WOW!!! this is really good I like it
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WOW!!! this is really good I like it
Your poem hasn't been deleted but moved to 'Personal Poetry' section, Dahlia:Quote:
Originally Posted by DahliaBlood
http://www.online-literature.com/for...ad.php?t=23401
The Windhover
I caught this morning morning's minion, king-
dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird, - the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!
Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!
No wonder of it: sheer plod makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.
-- Gerard Manley Hopkins
Spring
To what purpose, April, do you return again?
Beauty is not enough.
You can no longer quiet me with the redness
Of little leaves opening stickily.
I know what I know.
The sun is hot on my neck as I observe
The spikes of the crocus.
The smell of the earth is good.
It is apparent that there is no death.
But what does that signify?
Not only under ground are the brains of men
Eaten by maggots.
Life in itself
Is nothing,
An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs.
It is not enough that yearly, down this hill,
April
Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.
~The ever-so-lovely Edna St. Vincent Millay
ARCHAIC TORSO OF APOLLO
by Rainer Maria Rilke
Translated by Stephen Mitchell
We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,
gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.
Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast's fur:
would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.
What struck me first was their panic.
Some were pulled by the wind from moving
to the ends of the stacked cages,
some had their heads blown through the bars—
and could not get them in again.
Some hung there like that—dead—
their own feathers blowing, clotting
in their faces. Then
I saw the one that made me slow some—
I lingered there beside her for five miles.
She had pushed her head through the space
between bars—to get a better view.
She had the look of a dog in the back
of a pickup, that eager look of a dog
who knows she’s being taken along.
She craned her neck.
She looked around, watched me, then
strained to see over the car—strained
to see what happened beyond.
That is the chicken I want to be.
- Jane Mead
I discovered Jane Mead because I judged her book by its cover (later that day I left open the refigerator door). "The Lord and the General Din of the World." This poem the epiphany at the end of a painful journey.
All poems are included in the current edition of Dylan Thomas’ Collected Poems.
I see the boys of summer
Where once the twilight locks
A process in the weather of the heart
Before I knocked
The force that through the green fuse
My hero bares his nerves
Where once the waters of your face
If I were tickled by the rub of love
Our eunuch dreams
Especially when the October wind
When, like a running grave
From love’s first fever
In the beginning
Light breaks where no sun shines
I fellowed sleep
I dreamed my genesis
My world is pyramid
All all and all
CANTO I
And then went down to the ship,
Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea, and
We set up mast and sail on that swart ship,
Bore sheep aboard her, and our bodies also
Heavy with weeping, and winds from sternward
Bore us onward with bellying canvas,
Crice's this craft, the trim-coifed goddess.
Then sat we amidships, wind jamming the tiller,
Thus with stretched sail, we went over sea till day's end.
Sun to his slumber, shadows o'er all the ocean,
Came we then to the bounds of deepest water,
To the Kimmerian lands, and peopled cities
Covered with close-webbed mist, unpierced ever
With glitter of sun-rays
Nor with stars stretched, nor looking back from heaven
Swartest night stretched over wreteched men there.
The ocean flowing backward, came we then to the place
Aforesaid by Circe.
Here did they rites, Perimedes and Eurylochus,
And drawing sword from my hip
I dug the ell-square pitkin;
Poured we libations unto each the dead,
First mead and then sweet wine, water mixed with white flour
Then prayed I many a prayer to the sickly death's-heads;
As set in Ithaca, sterile bulls of the best
For sacrifice, heaping the pyre with goods,
A sheep to Tiresias only, black and a bell-sheep.
Dark blood flowed in the fosse,
Souls out of Erebus, cadaverous dead, of brides
Of youths and of the old who had borne much;
Souls stained with recent tears, girls tender,
Men many, mauled with bronze lance heads,
Battle spoil, bearing yet dreory arms,
These many crowded about me; with shouting,
Pallor upon me, cried to my men for more beasts;
Slaughtered the herds, sheep slain of bronze;
Poured ointment, cried to the gods,
To Pluto the strong, and praised Proserpine;
Unsheathed the narrow sword,
I sat to keep off the impetuous impotent dead,
Till I should hear Tiresias.
But first Elpenor came, our friend Elpenor,
Unburied, cast on the wide earth,
Limbs that we left in the house of Circe,
Unwept, unwrapped in the sepulchre, since toils urged other.
Pitiful spirit. And I cried in hurried speech:
"Elpenor, how art thou come to this dark coast?
"Cam'st thou afoot, outstripping seamen?"
And he in heavy speech:
"Ill fate and abundant wine. I slept in Crice's ingle.
"Going down the long ladder unguarded,
"I fell against the buttress,
"Shattered the nape-nerve, the soul sought Avernus.
"But thou, O King, I bid remember me, unwept, unburied,
"Heap up mine arms, be tomb by sea-bord, and inscribed:
"A man of no fortune, and with a name to come.
"And set my oar up, that I swung mid fellows."
And Anticlea came, whom I beat off, and then Tiresias Theban,
Holding his golden wand, knew me, and spoke first:
"A second time? why? man of ill star,
"Facing the sunless dead and this joyless region?
"Stand from the fosse, leave me my bloody bever
"For soothsay."
And I stepped back,
And he strong with the blood, said then: "Odysseus
"Shalt return through spiteful Neptune, over dark seas,
"Lose all companions." Then Anticlea came.
Lie quiet Divus. I mean, that is Andreas Divus,
In officina Wecheli, 1538, out of Homer.
And he sailed, by Sirens and thence outwards and away
And unto Crice.
Venerandam,
In the Cretan's phrase, with the golden crown, Aphrodite,
Cypri munimenta sortita est, mirthful, oricalchi, with golden
Girdle and breat bands, thou with dark eyelids
Bearing the golden bough of Argicidia. So that:
Ezra Pound
quasimodo1 (being a controversial poet...how about a short poll, like or dislike)
Love that poem Quasi.
CHICAGO
by: Carl Sandburg (1878-1967)
OG Butcher for the World,
Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders:
They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I have seen your painted women under the gas lamps luring the farm boys.
And they tell me you are crooked and I answer: Yes, it is true I have seen the gunman kill and go free to kill again.
And they tell me you are brutal and my reply is: On the faces of women and children I have seen the marks of wanton hunger.
And having answered so I turn once more to those who sneer at this my city, and I give them back the sneer and say to them:
Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.
Flinging magnetic curses amid the toil of piling job on job, here is a tall bold slugger set vivid against the little soft cities;
Fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action, cunning as a savage pitted against the wilderness,
Bareheaded,
Shoveling,
Wrecking,
Planning,
Building, breaking, rebuilding,
Under the smoke, dust all over his mouth, laughing with white teeth,
Under the terrible burden of destiny laughing as a young man laughs,
Laughing even as an ignorant fighter laughs who has never lost a battle,
Bragging and laughing that under his wrist is the pulse, and under his ribs the heart of the people,
Laughing!
Laughing the stormy, husky, brawling laughter of Youth, half-naked, sweating, proud to be the Hog Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and Freight Handler to the Nation.
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 convictions, 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?
W. B. Yeats
This and Among School Children are my favorites.Quote:
Originally Posted by PrinceMyshkin
And are you familiar with the theosophical stuff WBY believed that's relevant to The Second Coming?Quote:
Originally Posted by firefangled
You may have come upon my THREE FOR WBY, but better still Auden's "Earth receive an honoured guest..."
Quote:
Originally Posted by PrinceMyshkin
Earth, receive an honoured guest;
William Yeats is laid to rest:
Let the Irish vessel lie
Emptied of its poetry.
Sailing to Byzantium I remember, but not very well. Auden's lines I wrote, I sort of remembered, but I looked them up to be sure.
I should probably revisit both in my "old age." School Children I have read dozens of times over and am constantly bring it to mind for the "O Chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer...." stanza.
Thanks for reminding me.
Quote:
Originally Posted by firefangled
Do you know that wacky story by Borges: "Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote"? In the fashion of Menard I'd almost be tempted to adopt the dress and character of a late 19th-early 20th century Irishman, fall helplessly in love with Maud Gonne and take up Mme Blavatsky & the other theosophists if I could then write like that SOB!
Quote:
Originally Posted by PrinceMyshkin
No I don't know that story, but...
I always thought I would fall for Maud Gonne if we met...and then he had to say, "but one man loved the pilgrim soul in you, and loved the sorrows of your changing face."
That cinched it. I wouldn't even ask for anything in exchange for all the grief she would have put me through. I would liked to have met her when I was 18and rallying against Viet Nam. Our letters to each other from separate prisons would be famous now.
Yeats was a bit too well behaved for Maud Gonne? He looked somewhat proper when he was young. I know he had a sense of humor and was even ribald in his writing sometimes, but that could have been his outlet.
The Cranberries sing of her in their song, Yeats' Grave.
Silenced by death in the grave
William Butler Yeats couldn't save
Why did you stand here
Were you sickened in time
But I know by now
Why did you sit here?
In the grave.
Why should I blame her,
that she filled my days
With misery or that she would of late
Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways
Or hurled the little streets upon the great
Had they but courage
Equal to desire
Sad that Maud Gonne couldn't stay
But she had MacBride anyway
And you sit here with me
On the Isle Inisfree
And you are writing down everything
But I know by now
Why did you sit here
In the grave..
Why should I blame her
Had they but courage equal to desire
WHAT! Did you write this gorgeous poem? If not, please HASTEN to add the name of the author!Quote:
Originally Posted by ampoule
I have spoken!
Well, to save you the trouble of looking it up and going through the vexation I did: Pierre Menard is an early 20th c. Frenchman who conceives a desire to write Don Quixote so, to begin with, he dresses like a Spaniard of Cervantes' time, reads all the romance novels that Cervantes read... but then decides that that is the way Cervantes wrote it so he reverts to his original habits...Quote:
Originally Posted by firefangled
At his death it is found that he had completed a certain number of chapters of Book 1, etc. Borges then quotes a paragraph from Cervantes' version, and one that Menard wrote, and the reader goes effing crazy looking from one to the other to realize that indeed every word, every g/d comma is the same...
The point? Search me....
I have no idea who wrote this but I wish I did write it. quasimodo1
Well read my reply to firefangled just above yours, and you'll see that you COULD write it!Quote:
Originally Posted by quasimodo1
No PrinceMyshkin, I wish I could make you that happy! But, the words and music, recorded by the Cranberries, is by their singer, Dolores O'Riordan, born September 6, 1971, in Limerick, England.Quote:
Originally Posted by PrinceMyshkin
(Evidently my previous posting was in the wrong place. Please forgive me, I'm new.)
Ditties for the Week of July 9-uh,oh, 13th
A Clerihew is a humorous, "pseudo-biographical" ditty invented by Edmund Clerihew Bentley. As a young lad he came up with the idea when he was trying to avoid doing his homework. The name of the subject, usually a celebrity, appears at the end of Line One. (So you're more likely to find a Clerihew about someone whose name is easy to rhyme, like Donald Trump or Condoleeza Rice say, as opposed to David Ignatow or Zbignew Brzezinski.)
Here’s a couple, which like Law and Order plots, are ripped off today’s headlines:
Like a veggie out of the can, that Scooter “Libby”
Essentially scot-free from being all fibby,
He’s still driving a Bentley (not a Jeep)?
I guess it pays to be pals with The Veep.
Way down in the ratings, Ms Couric, Katie,
Gussied up for the news, all flirty and date-y,
Putting sober(?) CBS execs into a lather,
Consoled, at least, that she’s not Dan Rather.
And in honor of the All Star Game that nobody watched, a baseball extra by Auntie Clerihew Shecky:
Rewind
Inside the park home run!
Safe!
Home plate ump outstretches his arms.
too late.
Delivery to the catcher
runner slides-------------
who fires it home
cut off by the second baseman
the throw
the sprint from third
base coach waves ‘im in
finally retrieved by the center fielder
the ball ricochets against the wall
it’s heading for the corner
the runner rounding second
he still can't get it!
The right-fielder chases–
It’s going down the line!
Wait–it’s rolling–
Fair ball !
he busts out of the box
–-a line towards first
--and the swing--
center of the plate--
the pitcher deals –
Here’s the wind-up –
He’s looking for a fastball inside
Now here’s a guy who’s as good as anybody with a bat
Two outs
Nobody on.
From Questions About Angels by Billy Collins.
Questions About Angels
Of all the questions you might want to ask
about angels, the only one you ever hear
is how many can dance on the head of a pin.
No curiosity about how they pass the eternal time
besides circling the Throne chanting in Latin
or delivering a crust of bread to a hermit on earth
or guiding a boy and girl across a rickety wooden bridge.
Do they fly through God's body and come out singing?
Do they swing like children from the hinges
of the spirit world saying their names backwards and forwards?
Do they sit alone in little gardens changing colors?
What about their sleeping habits, the fabric of their robes,
their diet of unfiltered divine light?
What goes on inside their luminous heads? Is there a wall
these tall presences can look over and see hell?
If an angel fell off a cloud would he leave a hole
in a river and would the hole float along endlessly
filled with the silent letters of every angelic word?
If an angel delivered the mail would he arrive
in a blinding rush of wings or would he just assume
the appearance of the regular mailman and
whistle up the driveway reading the postcards?
No, The medieval theologians control the court.
The only question you ever hear is about
the little dance floor on the head of a pin
where halos are meant to converge and drift invisibly.
It is designed to make us think in millions,
billions, to make us run out of numbers and collapse
into infinity, but perhaps the answer is simply one:
one female angel dancing alone in her stocking feet,
a small jazz combo working in the background.
She sways like a branch in the wind, her beautiful
eyes closed, and the tall thin bassist leans over
to glance at his watch because she has been dancing
forever, and now it is very late, even for musicians.
Oh how that makes me smile. Thank you for sharing angels, Fire.
Emily Dickinson-
Glee! The great storm is over!
Four have recovered the land;
Forty gone down together
Into the boiling sand.
Ring, for the scant salvation!
Toll, for the bonnie souls, --
Neighbor and friend and bridegroom,
Spinning upon the shoals!
How they will tell the shipwreck
When winter shakes the door,
Till the children ask, "But the forty?
Did they come back no more?"
Then a silence suffuses the story,
And a softness the teller's eye;
And the children no further question,
And only the waves reply.
I chose this poem because I really enjoy reading about the ocean. And this poem has truth in it. This poem describes something that happens quite often in the seafaring world; a tragedy occurs, "and only the waves reply".
But I have to admit, it was hard trying to decide whether to use Emily D or William W; they're probably my favorite... along with some others of course.
Rhymes of a Rolling Stone
by
Robert W. Service
The Song of the Camp-Fire
I
Heed me, feed me, I am hungry, I am red-tongued with desire;
Boughs of balsam, slabs of cedar, gummy fagots of the pine,
Heap them on me, let me hug them to my eager heart of fire,
Roaring, soaring up to heaven as a symbol and a sign.
Bring me knots of sunny maple, silver birch and tamarack;
Leaping, sweeping, I will lap them with my ardent wings of flame;
I will kindle them to glory, I will beat the darkness back;
Streaming, gleaming, I will goad them to my glory and my fame.
Bring me gnarly limbs of live-oak, aid me in my frenzied fight;
Strips of iron-wood, scaly blue-gum, writhing redly in my hold;
With my lunge of lurid lances, with my whips that flail the night,
They will burgeon into beauty, they will foliate in gold.
Let me star the dim sierras, stab with light the inland seas;
Roaming wind and roaring darkness! seek no mercy at my hands;
I will mock the marly heavens, lamp the purple prairies,
I will flaunt my deathless banners down the far, unhouseled lands.
In the vast and vaulted pine-gloom where the pillared forests frown,
By the sullen, bestial rivers running where God only knows,
On the starlit coral beaches when the combers thunder down,
In the death-spell of the barrens, in the shudder of the snows;
In a blazing belt of triumph from the palm-leaf to the pine,
As a symbol of defiance lo! the wilderness I span;
And my beacons burn exultant as an everlasting sign
Of unending domination, of the mastery of Man;
I, the Life, the fierce Uplifter, I that weaned him from the mire;
I, the angel and the devil, I, the tyrant and the slave;
I, the Spirit of the Struggle; I, the mighty God of Fire;
I, the Maker and Destroyer; I, the Giver and the Grave.
II
Gather round me, boy and grey-beard, frontiersman of every kind.
Few are you, and far and lonely, yet an army forms behind:
By your camp-fires shall they know you, ashes scattered to the wind.
Peer into my heart of solace, break your bannock at my blaze;
Smoking, stretched in lazy shelter, build your castles as you gaze;
Or, it may be, deep in dreaming, think of dim, unhappy days.
Let my warmth and glow caress you, for your trails are grim and hard;
Let my arms of comfort press you, hunger-hewn and battle-scarred:
O my lovers! how I bless you with your lives so madly marred!
For you seek the silent spaces, and their secret lore you glean:
For you win the savage races, and the brutish Wild you wean;
And I gladden desert places, where camp-fire has never been.
From the Pole unto the Tropics is there trail ye have not dared?
And because you hold death lightly, so by death shall you be spared,
(As the sages of the ages in their pages have declared).
On the roaring Arkilinik in a leaky bark canoe;
Up the cloud of Mount McKinley, where the avalanche leaps through;
In the furnace of Death Valley, when the mirage glimmers blue.
Now a smudge of wiry willows on the weary Kuskoquim;
Now a flare of gummy pine-knots where Vancouver's scaur is grim;
Now a gleam of sunny ceiba, when the Cuban beaches dim.
Always, always God's Great Open: lo! I burn with keener light
In the corridors of silence, in the vestibules of night;
'Mid the ferns and grasses gleaming, was there ever gem so bright?
Not for weaklings, not for women, like my brother of the hearth;
Ring your songs of wrath around me, I was made for manful mirth,
In the lusty, gusty greatness, on the bald spots of the earth.
Men, my masters! men, my lovers! ye have fought and ye have bled;
Gather round my ruddy embers, softly glowing is my bed;
By my heart of solace dreaming, rest ye and be comforted!
III
I am dying, O my masters! by my fitful flame ye sleep;
My purple plumes of glory droop forlorn.
Grey ashes choke and cloak me, and above the pines there creep
The stealthy silver moccasins of morn.
There comes a countless army, it's the Legion of the Light;
It tramps in gleaming triumph round the world;
And before its jewelled lances all the shadows of the night
Back in to abysmal darknesses are hurled.
Leap to life again, my lovers! ye must toil and never tire;
The day of daring, doing, brightens clear,
When the bed of spicy cedar and the jovial camp-fire
Must only be a memory of cheer.
There is hope and golden promise in the vast portentous dawn;
There is glamour in the glad, effluent sky:
Go and leave me; I will dream of you and love you when you're gone;
I have served you, O my masters! let me die.
A little heap of ashes, grey and sodden by the rain,
Wind-scattered, blurred and blotted by the snow:
Let that be all to tell of me, and glorious again,
Ye things of greening gladness, leap and glow!
A black scar in the sunshine by the palm-leaf or the pine,
Blind to the night and dead to all desire;
Yet oh, of life and uplift what a symbol and a sign!
Yet oh, of power and conquest what a destiny is mine!
A little heap of ashes -- Yea! a miracle divine,
The foot-print of a god, all-radiant Fire.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------sometimes called the poet of the Yukon, Robert Service quasimodo1
She Is Dead
“She is dead,” they said
And they gathered up the things
Of her days.
Life’s little spindle,
Her gentle ways,
The comforting words
That were left a wall
About their fears
To keep them from climbing
Into future years.
The hopes of her pleasing,
Her little vigil hours,
The chest of her maiden dreams,
The flowers of a gladder faith,
The lavender of old tears.
The linen of her fingers weaving
The garments for her children’s souls
From words writ in the Holy booke.
And the memory
Or strong caressing hands
That they had always found
Understanding.
Afterwards, in one old chest
In the room she had slept in,
They found the gentle joys
Of her waiting years-
The petals of the hopes
At her children’s birthing.
- Opal Whiteley
To Genoveva: Your "favourite poet" being an unknown to me, had to do some looking. You are aware that an editor of the Atlantic Monthly encouraged the poet to reconstruct a collection of poems which for some reason was torn to pieces. The fragments were saved and published. I found this link useful...http://intersect.uoregon.edu/opal/ Another, if somewhat obscure, great talent. quasimodo1
Inversnaid
This darksome burn, horseback brown,
His rollrock highroad roaring down,
In coop and in comb the fleece of his foam
Flutes and low to the lake falls home.
A windpuff-bonnet of fáwn-fróth
Turns and twindles over the broth
Of a pool so pitchblack, féll-frówning,
It rounds and rounds Despair to drowning.
Degged with dew, dappled with dew
Are the groins of the braes that the brook treads through,
Wiry heathpacks, flitches of fern,
And the beadbonny ash that sits over the burn.
What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.
-- Gerard Manley Hopkins
Yes, quasimodo1, however, it was not a collection of poems that were torn to pieces and published, it was her childhood diary. A very interesting author from here in Oregon!Quote:
Originally Posted by quasimodo1
The Lake Isle
O GOD, O Venus, O Mercury, patron of thieves,
Give me in due time, I beseech you, a little tobacco-shop,
With the little bright boxes
piled up neatly upon the shelves
And the loose fragrant cavendish
and the shag,
And the bright Virginia
loose under the bright glass cases,
And a pair of scales not too greasy,
And the whores dropping in for a word or two in passing,
For a flip word, and to tidy their hair a bit.
O God, O Venus, O Mercury, patron of thieves,
Lend me a little tobacco-shop,
or install me in any profession
Save this damn'd profession of writing,
where one needs one's brains all the time.
Ezra Pound
Breathe on me winter wind
Sweep back old leaves, new shoots stir
Always, clouds come, have gone.
my first haiku. Airam. Criticism more than welcome
amazing how plath can make one thing, like a mushroom, be so many other things, a fist, shelves, tables, hammers etc, etc, So clever. Her words give life to ordinary things, even though living, and assimilates them to be equal to our own lives..........all living things being of equal importance.
reminds of The Carpet Sweeper by carol Rumens.
Airam
Everone who wants to write knows where ezra is coming from. However he did make it!
Megalosaurus
A MONSTER like a mountain, leathern limbed,
With eyes of sluggish ore and claws of stone,
He heaved his thunder-throated body, rimmed
By marsh fires human eyes have never known.
A monolith carved out of savage night,
He hid in his impenetrable hide
Muscle and blood, and nerves to sense delight
And agony that tore him when he died.
The clumsy terror of his frame has gone
The way of his blind, simple savagery.
Out of his casual bones men build the dawn
That bore and bred such brutish game as he.
But still endures his dull, confounding shape:
In wars of the wise offspring of the ape.
Babette Deutsch
(Mack The Knife by Bertolt Brecht)
Oh, the shark has pretty teeth, dear
And he shows them pearly white.
Just a jack knife has Macheath, dear
And he keeps it out of sight.
When the shark bites with his teeth, dear
Scarlet billows start to spread.
Fancy gloves, though, wears Macheath, dear
So there's not a trace of red.
On the side-walk Sunday morning
Lies a body oozing life;
Someone's sneaking 'round the corner.
Is that someone Mack the Knife?
From a tugboat by the river
A cement bag's dropping down;
The cement's just for the weight, dear.
Bet you Mackie's back in town.
Louie Miller disappeared, dear
After drawing out his cash;
And Macheath spends like a sailor.
Did our boy do something rash?
Sukey Tawdry, Jenny Diver,
Polly Peachum, Lucy Brown
Oh, the line forms on the right, dear
Now that Mackie's back in town.
This novelist, poet and lover of jazz wrote some amazing if experimental stuff. His book "The Journal of Albion Moonlight" has great flashes of genious and humor. Here is a fragment of one of his poems. "Let Us Have Madness" by Kenneth Patchen
Let us have madness openly.
O men Of my generation.
Let us follow
The footsteps of this slaughtered age:
See it trail across Time's dim land
Into the closed house of eternity
With the noise that dying has,
With the face that dead things wear--
nor ever say
We wanted more; we looked to find
An open door, an utter deed of love,
Transforming day's evil darkness;
but We found extended hell and fog Upon the earth,
and within the head
The Bells
(Alcools: Les Cloches)
My gipsy beau my lover
Hear the bells above us
We loved passionately
Thinking none could see us
But we so badly hidden
All the bells in their song
Saw from heights of heaven
And told it everyone
Tomorrow Cyprien Henry
Marie Ursule Catherine
The baker’s wife her husband
and Gertrude that’s my cousin
Will smile when I go by them
I won’t know where to hide
You far and I’ll be crying
Perhaps I shall be dying