by May Swenson
4 Likes
Meaning
By Czeslaw Milosz
When I die, I will see the lining of the world.
The other side, beyond bird, mountain, sunset.
The true meaning, ready to be decoded.
What never added up will add Up,
What was incomprehensible will be comprehended.
-And if there is no lining to the world?
If a thrush on a branch is not a sign,
But just a thrush on the branch? If night and day
Make no sense following each other?
And on this earth there is nothing except this earth?
Even if that is so, there will remain
A word wakened by lips that perish,
A tireless messenger who runs and runs
Through interstellar fields, through the revolving galaxies,
And calls out, protests, screams.
by Czeslaw Milosz
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Great thread.
http://www.jg-lab.com/arts/Poetry2.pdf
A collection of poetry from the clubhouse where i volunteer.
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@starkin999 Thats really cool that the clubhouse put together a collection of poetry. Thanks for sharing! 
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I came across a man, sitting
Naked, bestial, in a desert.
In his hands he held his heart,
And he ate of it.
I said, "Friend, is that good?"
He said, âAw, it is bitter, bitter,
But I like it, because it is bitter,
And because it is my heart.â
- Stephen Crain -
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You are not a slave
You are a king.
If you want something release the wish, and let it light on its desire, completely free of the personal.
Rumi
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Oh, Thou who Man of baser Earth didst make,
And evân with Paradise devise the Snake:
For all the Sin wherewith the Face of Man
Is blackened - Manâs forgiveness give - and take!
- The Rubaiyat -
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This is such a talented poet - wish more of his poems were translated.
CLOSE YOUR EYES SO NO TO SEE THE FLAGS
by Mehmed Begic
That same man is on the street below your window.
The light is low and his face obstructed.
You know heâs there and he knows you are too.
Cigarettes burning away in both your hands.
Telephone is silent and glass half full.
Telephone is an ominous blackbird -
you killed it a few days ago.
Before that the mirrors lost the war,
Guitar and songs of a revolution you believed in.
In the hallway on a hanger a coat and hat are waiting.
You ask who your friends are?
Did any woman ever really love you?
Leave the armchair and seize your answers in the bathroom
you broken man of the desert
who harbours a cactus in place of a heart.
On every razor there is a testament that life is a dream.
Remember how you dreamed illusions away
Like skirts fluttering in the wind.
You can run away from memories
try to forget the smells
close your eyes, still you see the flags.
None of them stand for freedom.
Freedom is a dress caught in the spring breeze.
The clock on the wall has struck you out.
Itâs silent but for the water dripping in the bathroom.
A hat and coat on a hanger
and a man below a window waiting.
Both of you know itâs the last cigarette time.
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Rilke - The First Elegy
Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angel hierarchies?
And even if one of them pressed me suddenly against his heart:
I would be consumed in that overwhelming existence.
For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we are still just able to endure,
and we are so awed because it sincerely disdains to annihilate us.
Every angel is terrifying.
And so I hold myself back and swallow the core-note of my dark sobbing.
Ah, who can we ever turn to in our need?
Not angels, not humans, and already the animals are aware
that we are not at home in our interpreted world.
Perhaps there remains for us a tree on some hillside, which every day we can take into our vision; There remains for us yesterdayâs streets and loyalty of habit so much at ease
when it stayed with us that it moved in and never left.
Oh and night: there is night, when a wind full of infinite space gnaws at our faces.
Whom would it not remain for-that longed-after, mildly
disillusioning presence,
Which the solitary heart so painfully meets.
Is it any less difficult for lovers?
But they keep on using each other to hide their own fate.
Donât you know yet?
Fling the emptiness out of your arms into the spaces we breathe;
Perhaps the birds will feel the expanded air with more passionate flying
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Its been 8 years since mentally illness took away David Foster Wallace. So as a tribute to a great writer I will post a few quotesâŠwith the genius allegory from his essay This is water for the start:
There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, âMorning, boys, howâs the water?â And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, âWhat the hell is water?â
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Everything Iâve ever let go of has claw marks on it.
Weâre all lonely for something we donât know weâre lonely for. How else to explain the curious feeling that goes around feeling like missing somebody weâve never even met?
You can be shaped, or you can be broken. There is not much in between. Try to learn. Be coachable. Try to learn from everybody, especially those who fail. This is hard. ⊠How promising you are as a Student of the Game is a function of what you can pay attention to without running away.
David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest
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âFor in a dream a good deed is not lostâ
Pedro Calderon, Lifeâs a dream
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- T.S. Eliot - from "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question âŠ
Oh, do not ask, "What is it?"
Let us go and make our visit.
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From The Hollow Men by T.S.Eliot
Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five oâclock in the morning.
Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom
Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
Life is very long
Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom
For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
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I died from minerality and became vegetable;
And From vegetativeness I died and became animal.
I died from animality and became man.
Then why fear disappearance through death?
Next time I shall die
Bringing forth wings and feathers like angels;
After that, soaring higher than angels -
What you cannot imagine,
I shall be that.
Rumi
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Just the other day I was trying to remember what poem that last line came from - âNot with a bang but a whimper.â I love that.
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Report From Paradise
by Zbignew Herbert
In paradise the work week is thirty hours
salaries are higher prices always dropping
physical labor is not tiring (because of lower gravity)
chopping wood is like typing
the social system is stable the government moderate
itâs certainly better in paradise than in any country
At first it was supposed to be different
luminous circles choirs and rungs of abstraction
but one couldnât separate body from soul
precisely enough and the soul would arrive
with a drop of blubber a thread of muscle
one had to compromise
mix the grain of the absolute with the grain of clay
still another falling away from the doctrine the ultimate one
only John foresaw it: the resurrection of the body
God is seen by few
exists only for those made of pure pneuma
the rest listen to communiqués about floods and miracles
in time all will see God
when this is to take place nobody knows
In the meantime Saturday at noon
the sirens roar sweetly
and heavenly proletarians come out of the factories
carrying their wings awkwardly like violins
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This is more like 3 poems a day lol.
Breasts by Ivor cutler:
If you have big breasts
You will fall over
Unless you wear a rucksack
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A bit of a heavy one: The Second Coming
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
3 Likes