By Jorie Graham. (More here and here.)
The slow overture of rain,
each drop breaking
without breaking into
the next, describes
the unrelenting, syncopated
mind. Not unlike
the hummingbirds
imagining their wings
to be their heart, and swallows
believing the horizon
to be a line they lift
and drop. What is it
they cast for? The poplars,
advancing or retreating,
lose their stature
equally, and yet stand firm,
making arrangements
in order to become
imaginary. The city
draws the mind in streets,
and streets compel it
from their intersections
where a little
belongs to no one. It is
what is driven through
all stationary portions
of the world, gravity’s
stake in things, the leaves,
pressed against the dank
window of November
soil, remain unwelcome
till transformed, parts
of a puzzle unsolvable
till the edges give a bit
and soften. See how
then the picture becomes clear,
the mind entering the ground
more easily in pieces,
and all the richer for it.
(Tonight’s poetry corner… a little rough, but the weather is appropriate)
Snow
I dare not speak, my lips are frozen.
The snowflakes are muting my words.
Falling is their only purpose, they mute my world,
wrapping me in their cold and wordless comfort.
The largest snowflakes turn on a fractal axis,
twisting, turning, and demanding my attention;
forcing me to ponder and wonder about my silent world.
Muted in my speaking language, deaf in my hearing language,
my inner voices race to compensate.
My monkey mind, flitting from one idea to another,
(SLOW DOWN SLOW DOWN!)
I try to hang on
(MUST HANG ON!)
long enough to arrive at a conclusion, or at least,
an insightful observation.
(STOP!!)
Silence. Ahhhhhh.
A fragile, colorless shape emerges,
rising from a dark and hidden place,
pausing at my skin.
Revealing itself.
A story.
_This_ story is born in the smallest and quietest moment.
Amara Lynn Graps
20 January 2001
Poetry.
Nice Amara.
I’m not quite ready to post original stuff but this is one of my all time favorites and could “easily” apply to many of the threads on this blog (both scientific and unscientific)
Elliot
The Second Coming — W. B. Yeats
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?
Brilliant — the first time, I think, that someone has posted a poetry comment to a poetry post. Keep ’em coming; we’re easier to get into than the New Yorker.
I know the New Yorker keeps turning my stuff down 😉
Then here’s one of my alltime favorites (that someone else wrote)
Ithaca
by Constantine P. Cavafy (1911)
When you set out on your journey to Ithaca,
then pray that the road is long,
full of adventure, full of knowledge.
Do not fear the Lestrygonians
and the Cyclops and the angry Poseidon.
You will never meet such as these on your path,
if your thoughts remain lofty, if a fine
emotion touches your spirit and your body.
You will never meet the Lestrygonians
the Cyclops and the fierce Poseidon,
if you do not carry them within your soul,
if your soul does not set them up before you.
Then pray that the road is long.
That the summer mornings are many,
that you will enter ports seen for the first time
with such pleasure, with such joy!
Stop at Phoenician markets,
and purchase fine merchandise,
mother-of-pearl and corals, amber and ebony,
and pleasureable perfumes of all kinds,
buy as many pleasurable perfumes as you can;
visit hosts of Egyptian cities,
to learn and learn from those who have knowledge.
Always keep Ithaca fixed in your mind.
To arrive there is your ultimate goal.
But do not hurry the voyage at all.
It is better to let it last for long years;
and even to anchor at the isle when you are old,
rich with all you have gained on the way,
not expecting that Ithaca will offer you riches.
Ithaca has given you the beautiful voyage.
Without her you would have never set out on the road.
But she has nothing more to give you.
And if you find her poor, Ithaca has not deceived you.
With the great wisdom you have gained, with so much experience,
you must surely have understood by then what Ithacas mean.
Ok….I think this is my favourite poem at the moment:
Openness, by Wislawa Szymborska
This always makes me cry…
Hardy’s “Afterwords” has always interested me. It’s terribly maudlin but a rather decent poem nonetheless.
When the Present has latched its postern behind my tremulous stay,
And the May month flaps its glad green leaves like wings,
Delicate-filmed as new-spun silk, will the neighbours say,
“He was a man who used to notice such things”?
If it be in the dusk when, like an eyelid’s soundless blink,
The dewfall-hawk comes crossing the shades to alight
Upon the wind-warped upland thorn, a gazer may think,
“To him this must have been a familiar sight.”
If I pass during some nocturnal blackness, mothy and warm,
When the hedgehog travels furtively over the lawn,
One may say, “He strove that such innocent creatures should
come to no harm,
But he could do little for them; and now he is gone.”
If, when hearing that I have been stilled at last, they stand
at the door,
Watching the full-starred heavens that winter sees,
Will this thought rise on those who will meet my face no more,
“He was one who had an eye for such mysteries”?
And will any say when my bell of quittance is heard in the gloom,
And a crossing breeze cuts a pause in its outrollings,
Till they rise again, as they were a new bell’s boom,
“He hears it not now, but used to notice such things”?
Amara,
Thanks for posting “Ithaca” — it was my most favorite poem when I was a teenager.
I was wondering whose the translation is in the version you posted. Thanks.
Someone was kind enough before to put this link up for examination. I thought I would return the favor.
While this isn’t a poem below, but a statement about poetry, I thought it relevant here?
Greene said.
The recognition that what could have held the eye to the quantum nature, would now recognzie the value in the stars?
Beautifull poetry all, thank you!
Though I had known the two famous lines for a long time I only came across the full poem recently:
Ozymandias
I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read,
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed,
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
-Percy Bysshe Shelley
Yo! Here’s my snow contribution. I’m going to state that this poem has an anonymous author since my websearch ended up digging at least two or three authors attributed to writing this poem
THE COLD WITHIN
Six humans trapped by happenstance
in black and bitter cold
Each possessed a stick of wood,
Or so the story’s told.
Their dying fire in need of logs,
the first woman held hers back
For on the faces around the fire
She noticed one was black.
The next man looking ‘cross the way
Saw one not of his church
And couldn’t bring himself to give
The fire his stick of birch.
The third one sat in tattered clothes
He gave his coat a hitch,
Why should his log be put to use
To warm the idle rich?
The rich man just sat back and thought
Of the wealth he had in store,
And how to keep what he had earned
From the lazy, shiftless poor.
The black man’s face bespoke revenge
As the fire passed from his sight,
For all he saw in his stick of wood
Was a chance to spite the white.
And the last man of this forlorn group
Did naught except for gain,
Giving only to those who gave
Was how he played the game.
The logs held tight in death’s stilled hands
Was proof of human sin,
They didn’t die from the cold without,
They died from the cold within.
From one of my more frivolous moments…
Our Unrequited Why
Poetry impugns
A prisoner haunted
Listen
Perhaps this was I
Zeal with gilded word
Verbose
Learn that squirming dance
Open guile once deft
Abide
Circle capricious
My chaste salient
Concrete
Almost an avail
Stiff temerity
Brazen
Drink arid champagne
Ephemeral ice
Warm breath
Bring laughing repose
When dazzle your eye
Blushing
Bleeding universe
Mere ferocious will
Conquer
Desire spurns the dark
Linger to morning
Naked
Remember coffee
Translucent and cold
Turgid
Torpid ocean and
Liquid sky above
Secret
Just a little prep here in relations to the following poem.
It’s quite a common poem here seen by those who have been involved in the quantum gravity issues. So I thought to give this more for the general public, and for those who needed to understand how different approaches are part and parcel of the same quest for describing and loking for this emergent property( like Sean saids we have to be careful)in regards to quantum gravity. What are the rules that define it?
Moral:
Ok after everyone has waxed eloquent this is going to sound fairly base but here goes:
When reading a cosmic v. thread
it stimulates cells in my head
but then if the topic
turns slightly anthropic
I say better off dead than read
#6: erc: Wislawa Szymborska poetry always makes me sad…
#8: Anna : I took the poetry from _The Complete Poems of Cavafy_ translated by Rae Dalven, Harvest Books, 1976
#13 Plato
Perhaps Godfrey Saxe made poetry out of this ancient Sufi story:
An elephant belonging to a traveling exhibition had been stabled near a town where no elephant had been seen before. Four curious citizens, hearing of the hidden wonder, went to see if they could get a preview of it. When they arrived at the stable they found that there was no light. The investigation therefore had to be carried out in the dark.
One touching its trunk, thought that the creature must resemble a hosepipe; the second felt an ear and concluded that it was a fan. The third, feeling a leg, could liken it only to a living pillar; and when the fourth put his hand on its back he was convinced it was some kind of throne. None could form the complete picture; and of the part which each felt, he could only refer to it in terms of things which he already knew. The result of the expedition was confusion. Each was sure that he was right; none of the other townspeople could understand what had happened, what the investigators had actually experienced.
(from chapter “The Elephant in the Dark” in The Sufis by Idries Shah, 1964)
———-
Golden Threads
When I am stripped to my essence,
sublimely precious
is the small, the shadow, the trace.
Childrens’ questions heard in passing through a door.
A muddy footprint planted on a hallway floor.
Whiffs of garlic through an open pane.
A missing cosine angle, searched for in vain.
A cuckoo from a clock heard while in bed.
Olive oil dripping from a piece of fresh bread.
A misdirected email from a woman in pain.
A dog’s sorrowful eyes seen through the rain.
The hands in a photograph of a long lost world.
Reading glasses on a table with one stem uncurled.
Elements weaving through the fabric of my life,
these are the golden threads,
which become the cloak, which I wear
to keep me warm.
Amara Lynn Graps 4 March 2001
#14 Elliot: Maybe base, but it made me laugh!
Amara,
It is nice to look for these histories and follow them to origination…..
Nice poem of yours 🙂