ladylinda
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Post by ladylinda on May 4, 2014 16:51:04 GMT -5
Giant Toad
Elizabeth Bishop
I am too big. Too big by far. Pity me.
My eyes bulge and hurt. They are my one great beauty, even so. They see too much, above, below. And yet, there is not much to see. The rain has stopped. The mist is gathering on my skin in drops. The drops run down my back, run from the corners of my downturned mouth, run down my sides and drip beneath my belly. Perhaps the droplets on my mottled hide are pretty, like dewdrops, silver on a moldering leaf? They chill me through and through. I feel my colors changing now, my pig- ments gradually shudder and shift over.
Now I shall get beneath that overhanging ledge. Slowly. Hop. Two or three times more, silently. That was too far. I'm standing up. The lichen's gray, and rough to my front feet. Get down. Turn facing out, it's safer. Don't breathe until the snail gets by. But we go travelling the same weathers.
Swallow the air and mouthfuls of cold mist. Give voice, just once. O how it echoed from the rock! What a profound, angelic bell I rang!
I live, I breathe, by swallowing. Once, some naughty children picked me up, me and two brothers. They set us down again somewhere and in our mouths they put lit cigarettes. We could not help but smoke them, to the end. I thought it was the death of me, but when I was entirely filled with smoke, when my slack mouth was burning, and all my tripes were hot and dry, they let us go. But I was sick for days.
I have big shoulders, like a boxer. They are not muscle, however, and their color is dark. They are my sacs of poison, the almost unused poison that I bear, my burden and my great responsibility. Big wings of poison, folded on my back. Beware, I am an angel in disguise; my wings are evil, but not deadly. If I will it, the poison could break through, blue-black, and dangerous to all. Blue-black fumes would rise upon the air.
Beware, you frivolous crab.
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ladylinda
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Post by ladylinda on May 4, 2014 16:51:25 GMT -5
------------------------------------------- I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Maya Angelou
The free bird leaps on the back of the wind and floats downstream till the current ends and dips his wings in the orange sun rays and dares to claim the sky.
But a bird that stalks down his narrow cage can seldom see through his bars of rage his wings are clipped and his feet are tied so he opens his throat to sing.
The caged bird sings with fearful trill of the things unknown but longed for still and his tune is heard on the distant hill for the caged bird sings of freedom
The free bird thinks of another breeze and the trade winds soft through the sighing trees and the fat worms waiting on a dawn-bright lawn and he names the sky his own.
But a caged bird stands on the grave of dreams his shadow shouts on a nightmare scream his wings are clipped and his feet are tied so he opens his throat to sing
The caged bird sings with a fearful trill of things unknown but longed for still and his tune is heard on the distant hill for the caged bird sings of freedom.
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ladylinda
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Post by ladylinda on Jun 3, 2014 18:08:05 GMT -5
Dylan Thomas was massively uneven but at his best his was brilliant.
This comparatively restrained piece is IMO one of his best short poems.
'A process in the weather of the heart'
Dylan Thomas
A process in the weather of the heart Turns damp to dry; the golden shot Storms in the freezing tomb. A weather in the quarter of the veins Turns night to day; blood in their suns Lights up the living worm.
A process in the eye forwarns The bones of blindness; and the womb Drives in a death as life leaks out.
A darkness in the weather of the eye Is half its light; the fathomed sea Breaks on unangled land. The seed that makes a forest of the loin Forks half its fruit; and half drops down, Slow in a sleeping wind.
A weather in the flesh and bone Is damp and dry; the quick and dead Move like two ghosts before the eye.
A process in the weather of the world Turns ghost to ghost; each mothered child Sits in their double shade. A process blows the moon into the sun, Pulls down the shabby curtains of the skin; And the heart gives up its dead.
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ladylinda
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Post by ladylinda on Jun 4, 2014 8:36:31 GMT -5
Prometheus
Charles Tomlinson
Summer thunder darkens, and its climbing Cumulae, disowning our scale in the zenith, Electrify this music: the evening is falling apart. Castles-in-air; on earth: green, livid fire, The radio simmers with static to the strains Of this mock last-day of nature and of art.
We have lived through apocalypse too long: Scriabin’s dinosaurs! Trombones for the transformation That arrived b train at the Finland Station, To bury its hatchet after thirty years in the brain Of Trotsky. Alexander Nikolayevitch, the events Were less merciful than your mob of instruments.
Too many drowning voices cram this waveband, I see Lenin’s face by yours – Yours, the fanatic ego of eccentricity against The systematic son of a schools inspector Tyatchev on desk – for the strong man reads Poems as the anti-Semite pleads: ‘A Jew was my friend.’
Cymballed firesweeps. Prometheus came down, In more than orchestral flame and Kerensky fled Before it. The babel of continents gnaws now And tears at the silk of those harmonies that seemed So dangerous once. You dreamed an end Where the rose of the world would go out like a close in music.
Population drags the partitions down And we are a single town of warring suburbs: I cannot bear such music for its consequence: Each sense was to have been reborn Out of a storm of perfumes and light To a white world, an in-the-beginning.
In the beginning, the strong man reigns: Trotsky, was it not then you brought yourself To judgement and to execution, when you forgot Where terror rules, justice turns arbitrary? Chromatic Prometheus, myth of fire, It is history topples you in the zenith.
Blok, too, wrote The Scythians Who should have known: he who howls With the whirlwind, with the whirlwind goes down. In this, was Lenin guiltier than you When, out of a merciless patience grew The daily prose such poetry prepares for?
Scriabin, Blok, men of extremes, History treads out the music of your dreams Through blood, and cannot close like this In the perfection of anabasis. It stops. The trees Continue raining though the rain has ceased In a cooled world of incessant codas:
Hard edges of the houses press On the after-music senses, and refuse to burn Where an ice-cream van circulates the estate Playing Greensleeves, and at the city’s Stale new frontier even ugliness Rules with the cruel mercy of solidities.
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ladylinda
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Post by ladylinda on Jun 5, 2014 17:35:20 GMT -5
Never a bad reason IMO to post something by William Carlos Williams, the greatest poet of the last hundred years.
Here's the beginning of his longest, most ambitious and IMO most brilliant poem, 'Paterson'
Paterson, Book 1
William Carlos Williams
Paterson lies in the valley under the Passaic Falls its spent waters forming the outline of his back. He lies on his right side, head near the thunder of the waters filling his dreams! Eternally asleep, his dreams walk about the city where he persists incognito. Butterflies settle on his stone ear. Immortal he neither moves nor rouses and is seldom seen, though he breathes and the subtleties of his machinations drawing their substance from the noise of the pouring river animate a thousand automations. Who because they neither know their sources nor the sills of their disappointments walk outside their bodies aimlessly for the most part, locked and forgot in their desires-unroused.
—Say it, no ideas but in things— nothing but the blank faces of the houses and cylindrical trees bent, forked by preconception and accident— split, furrowed, creased, mottled, stained— secret—into the body of the light!
From above, higher than the spires, higher even than the office towers, from oozy fields abandoned to gray beds of dead grass, black sumac, withered weed-stalks, mud and thickets cluttered with dead leaves- the river comes pouring in above the city and crashes from the edge of the gorge in a recoil of spray and rainbow mists-
(What common language to unravel? . . .combed into straight lines from that rafter of a rock's lip.)
A man like a city and a woman like a flower —who are in love. Two women. Three women. Innumerable women, each like a flower.
But only one man—like a city.
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feetlebaum
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Post by feetlebaum on Jun 7, 2014 9:38:44 GMT -5
How beautiful they are, the lordly ones who dwell in the hills, in the hollow hills. They have faces like flowers, and their breath is a wind that blows over summer meadows, filled with dewy clover. Their limbs are more white than shafts of moonshine: They are more fleet than the march wind. They laugh and are glad And are terrible: When their lances shake and glitter Every green reed quivers. How beautiful they are, How beautiful The lordly ones In the hollow hills..
[ii]from The Immortal Hour[/i]
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ladylinda
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Post by ladylinda on Dec 9, 2014 13:19:28 GMT -5
Two by D H Lawrence
How beastly the bourgeois is
D H Lawrence
How beastly the bourgeois is especially the male of the species--
Presentable, eminently presentable-- shall I make you a present of him?
Isn't he handsome? Isn't he healthy? Isn't he a fine specimen? Doesn't he look the fresh clean Englishman, outside? Isn't it God's own image? tramping his thirty miles a day after partridges, or a little rubber ball? wouldn't you like to be like that, well off, and quite the thing
Oh, but wait! Let him meet a new emotion, let him be faced with another man's need, let him come home to a bit of moral difficulty, let life face him with a new demand on his understanding and then watch him go soggy, like a wet meringue. Watch him turn into a mess, either a fool or a bully. Just watch the display of him, confronted with a new demand on his intelligence, a new life-demand.
How beastly the bourgeois is especially the male of the species--
Nicely groomed, like a mushroom standing there so sleek and erect and eyeable-- and like a fungus, living on the remains of a bygone life sucking his life out of the dead leaves of greater life than his own.
And even so, he's stale, he's been there too long. Touch him, and you'll find he's all gone inside just like an old mushroom, all wormy inside, and hollow under a smooth skin and an upright appearance.
Full of seething, wormy, hollow feelings rather nasty-- How beastly the bourgeois is!
Standing in their thousands, these appearances, in damp England what a pity they can't all be kicked over like sickening toadstools, and left to melt back, swiftly into the soil of England.
-------------------------------------------- The Oxford Voice
D.H. Lawrence When you hear it languishing and hooing and cooing, and sidling through the front teeth, the oxford voice or worse still the would-be oxford voice you don't even laugh any more, you can't. For every blooming bird is an oxford cuckoo nowadays, you can't sit on a bus nor in the tube but it breathes gently and languishingly in the back of your neck. And oh, so seductively superior, so seductively self-effacingly deprecatingly superior. — We wouldn't insist on it for a moment but we are we are you admit we are superior. —
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Jun 15, 2015 15:42:07 GMT -5
I am the People, the Mob
Carl Sandburg I AM the people — the mob—the crowd—the mass. Do you know that all the great work of the world is done through me? I am the workingman, the inventor, the maker of the world's food and clothes. I am the audience that witnesses history. The Napoleons come from me and the Lincolns. I am the seed ground. I am a prairie that will stand for much plowing. Terrible storms pass over me. I forget. The best of me is sucked out and wasted. I forget. Everything but death comes to me and makes me work and give up what I have. And I forget. Sometimes I grows, shake myself and spatter a few red drops for history to remember. Then—I forget. When I, the People, learn to remember, when I, the People, use the lessons of yesterday and no longer forget who robbed me last year, who played me for a fool—then there will be no speaker in all the world say the name: "The People," with any fleck of a sneer in his voice or any far off smile of derision. The mob—the crowd—the mass—will arrive then.
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ladylinda
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Post by ladylinda on Sept 12, 2015 17:06:12 GMT -5
As I Grew Older
Langston Hughes
It was a long time ago. I have almost forgotten my dream. But it was there then, In front of me, Bright like a sun— My dream. And then the wall rose, Rose slowly, Slowly, Between me and my dream. Rose until it touched the sky— The wall. Shadow. I am black. I lie down in the shadow. No longer the light of my dream before me, Above me. Only the thick wall. Only the shadow. My hands! My dark hands! Break through the wall! Find my dream! Help me to shatter this darkness, To smash this night, To break this shadow Into a thousand lights of sun, Into a thousand whirling dreams Of sun!
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ladylinda
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Post by ladylinda on Sept 12, 2015 17:08:53 GMT -5
Still I Rise
Maya Angelou
You may write me down in history With your bitter, twisted lies, You may trod me in the very dirt But still, like dust, I'll rise.
Does my sassiness upset you? Why are you beset with gloom? 'Cause I walk like I've got oil wells Pumping in my living room.
Just like moons and like suns, With the certainty of tides, Just like hopes springing high, Still I'll rise.
Did you want to see me broken? Bowed head and lowered eyes? Shoulders falling down like teardrops. Weakened by my soulful cries.
Does my haughtiness offend you? Don't you take it awful hard 'Cause I laugh like I've got gold mines Diggin' in my own back yard.
You may shoot me with your words, You may cut me with your eyes, You may kill me with your hatefulness, But still, like air, I'll rise.
Does my sexiness upset you? Does it come as a surprise That I dance like I've got diamonds At the meeting of my thighs?
Out of the huts of history's shame I rise Up from a past that's rooted in pain I rise I'm a black ocean, leaping and wide, Welling and swelling I bear in the tide. Leaving behind nights of terror and fear I rise Into a daybreak that's wondrously clear I rise Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave, I am the dream and the hope of the slave. I rise I rise I rise.
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watcheroo42
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Post by watcheroo42 on Feb 16, 2016 14:49:46 GMT -5
THE DWELLER - by the American horror writer H.P.Lovecraft (1890-1937)
It had been old when Babylon was new, None knows how long it slept beneath that mound, Where in the end our questing shovels found Its granite blocks, and brought it back to view. There were vast pavements and foundation walls, And crumbling slabs and statues carved to show Fantastic beings of some long-ago, Past anything the world of man recalls. And then we saw those stone steps leading down, Through a choked gate of graven dolomite, To some dark haven of eternal night, Where elder signs and primal secrets frown. We cleared a path, but raced in mad retreat When from below we heard those clumping feet. Our blood, our limbs, froze stiff in mortal dread, When, “Spare a chap a tea-bag”, a voice said.
Sorry, those two final lines are shameless duds. I did it, it was me. Incorrigible, that's me! Lovecraft was a Leo, same as me. Leos love humour - well, what passes for humour throughout the nausea of presidential campaigning.
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Jessiealan
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Post by Jessiealan on Feb 16, 2016 14:57:46 GMT -5
THE DWELLER - by the American horror writer H.P.Lovecraft (1890-1937) It had been old when Babylon was new, None knows how long it slept beneath that mound, Where in the end our questing shovels found Its granite blocks, and brought it back to view. There were vast pavements and foundation walls, And crumbling slabs and statues carved to show Fantastic beings of some long-ago, Past anything the world of man recalls. And then we saw those stone steps leading down, Through a choked gate of graven dolomite, To some dark haven of eternal night, Where elder signs and primal secrets frown. We cleared a path, but raced in mad retreat When from below we heard those clumping feet. Our blood, our limbs, froze stiff in mortal dread, When, “Spare a chap a tea-bag”, a voice said. Sorry, those two final lines are shameless duds. I did it, it was me. Incorrigible, that's me! Lovecraft was a Leo, same as me. Leos love humour - well, what passes for humour throughout the nausea of presidential campaigning. Lovecraft has faded to general obscurity these days. His material was popular in the last part of the 20th century, but few people nowadays know much about him. He was a rare and precious literary figure. Thank you for this, Watcher.
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Post by annaj26 on Feb 16, 2016 18:00:23 GMT -5
The Rope Escape of hope Or, hope of escape .. at dawn It all depends on How you're fastened on. Kyle Griffith I like that, Beth. Don't know how I missed that one.
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Post by annaj26 on Feb 16, 2016 18:05:12 GMT -5
THE DWELLER - by the American horror writer H.P.Lovecraft (1890-1937) It had been old when Babylon was new, None knows how long it slept beneath that mound, Where in the end our questing shovels found Its granite blocks, and brought it back to view. There were vast pavements and foundation walls, And crumbling slabs and statues carved to show Fantastic beings of some long-ago, Past anything the world of man recalls. And then we saw those stone steps leading down, Through a choked gate of graven dolomite, To some dark haven of eternal night, Where elder signs and primal secrets frown. We cleared a path, but raced in mad retreat When from below we heard those clumping feet. Our blood, our limbs, froze stiff in mortal dread, When, “Spare a chap a tea-bag”, a voice said. Sorry, those two final lines are shameless duds. I did it, it was me. Incorrigible, that's me! Lovecraft was a Leo, same as me. Leos love humour - well, what passes for humour throughout the nausea of presidential campaigning. Lovecraft was an original .. inspired by Poe, maybe,. but on a different wave length. Cthulhu rising!
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watcheroo42
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Post by watcheroo42 on Feb 16, 2016 21:11:16 GMT -5
A favourite poem from schooldays - the poignant 'The Piper' by Irish poet Seamus O'Sullivan (1879 - 1958)
A piper in the streets today Set up, and tuned, and started to play, And away, away, away on the tide Of his music we started; on every side Doors and windows were opened wide, And men left down their work and came, And women with petticoats coloured like flame. And little bare feet that were blue with cold, Went dancing back to the age of gold, And all the world went gay, went gay, For half an hour in the street today.
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