eyes;
Nor yet he died, but with unwonted force
Seemed with some fancied being to discourse;
He knew not us, or with accustomed art
He hid the knowledge, yet exposed his heart;
"Twas part confession and the rest defense,
A madman's tale, with gleams of waking sense.
'I'll tell you all," he said, "the very day
When the old man first placed them in my way:
My father's spirit — he who always tried
To give me trouble, when he lived and died —
When he was gone, he could not be content
To see my days in painful labor spent,
But would appoint his meetings, and he made
Me watch at these, and so neglect my trade.
"Twas one hot noon, all silent, still, serene,
No living being had I lately seen;
I paddled up and down and dipped my net,
But (such his pleasure) I could nothing get—
A father's pleasure, when his toil was done,
To plague and torture thus an only son!
And so I sat and looked upon the stream,
How it ran on, and felt as in a dream;
But dream it was not; no! I fixed my eyes
On the mid-stream and saw the spirits rise;
I saw my father on the water stand,
And hold a thin pale boy in either hand;
And there they glided ghastly on the top
Of the salt flood, and never touched a drop;
I would have struck them, but they knew th' intent,
And smiled upon the oar, and down they went.
"Now, from that day, whenever I began
To dip my net, there stood the hard old man—
He and those boys: I humbled me and prayed
They would be gone — they heeded not, but stayed.
Nor could I turn, nor would the boat go by,
But gazing on the spirits, there was I.
They bade me leap to death, but I was loath to die;
And every day, as sure as day arose,
Would these three spirits meet me ere the close;
To hear and mark them daily was my doom;
And 'Come,' they said, with weak, sad voices, 'come.'
To row away with all my strength I tried,
But there were they, hard by me in the tide,
The three unbodied forms — and 'Come,' still 'come,' they cried.
"Fathers should pity — but this old man shook
His hoary locks, and froze me by a look.
Thrice, when I struck them, through the water came
A hollow groan, that weakened all my frame.
'Father!' said I, 'have mercy.'
He replied, I know not what — the angry spirit lied —
'Didst thou not draw thy knife?' said he. 'Twas true,
But I had pity and my arm withdrew;
He cried for mercy which I kindly gave,
But he has no compassion in his grave.
"There were three places, where they ever rose—
The whole long river has not such as those—
Places accursed, where, if a man remain,
He'll see the things which strike him to the brain;
And there they made me on my paddle lean,
And look at them for hours — accursed scene!
When they would glide to that smooth eddy-space,
Then bid me leap and join them in the place;
And at my groans each little villain sprite
Enjoyed my pains and vanished in delight.
"In one fierce summer day, when my poor brain
Was burning hot and cruel was my pain,
Then came this father-foe, and there he stood
With his two boys again upon the flood;
There was more mischief in their eyes, more glee
In their pale faces when they glared at me;
Still did they force me on the oar to rest,
And when they saw me fainting and oppressed,
He, with his hand, the old man, scooped the flood,
And there came flame about him mixed with blood;
He bade me stoop and look upon the place,
Then flung the hot-red liquor in my face;
Burning it blazed, and then I roared for pain,
I thought the demons would have turned my brain.
"Still there they stood, and forced me to behold
A place of horrors — they cannot be told —
Where the flood opened, there I heard the shriek
Of tortured guilt — no earthly tongue can speak:
'All days alike! for ever!' did they say, '
And unremitted torments every day' —
Yes, so they said." — But here he ceased and gazed
On all around, frightened and amazed;
And still he tried to speak, and looked in dread
Of frightened females gathering round his bed;
Then dropped exhausted and appeared at rest,
Till the strong foe the vital powers possessed;
Then with an inward, broken voice he cried, "
Again they come," and muttered as he died.
To wait for certain hours the tide's delay;
At the same times the same dull views to see,
The bounding marshbank and the blighted tree;
The water only, when the tides were high,
When low, the mud half-covered and half-dry;
The sunburnt tar that blisters on the planks,
And bankside stakes in their uneven ranks;
Heaps of entangled weeds that slowly float,
As the tide rolls by th' impeded boat.
When tides were neap, and, in the sultry day,
Through the tall bounding mudbanks made their way,
Which on each side rose swelling, and below
The dark warm flood ran silently and slow;
There anchoring, Peter chose from man to hide,
There hang his head, and view the lazy tide
In its hot slimy channel slowly glide;
Where the small eels that left the deeper way
For the warm shore, within the shallows play;
Where gaping mussels, left upon the mud,
Slope their slow passage to the fallen flood;
Here dull and hopeless he'd lie down and trace
How sidelong crabs had scrawled their crooked race;
Or sadly listen to the tuneless cry
Of fishing gull or clanging goldeneye;
What time the sea birds to the marsh would come,
And the loud bittern, from the bulrush home,
Gave from the salt-ditch side the bellowing boom.
He nursed the feelings these dull scenes produce,
And loved to stop beside the opening sluice,
Where the small stream, confined in narrow bound,
Ran with a dull, unvaried, saddening sound;
Where all presented to the eye or ear
Oppressed the soul with misery, grief, and fear.
Besides these objects, there were places three,
Which Peter seemed with certain dread to see;
When he drew near them he would turn from each,
And loudly whistle till he passed the reach.
A change of scene to him brought no relief;
In town, 'twas plain, men took him for a thief;
The sailors' wives would stop him in the street,
And say, "Now, Peter, thou'st no boy to beat";
Infants at play, when they perceived him, ran,
Warning each other, "That's the wicked man."
He growled an oath, and in an angry tone
Cursed the whole place and wished to be alone.
Alone he was, the same dull scenes in view,
And still more gloomy in his sight they grew.
Though man he hated, yet employed alone
At bootless labor, he would swear and groan,
Cursing the shoals that glided by the spot,
And gulls that caught them when his arts could not.
Cold nervous tremblings shook his sturdy frame,
And strange disease — he couldn't say the name;
Wild were his dreams, and oft he rose in fright,
Waked by his view of horrors in the night—
Horrors that would the sternest minds amaze,
Horrors that demons might be proud to raise;
And though he felt forsaken, grieved at heart,
To think he lived from all mankind apart;
Yet, if a man approached, in terrors he would start.
A winter passed since Peter saw the town,
And summer lodgers were again come down;
These, idly curious, with their glasses spied
The ships in bay as anchored for the tide,
The river's craft, the bustle of the quay,
And seaport views, which landmen love to see.
One, up the river, had a man and boat
Seen day by day, now anchored, now afloat;
Fisher he seemed, yet used no net nor hook;
Of seafowl swimming by, no heed he took,
But on the gliding waves still fixed his lazy look:
At certain stations he would view the stream,
As if he stood bewildered in a dream,
Or that some power had chained him for a time,
To feel a curse or meditate on crime.
This known, some curious, some in pity went,
And others questioned, "Wretch, dost thou repent?"
He heard, he trembled, and in fear resigned
His boat; new terror filled his restless mind,
Furious he grew, and up the country ran,
And there they seized him — a distempered man.
Him we received, and to a parish-bed,
Followed and cursed, the groaning man was led.
Here when they saw him, whom they used to shun,
A lost, lone man, so harassed and undone,
Our gentle females, ever prompt to feel,
Perceived compassion on their anger steal;
His crimes they could not from their memories blot,
But they were grieved, and trembled at his lot.
A priest too came, to whom his words are told,
And all the signs they shuddered to behold.
"Look! look!" they cried, "his limbs with horror shake,
And as he grinds his teeth, what noise they make!
How glare his angry eyes, and yet he's not awake.
See! what cold drops upon his forehead stand,
And how he clenches that broad bony hand."
The priest attending, found he spoke at times
As one alluding to his fears and crimes: "
It was the fall," he muttered, "I can show
The manner how — I never struck a blow."
And then aloud — "Unhand me, free my chain;
On oath, he fell — it struck him to the brain—
Why ask my father?—that old man will swear
Against my life; besides, he wasn't there—
What, all agreed? — Am I to die today? —
My Lord, in mercy, give me time to pray."
Then as they watched him, calmer he became,
And grew so weak he couldn't move his frame,
But murmuring spake, while they could see and hear
The start of terror and the groan of fear;
See the large dew-beads on his forehead rise,
And the cold death-drop glaze his sunken eyes;
Nor yet he died, but with unwonted force
Seemed with some fancied being to discourse;
He knew not us, or with accustomed art
He hid the knowledge, yet exposed his heart;
"Twas part confession and the rest defense,
A madman's tale, with gleams of waking sense.
'I'll tell you all," he said, "the very day
When the old man first placed them in my way:
My father's spirit — he who always tried
To give me trouble, when he lived and died —
When he was gone, he could not be content
To see my days in painful labor spent,
But would appoint his meetings, and he made
Me watch at these, and so neglect my trade.
"Twas one hot noon, all silent, still, serene,
No living being had I lately seen;
I paddled up and down and dipped my net,
But (such his pleasure) I could nothing get—
A father's pleasure, when his toil was done,
To plague and torture thus an only son!
And so I sat and looked upon the stream,
How it ran on, and felt as in a dream;
But dream it was not; no! I fixed my eyes
On the mid-stream and saw the spirits rise;
I saw my father on the water stand,
And hold a thin pale boy in either hand;
And there they glided ghastly on the top
Of the salt flood, and never touched a drop;
I would have struck them, but they knew th' intent,
And smiled upon the oar, and down they went.
"Now, from that day, whenever I began
To dip my net, there stood the hard old man—
He and those boys: I humbled me and prayed
They would be gone — they heeded not, but stayed.
Nor could I turn, nor would the boat go by,
But gazing on the spirits, there was I.
They bade me leap to death, but I was loath to die;
And every day, as sure as day arose,
Would these three spirits meet me ere the close;
To hear and mark them daily was my doom;
And 'Come,' they said, with weak, sad voices, 'come.'
To row away with all my strength I tried,
But there were they, hard by me in the tide,
The three unbodied forms — and 'Come,' still 'come,' they cried.
"Fathers should pity — but this old man shook
His hoary locks, and froze me by a look.
Thrice, when I struck them, through the water came
A hollow groan, that weakened all my frame.
'Father!' said I, 'have mercy.'
He replied, I know not what — the angry spirit lied —
'Didst thou not draw thy knife?' said he. 'Twas true,
But I had pity and my arm withdrew;
He cried for mercy which I kindly gave,
But he has no compassion in his grave.
"There were three places, where they ever rose—
The whole long river has not such as those—
Places accursed, where, if a man remain,
He'll see the things which strike him to the brain;
And there they made me on my paddle lean,
And look at them for hours — accursed scene!
When they would glide to that smooth eddy-space,
Then bid me leap and join them in the place;
And at my groans each little villain sprite
Enjoyed my pains and vanished in delight.
"In one fierce summer day, when my poor brain
Was burning hot and cruel was my pain,
Then came this father-foe, and there he stood
With his two boys again upon the flood;
There was more mischief in their eyes, more glee
In their pale faces when they glared at me;
Still did they force me on the oar to rest,
And when they saw me fainting and oppressed,
He, with his hand, the old man, scooped the flood,
And there came flame about him mixed with blood;
He bade me stoop and look upon the place,
Then flung the hot-red liquor in my face;
Burning it blazed, and then I roared for pain,
I thought the demons would have turned my brain.
"Still there they stood, and forced me to behold
A place of horrors — they cannot be told —
Where the flood opened, there I heard the shriek
Of tortured guilt — no earthly tongue can speak:
'All days alike! for ever!' did they say, '
And unremitted torments every day' —
Yes, so they said." — But here he ceased and gazed
On all around, frightened and amazed;
And still he tried to speak, and looked in dread
Of frightened females gathering round his bed;
Then dropped exhausted and appeared at rest,
Till the strong foe the vital powers possessed;
Then with an inward, broken voice he cried, "
Again they come," and muttered as he died.
mango5
Endeavour era
Love and Sleep
Lying asleep between the strokes of night
I saw my love lean over my sad bed,
Pale as the duskiest lily's leaf or head,
Smooth-skinned and dark, with bare throat made to bite,
Too wan for blushing and too warm for white,
But perfect-coloured without white or red.
And her lips opened amorously, and said -
I wist not what, saving one word - Delight.
And all her face was honey to my mouth,
And all her body pasture to mine eyes;
The long lithe arms and hotter hands than fire
The quivering flanks, hair smelling of the south,
The bright light feet, the splendid supple thighs
And glittering eyelids of my soul's desire.
Algernon Charles Swinburne
Lying asleep between the strokes of night
I saw my love lean over my sad bed,
Pale as the duskiest lily's leaf or head,
Smooth-skinned and dark, with bare throat made to bite,
Too wan for blushing and too warm for white,
But perfect-coloured without white or red.
And her lips opened amorously, and said -
I wist not what, saving one word - Delight.
And all her face was honey to my mouth,
And all her body pasture to mine eyes;
The long lithe arms and hotter hands than fire
The quivering flanks, hair smelling of the south,
The bright light feet, the splendid supple thighs
And glittering eyelids of my soul's desire.
Algernon Charles Swinburne
Mrs Magpie
On a bit of break...
Age by Mary Wraith
'You are old, my poor mother', the young man said,
'And your hair is exceedingly white,
Can you tell me - I really must ask you again,
How is it you sometimes judge right?'
'In my youth,' the old woman replied with a smile,
'When I looked a much prettier sight,
I sometimes declared again and again
Black is black and white often is white.
To keep my brain active I stood on my head
And asserted all manner of truth,
I balanced the facts on the end of my nose -
Oh, alas, for the days of my youth.
But now that my body is not quite so lithe,
And my hair is exceedingly gray,
I have to accept the very strange fact
That I can't change the world in a day'.
'I find to my sorrow', she said to her son,
'That I see neither black nor yet white,
But a rainbow of hues and all shades of gray,
Do you think I am losing my sight?'
'You are old, my poor mother', the young man said,
'And your hair is exceedingly white,
Can you tell me - I really must ask you again,
How is it you sometimes judge right?'
'In my youth,' the old woman replied with a smile,
'When I looked a much prettier sight,
I sometimes declared again and again
Black is black and white often is white.
To keep my brain active I stood on my head
And asserted all manner of truth,
I balanced the facts on the end of my nose -
Oh, alas, for the days of my youth.
But now that my body is not quite so lithe,
And my hair is exceedingly gray,
I have to accept the very strange fact
That I can't change the world in a day'.
'I find to my sorrow', she said to her son,
'That I see neither black nor yet white,
But a rainbow of hues and all shades of gray,
Do you think I am losing my sight?'
Yossarian
⏭️
October Sky
Taduesz Borowski
October was beautiful. As if it were yesterday I remember
the strangely clear, strangely deep sky
shimmering in the noon heat as a leaf shimmers in the wind,
empty and unreachable. I am oddly melancholy
telling you about this, for what do words mean?
I saw the lines of smoke the wind traced on the elusive sky
and I waited for the moment
when this unreachable sky would lean toward them
to absorb them. After that there is nothing but
the poet's sadness and a subject for a poem.
And once I saw the sky through window panes.
We had just been ordered to open the windows in the blockhouse
and walking by I saw the sky in the glass,
unexpected and wonderful, as if it were
a great camp. Posts stapled with wire,
roads I know so well, were suspended in air
and the grass sparkled in the glass of the window pane
dark green, as from the bottom of a lake. A red flame moved
across the sky and glistened on the grass in a russet stream.
Above this sky, a sky covered with smoke,
another sky hung clear and empty
and the smoke of the first sky drowned in the second.
And I realized that I didn't know anything for certain,
that the earth and all that happens around me
are only a glass pane for someone else's eyes.
Then someone blurred the picture and closed the window.
A moment long gone. The earth is real, and now I know
how real human suffering is.
But as a wave to shore, a moment of doubt returns
still, today, it still pierces me,
and always when I look at the December clouds
I see above them the October sky.
Taduesz Borowski
October was beautiful. As if it were yesterday I remember
the strangely clear, strangely deep sky
shimmering in the noon heat as a leaf shimmers in the wind,
empty and unreachable. I am oddly melancholy
telling you about this, for what do words mean?
I saw the lines of smoke the wind traced on the elusive sky
and I waited for the moment
when this unreachable sky would lean toward them
to absorb them. After that there is nothing but
the poet's sadness and a subject for a poem.
And once I saw the sky through window panes.
We had just been ordered to open the windows in the blockhouse
and walking by I saw the sky in the glass,
unexpected and wonderful, as if it were
a great camp. Posts stapled with wire,
roads I know so well, were suspended in air
and the grass sparkled in the glass of the window pane
dark green, as from the bottom of a lake. A red flame moved
across the sky and glistened on the grass in a russet stream.
Above this sky, a sky covered with smoke,
another sky hung clear and empty
and the smoke of the first sky drowned in the second.
And I realized that I didn't know anything for certain,
that the earth and all that happens around me
are only a glass pane for someone else's eyes.
Then someone blurred the picture and closed the window.
A moment long gone. The earth is real, and now I know
how real human suffering is.
But as a wave to shore, a moment of doubt returns
still, today, it still pierces me,
and always when I look at the December clouds
I see above them the October sky.
Julie and Jim- t. in the park 2003
love story
T in the Park
What a spark
I met gem of a guy
Who immediatly caught my eye
I can hardly believe my luck
Although i know its so true
But....wholley fuck
My life is brand new
Life does have meaning, and purpose afterall
Love,care affection ect
Now i can stand so tall
With you by my side, my darling soulmate
since T in the park
We follow fate!
Julie Mclinden, 2003
ahhhh, lovely
love story
T in the Park
What a spark
I met gem of a guy
Who immediatly caught my eye
I can hardly believe my luck
Although i know its so true
But....wholley fuck
My life is brand new
Life does have meaning, and purpose afterall
Love,care affection ect
Now i can stand so tall
With you by my side, my darling soulmate
since T in the park
We follow fate!
Julie Mclinden, 2003
ahhhh, lovely
RubyToogood
RubyTwobikes
I didn't know anything about Borowski till I read that beautiful poem - I was just sharing it with a friend and we ended up looking up his (fascinating and politically eventful) biography on google. My reading of the poem was completely changed by finding out it was written about Auschwitz, where he was sent for being part of the underground Warsaw University (higher education was forbidden for Poles), along with his fiancee Maria. The gas chambers had a few weeks earlier been declared as only being for Jews, so he survived the last two years of the war there, and even managed to spend time with Maria for some of it, working as a roofer in the women's quarters (they married after the war).
Here's another poem of his from the Auschwitz period:
The Sun of Auschwitz
You remember the sun of Auschwitz
and the green of the distant meadows, lightly
lifted to the clouds by birds,
no longer green in the clouds,
but seagreen white. Together
we stood looking into the distance and felt
the far away green of the meadows and the clouds'
seagreen white within us,
as if the color of the distant meadows
were our blood or the pulse
beating within us, as if the world
existed only through us and nothing changed
as long as we were there. I remember
your smile as elusive
as a shade of the color of the wind,
a leaf trembling on the edge
of sun and shadow, fleeting
yet always there. So you are
for me today, in the seagreen
sky, the greenery and
the leaf-rustling wind. I feel you
in every shadow, every movement,
and you put the world around me
like your arms. I feel the world
as your body, you look into my eyes
and call me with the whole world.
http://hunza1.tripod.com/borowski/index.html - well worth a look for some of the biographical stuff related to the poetry. He committed suicide by gassing himself in 1951. Possible factors cited by biographers include survivor's guilt, post traumatic stress disorder, the fact that he'd had an extra marital affair resulting in a child at the same time that Maria had a child, and severe doubts about his involvement with the Polish Communist Party and secret police when Stalin's atrocities were revealed.
Here's another poem of his from the Auschwitz period:
The Sun of Auschwitz
You remember the sun of Auschwitz
and the green of the distant meadows, lightly
lifted to the clouds by birds,
no longer green in the clouds,
but seagreen white. Together
we stood looking into the distance and felt
the far away green of the meadows and the clouds'
seagreen white within us,
as if the color of the distant meadows
were our blood or the pulse
beating within us, as if the world
existed only through us and nothing changed
as long as we were there. I remember
your smile as elusive
as a shade of the color of the wind,
a leaf trembling on the edge
of sun and shadow, fleeting
yet always there. So you are
for me today, in the seagreen
sky, the greenery and
the leaf-rustling wind. I feel you
in every shadow, every movement,
and you put the world around me
like your arms. I feel the world
as your body, you look into my eyes
and call me with the whole world.
http://hunza1.tripod.com/borowski/index.html - well worth a look for some of the biographical stuff related to the poetry. He committed suicide by gassing himself in 1951. Possible factors cited by biographers include survivor's guilt, post traumatic stress disorder, the fact that he'd had an extra marital affair resulting in a child at the same time that Maria had a child, and severe doubts about his involvement with the Polish Communist Party and secret police when Stalin's atrocities were revealed.
Whoever wrote that last bit, Ruby, has an axe to grind, as the man died in 1951 - two years before Comrade JV Stalin, and FIVE years before the snake Khrushchev issued his denouncements in 1956. Either that or the biographer is talking out of his/her arse.
RubyToogood
RubyTwobikes
It's probably me who's talking out of my arse having read several biographies of him and probably muddled them up. I think this was the bit that I was thinking of:
http://cfcc.net/ghurley/262/borowski.html
I was also thinking of this
http://www.radix.net/~dalila/lit/borowski.html
I have no idea what the significance of the Tito thing is, I'm not a historian.
http://cfcc.net/ghurley/262/borowski.html
I was also thinking of this
http://www.radix.net/~dalila/lit/borowski.html
I have no idea what the significance of the Tito thing is, I'm not a historian.
mango5
Endeavour era
STRONGER LESSONS
HAVE you learned lessons only of those who admired
you, and were tender with you, and stood aside
for you?
Have you not learned the great lessons of those who
rejected you, and braced themselves against
you? or who treated you with contempt, or
disputed the passage with you?
Walt Whitman
HAVE you learned lessons only of those who admired
you, and were tender with you, and stood aside
for you?
Have you not learned the great lessons of those who
rejected you, and braced themselves against
you? or who treated you with contempt, or
disputed the passage with you?
Walt Whitman
RubyToogood
RubyTwobikes
Another October war poem (different war this time).
Autumn
OCTOBER’S bellowing anger breaks and cleaves
The bronzed battalions of the stricken wood
In whose lament I hear a voice that grieves
For battle’s fruitless harvest, and the feud
Of outraged men. Their lives are like the leaves
Scattered in flocks of ruin, tossed and blown
Along the westering furnace flaring red.
O martyred youth and manhood overthrown,
The burden of your wrongs is on my head.
Siegfried Sassoon
Autumn
OCTOBER’S bellowing anger breaks and cleaves
The bronzed battalions of the stricken wood
In whose lament I hear a voice that grieves
For battle’s fruitless harvest, and the feud
Of outraged men. Their lives are like the leaves
Scattered in flocks of ruin, tossed and blown
Along the westering furnace flaring red.
O martyred youth and manhood overthrown,
The burden of your wrongs is on my head.
Siegfried Sassoon
RubyToogood
RubyTwobikes
And another Siegfried Sassoon:
Falling Asleep
VOICES moving about in the quiet house:
Thud of feet and a muffled shutting of doors:
Everyone yawning. Only the clocks are alert.
Out in the night there’s autumn-smelling gloom
Crowded with whispering trees; across the park
A hollow cry of hounds like lonely bells:
And I know that the clouds are moving across the moon;
The low, red, rising moon. Now herons call
And wrangle by their pool; and hooting owls
Sail from the wood above pale stooks of oats.
Waiting for sleep, I drift from thoughts like these;
And where to-day was dream-like, build my dreams.
Music ... there was a bright white room below,
And someone singing a song about a soldier,
One hour, two hours ago: and soon the song
Will be ‘last night’: but now the beauty swings
Across my brain, ghost of remembered chords
Which still can make such radiance in my dream
That I can watch the marching of my soldiers,
And count their faces; faces; sunlit faces.
Falling asleep ... the herons, and the hounds....
September in the darkness; and the world
I’ve known; all fading past me into peace
Falling Asleep
VOICES moving about in the quiet house:
Thud of feet and a muffled shutting of doors:
Everyone yawning. Only the clocks are alert.
Out in the night there’s autumn-smelling gloom
Crowded with whispering trees; across the park
A hollow cry of hounds like lonely bells:
And I know that the clouds are moving across the moon;
The low, red, rising moon. Now herons call
And wrangle by their pool; and hooting owls
Sail from the wood above pale stooks of oats.
Waiting for sleep, I drift from thoughts like these;
And where to-day was dream-like, build my dreams.
Music ... there was a bright white room below,
And someone singing a song about a soldier,
One hour, two hours ago: and soon the song
Will be ‘last night’: but now the beauty swings
Across my brain, ghost of remembered chords
Which still can make such radiance in my dream
That I can watch the marching of my soldiers,
And count their faces; faces; sunlit faces.
Falling asleep ... the herons, and the hounds....
September in the darkness; and the world
I’ve known; all fading past me into peace
Yossarian
⏭️
The Most
Charles Bukowski
here comes the fishhead singing
here comes the baked potato in drag
here comes nothing to do all day long
here comes another night of no sleep
here comes the phone wringing the wrong tone
here comes a termite with a banjo
here comes a flagpole with blank eyes
here comes a a cat and a dog wearing nylons
here comes a machine gun saying
here comes bacon burning in the pan
here comes a voice saying something dull
here comes a newspaper stuffed with small red birds
with flat brown beaks
here comes a cunt carrying a torch
a grenade
a deathly love
here comes a victory carrying
one bucket of blood
and stumbling over the berry bush
and the sheets hang out the windows
and the bombers head east west north south
get lost
get tossed like salad
as all the fish in the sea line up and form
one line
one long line
one very long thin line
the longest line you could ever imagine
and we get lost
walking past purple mountains
we walk lost
bare at last like the knife
having given
having spit it out like an unexpected olive seed
as the girl at the call service
screams over the phone:
"don't call back! you sound like a jerk!"
Charles Bukowski
here comes the fishhead singing
here comes the baked potato in drag
here comes nothing to do all day long
here comes another night of no sleep
here comes the phone wringing the wrong tone
here comes a termite with a banjo
here comes a flagpole with blank eyes
here comes a a cat and a dog wearing nylons
here comes a machine gun saying
here comes bacon burning in the pan
here comes a voice saying something dull
here comes a newspaper stuffed with small red birds
with flat brown beaks
here comes a cunt carrying a torch
a grenade
a deathly love
here comes a victory carrying
one bucket of blood
and stumbling over the berry bush
and the sheets hang out the windows
and the bombers head east west north south
get lost
get tossed like salad
as all the fish in the sea line up and form
one line
one long line
one very long thin line
the longest line you could ever imagine
and we get lost
walking past purple mountains
we walk lost
bare at last like the knife
having given
having spit it out like an unexpected olive seed
as the girl at the call service
screams over the phone:
"don't call back! you sound like a jerk!"
Appolinaire
Automne malade
Automne malade et adoré
Tu mourras quand l'ouragan soufflera dans les roseraies
Quand il aura neigé
Dans les vergers
Pauvre automne
Meurs en blancheur et en richesse
De neige et de fruits mûrs
Au fond du ciel
Des éperviers planent
Sur les nixes nicettes aux cheveux verts et naines
Qui n'ont jamais aimé
Aux lisières lointaines
Les cerfs ont bramé
Et que j'aime ô saison que j'aime tes rumeurs
Les fruits tombant sans qu'on les cueille
Le vent et la forêt qui pleurent
Toutes leurs larmes en automne feuille à feuille
Les feuilles
Qu'on foule
Un train
Qui roule
La vie
S'écoule
Automne malade
Automne malade et adoré
Tu mourras quand l'ouragan soufflera dans les roseraies
Quand il aura neigé
Dans les vergers
Pauvre automne
Meurs en blancheur et en richesse
De neige et de fruits mûrs
Au fond du ciel
Des éperviers planent
Sur les nixes nicettes aux cheveux verts et naines
Qui n'ont jamais aimé
Aux lisières lointaines
Les cerfs ont bramé
Et que j'aime ô saison que j'aime tes rumeurs
Les fruits tombant sans qu'on les cueille
Le vent et la forêt qui pleurent
Toutes leurs larmes en automne feuille à feuille
Les feuilles
Qu'on foule
Un train
Qui roule
La vie
S'écoule
invisibleplanet
porter des cornes
two poems from two of my favourite poets:
from the american poet, E.E.Cummings.
i like my body when it is with your
body. It is so quite new a thing.
Muscles better and nerves more.
i like your body. i like what it does,
i like its hows. i like to feel the spine
of your body and its bones, and the trembling
-firm-smooth ness and which i will
again and again and again
kiss, i like kissing this and that of you,
i like, slowly stroking the, shocking fuzz
of your electric fur, and what-is-it comes
over parting flesh . . . . And eyes big love-crumbs,
and possibly i like the thrill
of under me you so quite new
from the french poet, Charles Baudelaire:
I prize the memory of the naked ages
when Apollo relished gilding marble limbs
whose agile-fleshed originals achieved
with neither ecstasy, fraud nor fear
and was nursed by companionable sky,
enjoying the health of a sublime machine.
Cybele than, abundant in her yield,
did not regard her sons as burdensome,
but, tender-hearted she-wolf, graciously
suckled the universe as her brown dugs.
Lithe and powerful, a man deserved
his pride in beauties who called him their king-
flawless fruit engendered without shame,
whose ripened flash asked only to be tried!
Today the poet eager to recall
such human splendor, when visiting the sites
where men and women show their nakedness
must feel a cold revulsion in his soul
at the display of flesh he contemplates.
How these deformities cry out for clothes!
-wretched bodies, regular grotesques,
runty, paunchy, flabby, scrawny, lame,
brats whom Utility, a pitiless god,
has swaddled in his brazen diapers!
Look at the women - pale as tallow, gnawed
and nourished by debauch - the girls who bear
the burden of their mothers' vice or wear
the hideous stigmas of fecundity!
True, in our corruption we possess
beauties unrevealed to ancient times:
countenances cankered by the heart
and, so to speak, the charm of listlessness;
but subtle thought they are, such artifacts
of a belated muse will never keep
our sickly race from offering to youth
its truest homage; youth we worship still,
its frank expression, its untroubled brow,
its eyes as bright as water; sacred youth
that shares - unconscious as a singing bird,
a flower, or the blue sky's radiance -
its song, its scent, its irresistible warmth!
from the american poet, E.E.Cummings.
i like my body when it is with your
body. It is so quite new a thing.
Muscles better and nerves more.
i like your body. i like what it does,
i like its hows. i like to feel the spine
of your body and its bones, and the trembling
-firm-smooth ness and which i will
again and again and again
kiss, i like kissing this and that of you,
i like, slowly stroking the, shocking fuzz
of your electric fur, and what-is-it comes
over parting flesh . . . . And eyes big love-crumbs,
and possibly i like the thrill
of under me you so quite new
from the french poet, Charles Baudelaire:
I prize the memory of the naked ages
when Apollo relished gilding marble limbs
whose agile-fleshed originals achieved
with neither ecstasy, fraud nor fear
and was nursed by companionable sky,
enjoying the health of a sublime machine.
Cybele than, abundant in her yield,
did not regard her sons as burdensome,
but, tender-hearted she-wolf, graciously
suckled the universe as her brown dugs.
Lithe and powerful, a man deserved
his pride in beauties who called him their king-
flawless fruit engendered without shame,
whose ripened flash asked only to be tried!
Today the poet eager to recall
such human splendor, when visiting the sites
where men and women show their nakedness
must feel a cold revulsion in his soul
at the display of flesh he contemplates.
How these deformities cry out for clothes!
-wretched bodies, regular grotesques,
runty, paunchy, flabby, scrawny, lame,
brats whom Utility, a pitiless god,
has swaddled in his brazen diapers!
Look at the women - pale as tallow, gnawed
and nourished by debauch - the girls who bear
the burden of their mothers' vice or wear
the hideous stigmas of fecundity!
True, in our corruption we possess
beauties unrevealed to ancient times:
countenances cankered by the heart
and, so to speak, the charm of listlessness;
but subtle thought they are, such artifacts
of a belated muse will never keep
our sickly race from offering to youth
its truest homage; youth we worship still,
its frank expression, its untroubled brow,
its eyes as bright as water; sacred youth
that shares - unconscious as a singing bird,
a flower, or the blue sky's radiance -
its song, its scent, its irresistible warmth!
onemonkey
winmonkey
Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997)
Howl - For Carl Solomon
I
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall,
who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,
who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their torsos night after night
with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and endless balls,
incomparable blind streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in the mind leaping towards poles of Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the motionless world of Time between,
Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops, storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brooklyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind,
who chained themselves to subways for the endless ride from Battery to holy Bronx on benzedrine until the noise of wheels and children brought them down shuddering mouth-wracked and battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance in the drear light of Zoo,
who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford's floated out and sat through the stale beer afternoon in desolate Fugazzi's, listening to the crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox,
who talked continuously seventy hours from park to pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brooklyn Bridge,
a lost batallion of platonic conversationalists jumping down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills off Empire State out of the moon
yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars,
whose intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days and nights with brilliant eyes, meat for the Synagogue cast on the pavement,
who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a trail of ambiguous picture postcards of Atlantic City Hall,
suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grindings and migraines of China under junk-withdrawal in Newark's bleak furnished room,
who wandered around and around at midnight in the railway yard wondering where to go, and went, leaving no broken hearts,
who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing through snow toward lonesome farms in grandfather night,
who studied Plotinus Poe St John of the Cross telepathy and bop kabbalah because the universe instinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas,
who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking visionary indian angels who were visionary indian angels,
who thought they were only mad when Baltimore gleamed in supernatural ecstasy,
who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Oklahoma on the impulse of winter midnight streetlight smalltown rain,
who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston seeking jazz or sex or soup, and followed the brilliant Spaniard to converse about America and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship to Africa,
who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving nothing behind but the shadow of dungarees and the larva and ash of poetry scattered in fireplace Chicago,
who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the FBI in beards and shorts with big pacifist eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incomprehensible leaflets,
who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism, who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union Square weeping and undressing while the sirens of Los Alamos wailed them down, and wailed down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also wailed,
who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked and trembling before the machinery of other skeletons,
who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight in policecars for committing no crime but their own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication,
who howled on their knees in the subway and were dragged off the roof waving genitals and manuscripts,
who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy,
who blew and were blown by those human seraphim, the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean love,
who balled in the morning in the evenings in rosegardens and the grass of public parks and cemeteries scattering their semen freely to whomever come who may,
who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up with a sob behind a partition in a Turkish Bath when the blond & naked angel came to pierce them with a sword,
who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar the one eyed shrew that winks out of the womb and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but sit on her ass and snip the intellectual golden threads of the craftsman's loom,
who copulated ecstatic and insatiate and fell off the bed, and continued along the floor and down the hall and ended fainting on the wall with a vision of ultimate cunt and come eluding the last gyzym of consciousness,
who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling in the sunset, and were red eyed in the morning but were prepared to sweeten the snatch of the sunrise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked in the lake,
who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad stolen night-cars, N.C., secret hero of these poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver-joy to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls in empty lots & diner backyards, moviehouses' rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or with gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely petticoat upliftings & especially secret gas-station solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys too,
who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in dreams, woke on a sudden Manhattan, and picked themselves up out of basements hungover with heartless Tokay and horrors of Third Avenue iron dreams & stumbled to unemployment offices,
who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on the snowbank docks waiting for a door in the East River to open full of steamheat and opium,
who created great suicidal dramas on the appartment cliff-banks of the Hudson under the wartime blue floodlight of the moon & their heads shall be crowned with laurel in oblivion,
who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested the crab at the muddy bottom of the rivers of the Bowery,
who wept at the romance of the streets with their pushcarts full of onions and bad music,
who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the bridge, and rose up to build harpsichords in their lofts, who coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned with flame under the tubercular sky surrounded by orange crates of theology,
who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty incantations which in the yellow morning were stanzas of gibberish,
who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail borsht & tortillas dreaming of the pure vegetable kingdom,
who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for an egg,
who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for an Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next decade,
who cut their wrists three times successfully unsuccessfully, gave up and were forced to open antique stores where they thought they were growing old and cried,
who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse & the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors, or were run down by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality,
who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened and walked away unknown and forgotten into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alleyways & firetrucks, not even one free beer,
who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of the subway window, jumped in the filthy Passaic, leaped on negroes, cried all over the street, danced on broken wineglasses barefoot smashed phonograph records of nostalgic European 1930s German jazz finished the whiskey and threw up groaning into the bloody toilet, moans in their ears and the blast of colossal steamwhistles,
who barreled down the highways of the past journeying to each other's hotrod-Golgotha jail-solitude watch Birmingham jazz incarnation,
who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had a vision to find out Eternity,
who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who came back to Denver & waited in vain, who watched over Denver & brooded & loned in Denver and finally went away to find out the Time, & now Denver is lonesome for her heroes,
who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying for each other's salvation and light and breasts, until the soul illuminated its hair for a second,
who crashed through their minds in jail waiting for impossible criminals with golden heads and the charm of reality in their hearts who sang sweet blues to Alcatraz,
Howl - For Carl Solomon
I
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall,
who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,
who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their torsos night after night
with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and endless balls,
incomparable blind streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in the mind leaping towards poles of Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the motionless world of Time between,
Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops, storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brooklyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind,
who chained themselves to subways for the endless ride from Battery to holy Bronx on benzedrine until the noise of wheels and children brought them down shuddering mouth-wracked and battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance in the drear light of Zoo,
who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford's floated out and sat through the stale beer afternoon in desolate Fugazzi's, listening to the crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox,
who talked continuously seventy hours from park to pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brooklyn Bridge,
a lost batallion of platonic conversationalists jumping down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills off Empire State out of the moon
yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars,
whose intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days and nights with brilliant eyes, meat for the Synagogue cast on the pavement,
who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a trail of ambiguous picture postcards of Atlantic City Hall,
suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grindings and migraines of China under junk-withdrawal in Newark's bleak furnished room,
who wandered around and around at midnight in the railway yard wondering where to go, and went, leaving no broken hearts,
who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing through snow toward lonesome farms in grandfather night,
who studied Plotinus Poe St John of the Cross telepathy and bop kabbalah because the universe instinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas,
who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking visionary indian angels who were visionary indian angels,
who thought they were only mad when Baltimore gleamed in supernatural ecstasy,
who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Oklahoma on the impulse of winter midnight streetlight smalltown rain,
who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston seeking jazz or sex or soup, and followed the brilliant Spaniard to converse about America and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship to Africa,
who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving nothing behind but the shadow of dungarees and the larva and ash of poetry scattered in fireplace Chicago,
who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the FBI in beards and shorts with big pacifist eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incomprehensible leaflets,
who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism, who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union Square weeping and undressing while the sirens of Los Alamos wailed them down, and wailed down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also wailed,
who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked and trembling before the machinery of other skeletons,
who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight in policecars for committing no crime but their own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication,
who howled on their knees in the subway and were dragged off the roof waving genitals and manuscripts,
who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy,
who blew and were blown by those human seraphim, the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean love,
who balled in the morning in the evenings in rosegardens and the grass of public parks and cemeteries scattering their semen freely to whomever come who may,
who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up with a sob behind a partition in a Turkish Bath when the blond & naked angel came to pierce them with a sword,
who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar the one eyed shrew that winks out of the womb and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but sit on her ass and snip the intellectual golden threads of the craftsman's loom,
who copulated ecstatic and insatiate and fell off the bed, and continued along the floor and down the hall and ended fainting on the wall with a vision of ultimate cunt and come eluding the last gyzym of consciousness,
who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling in the sunset, and were red eyed in the morning but were prepared to sweeten the snatch of the sunrise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked in the lake,
who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad stolen night-cars, N.C., secret hero of these poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver-joy to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls in empty lots & diner backyards, moviehouses' rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or with gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely petticoat upliftings & especially secret gas-station solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys too,
who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in dreams, woke on a sudden Manhattan, and picked themselves up out of basements hungover with heartless Tokay and horrors of Third Avenue iron dreams & stumbled to unemployment offices,
who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on the snowbank docks waiting for a door in the East River to open full of steamheat and opium,
who created great suicidal dramas on the appartment cliff-banks of the Hudson under the wartime blue floodlight of the moon & their heads shall be crowned with laurel in oblivion,
who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested the crab at the muddy bottom of the rivers of the Bowery,
who wept at the romance of the streets with their pushcarts full of onions and bad music,
who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the bridge, and rose up to build harpsichords in their lofts, who coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned with flame under the tubercular sky surrounded by orange crates of theology,
who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty incantations which in the yellow morning were stanzas of gibberish,
who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail borsht & tortillas dreaming of the pure vegetable kingdom,
who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for an egg,
who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for an Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next decade,
who cut their wrists three times successfully unsuccessfully, gave up and were forced to open antique stores where they thought they were growing old and cried,
who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse & the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors, or were run down by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality,
who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened and walked away unknown and forgotten into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alleyways & firetrucks, not even one free beer,
who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of the subway window, jumped in the filthy Passaic, leaped on negroes, cried all over the street, danced on broken wineglasses barefoot smashed phonograph records of nostalgic European 1930s German jazz finished the whiskey and threw up groaning into the bloody toilet, moans in their ears and the blast of colossal steamwhistles,
who barreled down the highways of the past journeying to each other's hotrod-Golgotha jail-solitude watch Birmingham jazz incarnation,
who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had a vision to find out Eternity,
who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who came back to Denver & waited in vain, who watched over Denver & brooded & loned in Denver and finally went away to find out the Time, & now Denver is lonesome for her heroes,
who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying for each other's salvation and light and breasts, until the soul illuminated its hair for a second,
who crashed through their minds in jail waiting for impossible criminals with golden heads and the charm of reality in their hearts who sang sweet blues to Alcatraz,
onemonkey
winmonkey
who retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit, or Rocky Mount to tender Buddha or Tangiers to boys or Southern Pacific to the black locomotive or Harvard to Narcissus to Woodlawn to the daisychain or grave,
who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hypnotism & were left with their insanity & their hands & a hung jury,
who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturerson Dadaism and subsequently presented themselves on the granite steps of the madhouse with the shaven heads and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding instantaneous lobotomy,
and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin Metrazol electricity hydrotherapy psychotherapy occupational therapy pingpong & amnesia,
who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic pingpong table, resting briefly in catatonia,
returning years later truly bald except for a wig of blood, and tears and fingers, to the visible madman doom of the wards of the madtowns of the East,
Pilgrim State's Rockland's and Greystone's foetid halls, bickering with the echoes of the soul, rocking and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench dolmen-realms of love, dream of life a nightmare, bodies turned to stone as heavy as the moon,
with mother finally *****, and the last fantastic book flung out of the tenement window, and the last door closed at 4 A.M. and the last telephone slammed at the wall in reply and the last furnished room emptied down to the last piece of mental furniture, a yellow paper rose twisted on a wire hanger on the closet, and even that imaginary, nothing but a hopeful little bit of hallucination -
ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and now you're really in the total animal soup of time -
and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed with a sudden flash of the alchemy of the use of the ellipse the catalog the meter & the vibrating plane,
who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images juxtaposed, and trapped the archangel of the soulbetween 2 visual images and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of consciousness together jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus
to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in his naked and endless head,
the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown, yet putting down here what might be left to say in time come after death,
and rose incarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the suffering of America's naked mind for love into an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio
with the absolute heart of the poem butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years.
who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hypnotism & were left with their insanity & their hands & a hung jury,
who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturerson Dadaism and subsequently presented themselves on the granite steps of the madhouse with the shaven heads and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding instantaneous lobotomy,
and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin Metrazol electricity hydrotherapy psychotherapy occupational therapy pingpong & amnesia,
who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic pingpong table, resting briefly in catatonia,
returning years later truly bald except for a wig of blood, and tears and fingers, to the visible madman doom of the wards of the madtowns of the East,
Pilgrim State's Rockland's and Greystone's foetid halls, bickering with the echoes of the soul, rocking and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench dolmen-realms of love, dream of life a nightmare, bodies turned to stone as heavy as the moon,
with mother finally *****, and the last fantastic book flung out of the tenement window, and the last door closed at 4 A.M. and the last telephone slammed at the wall in reply and the last furnished room emptied down to the last piece of mental furniture, a yellow paper rose twisted on a wire hanger on the closet, and even that imaginary, nothing but a hopeful little bit of hallucination -
ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and now you're really in the total animal soup of time -
and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed with a sudden flash of the alchemy of the use of the ellipse the catalog the meter & the vibrating plane,
who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images juxtaposed, and trapped the archangel of the soulbetween 2 visual images and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of consciousness together jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus
to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in his naked and endless head,
the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown, yet putting down here what might be left to say in time come after death,
and rose incarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the suffering of America's naked mind for love into an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio
with the absolute heart of the poem butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years.
onemonkey
winmonkey
II
What sphinx of cement and aluminium bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?
Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!
Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!
Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgement! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!
Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!
Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovas! Moloch whose factories dream and choke in the fog! Moloch whose smokestacks and antennae crown the cities!
Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Moloch whose name is the Mind!
Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream angels! Crazy in Moloch! Cocksucker in Moloch! Lacklove and manless in Moloch!
Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy! Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch! Light streaming out of the sky!
Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisable suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible madhouses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!
They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pavements, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us!
Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstacies! gone down the American river!
Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit!
Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions! gone down the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! Despairs! Ten years' animal screams and suicides! Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on the rocks of Time!
Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell! They jumped off the roof! to solitude! waving! carrying flowers! Down to the river! into the street!
What sphinx of cement and aluminium bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?
Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!
Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!
Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgement! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!
Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!
Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovas! Moloch whose factories dream and choke in the fog! Moloch whose smokestacks and antennae crown the cities!
Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Moloch whose name is the Mind!
Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream angels! Crazy in Moloch! Cocksucker in Moloch! Lacklove and manless in Moloch!
Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy! Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch! Light streaming out of the sky!
Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisable suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible madhouses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!
They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pavements, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us!
Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstacies! gone down the American river!
Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit!
Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions! gone down the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! Despairs! Ten years' animal screams and suicides! Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on the rocks of Time!
Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell! They jumped off the roof! to solitude! waving! carrying flowers! Down to the river! into the street!
onemonkey
winmonkey
III
Carl Solomon! I'm with you in Rockland
where you're madder than I am
I'm with you in Rockland
where you must feel strange
I'm with you in Rockland
where you imitate the shade of my mother
I'm with you in Rockland
where you've murdered your twelve secretaries
I'm with you in Rockland
where you laugh at this invisible humour
I'm with you in Rockland
where we are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter
I'm with you in Rockland
where your condition has become serious and is reported on the radio
I'm with you in Rockland
where the faculties of the skull no longer admit the worms of the senses
I'm with you in Rockland
where you drink the tea of the breasts of the spinsters of Utica
I'm with you in Rockland
where you pun on the bodies of your nurses the harpies of the Bronx
I'm with you in Rockland
where you scream in a straightjacket that you're losing the game of actual pingpong of the abyss
I'm with you in Rockland
where you bang on the catatonic piano the soul is innocent and immortal it should never die ungodly in an armed madhouse
I'm with you in Rockland
where fifty more shocks will never return your soul to its body again from its pilgrimage to a cross in the void
I'm with you in Rockland
where you accuse your doctors of insanity and plot the Hebrew socialist revolution against the fascist national Golgotha
I'm with you in Rockland
where you will split the heavens of Long Island and resurrect your living human Jesus from the superhuman tomb
I'm with you in Rockland
where there are twentyfive thousand mad comrades all together singing the final stanzas of the Internationale
I'm with you in Rockland
where we hug and kiss the United States under our bedsheets the United States that coughs all night and won't let us sleep
I'm with you in Rockland
where we wake up electrified out of the coma by our own souls' airplanes roaring over the roof they've come to drop angelic bombs the hospital illuminates itself imaginary walls collapse O skinny legions run outside O starry-spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is here O victory forget your underwear we're free
I'm with you in Rockland
in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-journey on the highway across America in tears to the door of my cottage in the Western night
Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997)
Carl Solomon! I'm with you in Rockland
where you're madder than I am
I'm with you in Rockland
where you must feel strange
I'm with you in Rockland
where you imitate the shade of my mother
I'm with you in Rockland
where you've murdered your twelve secretaries
I'm with you in Rockland
where you laugh at this invisible humour
I'm with you in Rockland
where we are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter
I'm with you in Rockland
where your condition has become serious and is reported on the radio
I'm with you in Rockland
where the faculties of the skull no longer admit the worms of the senses
I'm with you in Rockland
where you drink the tea of the breasts of the spinsters of Utica
I'm with you in Rockland
where you pun on the bodies of your nurses the harpies of the Bronx
I'm with you in Rockland
where you scream in a straightjacket that you're losing the game of actual pingpong of the abyss
I'm with you in Rockland
where you bang on the catatonic piano the soul is innocent and immortal it should never die ungodly in an armed madhouse
I'm with you in Rockland
where fifty more shocks will never return your soul to its body again from its pilgrimage to a cross in the void
I'm with you in Rockland
where you accuse your doctors of insanity and plot the Hebrew socialist revolution against the fascist national Golgotha
I'm with you in Rockland
where you will split the heavens of Long Island and resurrect your living human Jesus from the superhuman tomb
I'm with you in Rockland
where there are twentyfive thousand mad comrades all together singing the final stanzas of the Internationale
I'm with you in Rockland
where we hug and kiss the United States under our bedsheets the United States that coughs all night and won't let us sleep
I'm with you in Rockland
where we wake up electrified out of the coma by our own souls' airplanes roaring over the roof they've come to drop angelic bombs the hospital illuminates itself imaginary walls collapse O skinny legions run outside O starry-spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is here O victory forget your underwear we're free
I'm with you in Rockland
in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-journey on the highway across America in tears to the door of my cottage in the Western night
Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997)
Donna Ferentes
jubliado
Very nice, but there it is already in the index - which directs us to page 9, wherein the poem can still be found.
mango5
Endeavour era
Wife to Husband
Pardon the faults in me,
For the love of years ago;
Good-bye.
I must drift across the sea,
I must sink into the snow,
I must die.
You can bask in this sun,
You can drink wine and eat;
Good-bye.
I must gird myself and run,
Though with unready feet:
I must die.
Blank sea to sail upon,
Cold bed to sleep in:
Good-bye.
While you clasp, I must be gone
For all your weeping:
I must die.
A kiss for one friend,
And a word for two, -
Good-bye:-
A lock that you msut send,
A kindness you must do:
I must die.
Not a word for you,
Not a lock or kiss,
Good-bye.
We, one, must part in two;
Verily death is this:
I must die.
Christina Rossetti
Pardon the faults in me,
For the love of years ago;
Good-bye.
I must drift across the sea,
I must sink into the snow,
I must die.
You can bask in this sun,
You can drink wine and eat;
Good-bye.
I must gird myself and run,
Though with unready feet:
I must die.
Blank sea to sail upon,
Cold bed to sleep in:
Good-bye.
While you clasp, I must be gone
For all your weeping:
I must die.
A kiss for one friend,
And a word for two, -
Good-bye:-
A lock that you msut send,
A kindness you must do:
I must die.
Not a word for you,
Not a lock or kiss,
Good-bye.
We, one, must part in two;
Verily death is this:
I must die.
Christina Rossetti
Donna Ferentes
jubliado
Let's all have a swoon
Christ, how I hate Rossetti and her crowd. It reminds me of this:
Christ, how I hate Rossetti and her crowd. It reminds me of this:
Pickman's model
Starry Wisdom
Let's all have a swoon
i hope yr not going to drown yrself, justin! not just cos of one poem...Originally posted by Justin
Christ, how I hate Rossetti and her crowd. It reminds me of this:
