[somewhere i have never travelled]

somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skillfully,mysteriously) her first rose

or if your wish be to close me,i and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain, has such small hands

e.e. cummings

only really.. "The Jabberwocky" and the line

the woods are lovely
dark and deep
but I have promises to keep
and many miles to go
before I sleep
-R.Frost

other than that.. tabla rasa baby!

Ulysses by Alfred Lord Tennyson.

It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Match’d with an aged wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
That hoard and sleep, and feed, and know not me.
I cannot rest from travel: I will drink
Life to the lees: all times I have enjoy’d
Greatly, have suffer’d greatly, both with those
That loved me, and alone; on shore, and when
Thro’ scudding drifts the rainy Hyades
Vext the dim sea: I am become a name;
For always roaming with a hungry heart
Much have I seen and known; cities of men
And manners, climates, councils, governments,
Myself not least, but honour’d of them all;
And drunk delight of battle with my peers,
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.
I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’
Gleams that untravell’d world, whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use!
As tho’ to breathe were life.

Oh, now this one resonates strongly with me -- I cultivate a medievalist hobby, and here we have a poem all about an effigial tomb. Nice nice nice...

Ever considered taking up calligraphy and arranging favorite lines on nice paper? Old English black letter can be very satisfying -- and you can make it look exactly like the tomb inscriptions, in their scary Gothic ultraverticality, as "The Latin names around the base," by making the letters' middle sections three-fifths the overall height of the letters -- Hic Iacet...

谢谢你

thank you

haiku 404
 

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A Case Of Murder

They should not have left him there alone,
Alone that is except for the cat.
He was only nine, not old enough
To be left alone in a basement flat,
Alone, that is, except for the cat.
A dog would have been a different thing,
A big gruff dog with slashing jaws,
But a cat with round eyes mad as gold,
Plump as a cushion with tucked-in paws---
Better have left him with a fair-sized rat!
But what they did was leave him with a cat.
He hated that cat; he watched it sit,
A buzzing machine of soft black stuff,
He sat and watched and he hated it,
Snug in its fur, hot blood in a muff,
And its mad gold stare and the way it sat
Crooning dark warmth: he loathed all that.
So he took Daddy's stick and he hit the cat.
Then quick as a sudden crack in glass
It hissed, black flash, to a hiding place
In the dust and dark beneath the couch,
And he followed the grin on his new-made face,
A wide-eyed, frightened snarl of a grin,
And he took the stick and he thrust it in,
Hard and quick in the furry dark.
The black fur squealed and he felt his skin
Prickle with sparks of dry delight.
Then the cat again came into sight,
Shot for the door that wasn't quite shut,
But the boy, quick too, slammed fast the door:
The cat, half-through, was cracked like a nut
And the soft black thud was dumped on the floor.
Then the boy was suddenly terrified
And he bit his knuckles and cried and cried;
But he had to do something with the dead thing there.
His eyes squeezed beads of salty prayer
But the wound of fear gaped wide and raw;
He dared not touch the thing with his hands
So he fetched a spade and shovelled it
And dumped the load of heavy fur
In the spidery cupboard under the stair
Where it's been for years, and though it died
It's grown in that cupboard and its hot low purr
Grows slowly louder year by year:
There'll not be a corner for the boy to hide
When the cupboard swells and all sides split
And the huge black cat pads out of it.

Vernon Scannell


This was the first poem I ever hated. I moved to Grammar school (ie passed an exam to get in) and had only had nice, safe or classic poems beforehand. This shocked me the same way Dali's paintings did a year later. I grew to appreciate Vernon Scannell's poetry, even this one. And when I despise my own procrastination I always picture the cupboard. And the huge dead cat.

Genesis
(for J R R Tolkien)

In the beginning were the words,
Aristocratic, cryptic, chromatic.
Vowels as direct as mid-day,
Consonants lanky as long-swords.

Mouths materialized to speak the words:
Leafshaped lips for the high language,
Tranquil tongues for the tree-creatures,
Slits and slobbers for the lower orders.

Deeds came next, words' children.
Legs by walking evolved a landscape.
Continents and chronologies occurred,
Complex and casual as an implication.

Arched over all, alarming nimbus,
Magic's disorderly thunder and lightning.

The sage sat in his suburban fastness,
Garrisoned against progress. He grieved
At what the Duke's men did to our words
(Whose war memorial is every signpost).

The sage sat. And middle-earth
Rose around him like a rumour.
Grave grammarians, Grimm and Werner,
Gave it laws, granted it charters.

The sage sat. But the ghosts walked
Of the Birmingham schoolboy, the Somme soldier,
Whose bones lay under the hobbit burrows,
Who endured darkness, and friends dying,

Whom words waylaid in a Snow Hill siding,
Coal truck pit names, grimy, gracious,
Blaen-Rhondda, Nantyglo, Senghenydd.
In these deeps middle-earth was mined.

These were the words in the beginning.

U A Fanthorpe

How to pronounce the names

A Study of Reading Habits

When getting my nose in a book
Cured most things short of school,
It was worth ruining my eyes
To know I could still keep cool,
And deal out the old right hook
To dirty dogs twice my size.

Later, with inch-thick specs,
Evil was just my lark:
Me and my coat and fangs
Had ripping times in the dark.
The women I clubbed with sex!
I broke them up like meringues.

Don't read much now: the dude
Who lets the girl down before
The hero arrives, the chap
Who's yellow and keeps the store
Seem far too familiar. Get stewed:
Books are a load of crap.

Philip Larkin

Try singing Jabberwocky to Saint Patrick's Breastplate, Lledrod, Old 100th, Eternal Father Strong to Save... oh, there are a bunch of hymntunes Jabberwocky can be scansion-hammered into.

Casey Jones
Casey Jones was a s never mind.


43

I am the Wind

I AM the wind that wavers,
You are the certain land;
I am the shadow that passes
Over the sand.

I am the leaf that quivers,
You, the unshaken tree;
You are the stars that are steadfast,
I am the sea.

You are the light eternal--
Like a torch I shall die.
You are the surge of deep music,
I but a cry!

Zoë Akins

Sonnet to America
 

Sonnet to America

AMERICA! At this thy Golden Gate,
New travelled from those portals of the West,
Parting -- I make my reverence! It were best
With backward looks to quit a Queen in state!
Land of all lands most fair, and free, and great,
Of countless kindred lips, wherefrom I heard
Sweet speech of Shakespeare -- keep it consecrate
For noble uses! Land of Freedom's Bird,
Fearless and proud! so let him soar that, stirred
With generous joy, all lands may learn from thee
A larger life, and Europe, undeterred
By ancient dreads, dare also to be free
Body and Soul, seeing thine eagle gaze
Undazzled, upon Freedom's sun full-blaze.

Sir Edwin Arnold


:thepain:

Not to forget my favorite twist -- "Jabberwocky" to the tune of "O For A Thousand Tongues To Sing." Though at one point you have to chop a few quarter notes into eighth notes.

another sonnet
 

"next to of course god america i
love you land of the pilgrims' and so forth oh
say can you see by the dawn's early my
country 'tis of centuries come and go
and are no more what of it we should worry
in every language even deafanddumb
thy sons acclaim your glorious name by gorry
by jingo by gee by gosh by gum
why talk of beauty what could be more beaut-
iful than these heroic happy dead
who rushed like lions to the roaring slaughter
they did not stop to think they died instead
then shall the voice of liberty be mute?"

He spoke. And drank rapidly a glass of water

-- e. e. cummings