http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009...ef=global-home ---Dennis Brutus, South African poet... "Poetry" by Dennis Brutus --- http://logosonline.home.igc.org/brutus.htm
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http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009...ef=global-home ---Dennis Brutus, South African poet... "Poetry" by Dennis Brutus --- http://logosonline.home.igc.org/brutus.htm
Struggles with Meaningless Things
In the beginning, there was chaos.
No, that’s not right.
In the beginning, there was nothing.
An empty space spread out, big and empty.
Time flowed by, two years to be specific. Various things were brought in.
Among them, a desk, a bed, a computer, shelves, chairs (two of them), a folding table,
An electric piano, a fax machine, and then lots of newspapers.
Books. Magazines. Fliers advertising plays. Envelopes. CDs. Faxes from different folks.
Letters from different people. Unimportant things. Important things.
Things that might be important one day.
(Now, all these things, no longer important,
Fill all the available space.
{excerpt}
ENNUI
Tea leaves thwart those who court catastrophe,
designing futures where nothing will occur:
cross the gypsy’s palm and yawning she
will still predict no perils left to conquer.
Jeopardy is jejune now: naïve knight
finds ogres out-of-date and dragons unheard
of, while blasé princesses indict
tilts at terror as downright absurd.
{first of two stanzas}
from The Triumph of Love {XIII}
Whose lives are hidden in God? Whose?
Who can now tell what was taken, or where,
or how, or whether it was received:
how ditched, divested, clamped, sifted, over-
laid, raked over, grassed over, spread around,
rotted down with leafmould, accepted
as civic concrete, reinforceable
base cinderblocks:
tipped into Danube, Rhine, Vistula, dredged up
with the Baltic and the Pontic sludge:
committed in absentia to solemn elevation,
Trauermusik, musique funèbre, funeral
music, for male and female
voices ringingly a cappella,
made for double string choirs, congregated brass,
choice performers on baroque trumpets hefting,
like glassblowers, inventions
of supreme order?
THE SNOW IS DEEP ON THE GROUND
The snow is deep on the ground.
Always the light falls
Softly down on the hair of my belovèd.
This is a good world.
The war has failed.
God shall not forget us.
Who made the snow waits where love is.
Only a few go mad.
The sky moves in its whiteness
Like the withered hand of an old king. ... {excerpt}
Yea I thought of you quasimodo1 rather crudely :D and came up with this to post, love this poem.
From 'Mrs Quisimodo' by Carol Ann Duffy (about the last third of it)
The bells. The bells.
I made them mute.
No more apreggios or scales, no more stretti, trills
for christenings, weddings, great occasions, happy days.
No more practising
for bellringers
on smudgy autumn nights.
No more clarity of sound, divine, articulate
to purify the air
and bow the heads of drinkers in the city bars.
No single
solemn
funeral note
to answer
grief.
I sawed and pulled and hacked.
I wanted silence back.
Get this:
When I was done,
and bloody to the wrist,
I squatted down among the murdered music of the bells and
pissed.
Excellent entry, TheDave ... Duffy doesn't get much notice since being a laureate, in the US at least. "Poetry, above all, is a series of intense moments - its power is not in narrative. I'm not dealing with facts, I'm dealing with emotion." Carol Ann Duffy
http://coldfrontmag.com/news/salingers-poets --- Salinger’s Poets
by John Deming
LETTERS FROM THE DEAD
I. From My Mother
You who have read as I read when I was eight
that the sea will disgorge at the end of time
its centuries of dead, walk with me now,
listen with me as a blue rain ticks down
from your roof. This is not Armageddon, just another day
I am out of life, a spirit, today age eight
and this same sun freckling the autumn grass
drew me out, another morning, summer ending,
1915 and after, seventy-five years
into a world I never learned to love enough.
Today, hand in hand, we will walk back
until I am that little girl, flowers in hand
she presses into a book, A Child’s Garden of Verses,
cowslip, Queen Anne’s lace, Wild Clover,
a piece of that day breaking off in my son’s hand
today, June 9, 2007. Now I look down,
he is so small from here, my son at late middle-age.
I watch him press it to his nose, scentless,
his lips, to see him taste it, tasteless, kissing it.
And I would come back, not even when he cries
and the memory of me flickers while he tries, failing at this.
{one of two parts}
Dennis Brutus!
Dennis Brutus!