Day: June 27, 2017

I saw your soul in your transparent face.

The sparrows sing as if to draw me to
The present moment’s gravity and grace
Our contemplation of life’s nature new

What  other attitude is worthwhile now
That I no longer see your loving face?
The sparrows sing as if to greet me too

Eden is still here, we miss the clues
We miss the  ardent touch,  the lost embrace
Our contemplation of the world renews

On my face, the tears are jeweled dew
In my body, I feel well enclosed
The sparrows sing as if to greet me too

Now the blackbird sings as if on cue
Inside my swollen heart, I feel its grace
Contemplation of  life’s nature new

I saw your soul in your transparent face.
And crisscrossed lines from struggle left their trace
The sparrows sing as if to draw us to
The contemplation of the  wildness true,

Unless there is a space where we can doubt

Fashion plays with symbols unconcealed
The trench coat, Breton sweater, leather boots.
But sometimes “fantasy” is too near ” real”

We cannot play nor allow art to reveal
Unless there is a space where we can doubt
Fashion plays with symbols unconcealed

We must not  just with  demons do a deal
For we also need the angels who’re about.
Nowadays , our “fantasies” blur ” real”

 

The biker jacket’s modish in appeal.
The leather  has its Fascistic  clout
Fashion plays with symbols unconcealed

If we cannot waken, dreams will  fool,
As on our monstrous war horses, we mount
I feel it now : our “fantasies” blur ” real”

 

We never can have everything we want
So we learn that other peoples count
Fashion plays with symbols unconcealed
But fantasising may lay waste to all

l

 

Which of us desires to dress for war?

My polyester trench coat  looks real swell
But inside it, I feel as hot as hell.
And when the storm hit, I found out
It is no raincoat, I have no more doubts.

Which of us desires to dress for war
This is what the trench coat was made for.
British soldiers  on the battlefields
Died in mud locked trenches for what yield?

Do we want to know the Middle East
Was divided by the conquerors at their feast
France and Britain split the old Empire
We see from that the rise of Herr Hitler.

The war to end all wars is on stage yet.
Go hang these trench coats  round the scapegoat’s neck

On war by Ezra Pound

https://ticer-swim.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/war

 

E.P. ODE POUR L’ELECTION DE SON SEPULCHRE (1920) Ezra Pound

II

The age demanded an image
Of its accelerated grimace,
Something for the modern stage,
Not, at any rate, an Attic grace;

Not, not certainly, the obscure reveries
Of the inward gaze;
Better mendacities
Than the classics in paraphrase!

The “age demanded” chiefly a mould in plaster,
Made with no loss of time,
A prose kinema, not, not assuredly, alabaster
Or the “sculpture” of rhyme.

Ezra Pound in 1913
IV
These fought in any case,
and some believing,
pro domo, in any case. . .
Some quick to arm,
some for adventure,
some from fear of weakness,
some from fear of censure,
some for love of slaughter, in imagination,
learning later . . .
some in fear, learning love of slaughter;

Died some, pro patria,
non “dulce” non “et decor”. . .
walked eye-deep in hell
believing in old men’s lies, then unbelieving
came home, home to a lie,
home to many deceits,
home to old and new infamy;
usury age-old and age-thick
and liars in public places.

Daring as never before, wastage as never before.
Young blood and high blood,
fair cheeks, and fine bodies;

fortitude as never before

frankness as never before,
disillusions as never told in the days,
hysterias, trench confessions,
laughter out of dead bellies.
V
There died a myriad,
and of the best, among them,
For an old bitch gone in the teeth,
For a botched civilization,

Charm, smiling at the good mouth,
Quick eyes gone under earth’s lid,

For two gross of broken statues,
For a few thousand battered book

Keats’ letters 2

Photo0335 2

http://ticer-swim.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/john-keats-1795-1821-here-lies-one.html

“When I am in a room with People if I ever am free from speculating on creations of my own brain, then not myself goes home to myself: but the identity of every one in the room begins so to press upon me that I am in a very little time annihilated ­ not only among Men; it would be the same in a Nursery of children: I know not whether I make myself wholly understood: I hope enough so to let you see that no despondence is to be placed on what I said that day.”

The most read post in June

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There was a young lady from Ealing
Who slept upside down on the ceiling
When she was asked how
She said I don’t know
I stood on my head and I’m reeling

There was a young lady from Ealing
Who wept upside down on the ceiling
When she was asked why
She  said , well I cry
But gravity keeps interfering.

 

There was a young lady from Ealing
Who kept   cats of all kinds on the ceiling
When they asked her if
It was where she’d  like to live
She said, I’m bereft of desire and need healing

Keats’ letters

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‘Moods of my own Mind’: Keats, melancholy, and mental health

On mindfulness: “The only means of strengthening one’s intellect is to make up one’s mind about nothing — to let the mind be a thoroughfare for all thoughts.”

To George & Georiana Keats 1819

Negative Capability

 

“… – I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason – Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge. This pursued through volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.”

 

Photo0315

“Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a Soul? A Place where the heart must feel and suffer in a thousand diverse ways!”

To George & Georgiana Keats, May 1819.

Precognition by Margaret Atwood

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Drawing by my sister

https://www.poeticous.com/margaret-atwood/precognition

 

Precognition

Living backwards means only
I must suffer everything twice.
Those picnics were already loss:
with the dragonflies and the clear streams halfway.

What good did it do me to know
how far along you would come with me
and when you would return?
By yourself, to a life you call daily.

You did not consider me a soul
but a landscape, not even one
I recognize as mine, but foreign
and rich in curios:
an egg of blue marble,
a dried pod,
a clay goddess you picked up at a stall
somewhere among the dun and dust-green
hills and the bronze-hot
sun and the odd shadows,

not knowing what would be protection,
or even the need for it then.

I wake in the early dawn and there is the roadway
shattered, and the glass and the blood,
from an intersection that has happened
already, though I can’t say when.
Simply that it will happen.

What could I tell you now that would keep you
safe or warn you?
What good would it do?
Live and be happy.

I would rather cut myself loose
from time, shave off my hair
and stand at a crossroads
with a wooden bowl, throwing
myself on the dubious mercy
of the present, which is innocent
and forgetful and hits the eye bare

and without words and without even love
than do this mourning over.