Month: December 2017

The rational one can be almost deranged

Grief  and love are linked by velvet chains
Imagination  does not desire change
When love’s killed, its ghost will haunt  and maim

In our wanderings in our mind’s domains
The furnishings are gently rearranged
Ire and love are linked by uncoiled chains

The mind itself will change the human brain
The man most strong may be the man insane
When love dies, its shadow  still remains

The hate of loss  is like the mark of Cain
The rational one can be at once deranged
Grief  and love are linked by  velvet chains

What is lost will  heal in its due time
Murderous “love”   comes from the most estranged
When love’s killed its  ghost will  cause  us pain

Suffering most acute  stabs  every place
Chronic losses cause this pale strained face
Grief  and love are linked by sacred chains
When love’s killed, its ghost will haunt  to maim

A day in the life of a poetry translator

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https://www.londoncalling.com/features/a-day-in-the-life-of-a-poetry-translator

Extract

LC: Every single word holds its own importance in poetry. How do you translate the meaning of an individual word if there isn’t a translatable word in English? 

CP: Finding a solution is part of the fun. English is a very extensive, nuanced language, so there’s usually some way to do it if you think long enough.

LC: What challenges do you face when translating a poet who has a very different heritage and culture from your own? 

CP: The fun is that the challenges are always different. Translating the Somali poet Caasha Lul Mohamad Yusuf brings technical challenges because her poetry is structured around alliteration. She often references the Quran so there are allusions I can miss that would be obvious to a Somali audience. You worry about misunderstanding, and that you might not be able to carry a poet’s particular formal skill or music into English.

LC: In Somalia, poetry is regarded as the highest art form. What themes do you find reoccurring in Somali poems, and why do you think this art form is so important to their culture? 

CP: There’s lots of romance. Love, men and women, the romance of the land itself. The green after the rain; the honey. It can be very delicate and lyrical. There’s also politics. Lots of politics. There’s a real sense that poetry matters, that people are listening to what poets say. Somali culture was traditionally nomadic, so it’s no surprise poetry is important. Unlike other art forms, a poem is so light you can carry it in your head.

LC: What is your involvement with the Poetry Translation Centre? 

CP: I’ve been translating Somali poems for them for five years now, and Somali week has become a very important date in my diary! I’ve particularly loved working with Caasha Lul Mohamad Yusuf, and am excited that the PTC are going to publish a major book of her work next year with Bloodaxe called The Sea- Migrations. She writes so powerfully about being a black Muslim woman and immigrant. Her poems feel very necessary right now. I’m also involved in the PTC’s translation workshops. Every week we look at a poem from a different language, hear about the context and culture from a literal translator and attempt a group translation. Last term was a crash course on everything from Chinese poetical ambiguities to Swahili syllabics. It’s amazing what good translations the collaborative process can create.

LC: For someone who has never read translated poetry before, where is a good place to start? 

CP: The Poetry Translation Centre anthology My Voice is a wonderful way in. It has the originals facing the translations which is really important. The magazine Modern Poetry in Translation is also fantastic.

LC: What do you think the medium of poetry does that no other art form can do? 

CP: I’m drawn to the intensity. In a novel it can take several hours of emotional investment to get to the place where you cry, a good poem can do it in thirty seconds.

While I live, to whom am I of use?

The empty tomb is here inside my house
Not entire and not destroying all
This space  where used to dwell  my  loving spouse

The consolation is   bitter excuse
The loss of  love, my future state appals.
The empty tomb is here inside my house

As I live, to whom am I of use?
Where is the voice that to my heart will call?
A space  where used to speak  my  loving spouse

There is no resurrection for  our race;
But from the nuclear threat we each recoil.
The empty tomb is here inside my house

How is the world now ruled by the debased?
Are we redeemed  ever from our  Fall?
I miss  exchanges with my artist  spouse

Must we build  more iron  prison walls?
How bitter, Jesus,  is the human  bile.
The empty tomb is here inside my house.
This space  where we  mused, as spouse to spouse

 

So dust to dust and ash to ash,oh lord
Let us mourn without more wrath,discord

Elusive inner presence, other me

 Elusive inner presence, other me,
Those bubbles on the water surface tell
Of life we cannot speak about nor see

We have many layers, currents pulled
Dynamic, swaying, living, dark unquelled.
Elusive inner presence, other me.

The philosophers like Langer all agree
A symbol is as deep as any well.
With life we barely speak about or see

A mermaid’s tail may flicker from the sea
The rhythm of waves our senses charmed, compelled
Elusive inner presence, other me.

Humanity is  called a living tree
If one leaf falls there is no plangent bell
For what we cannot speak about nor see

A coat embroidered three dimensionally
Will seize our eye and heart and soul as well
Elusive inner presence, other me.

The inner one must live in privacy,
Betrayed by none in marvelled secrecy.
Elusive inner presence, other me,
Open my blind eye,oh let me see.

Shaken by the wildness of the good

In the war the artist made small maps
For  agents  dropped   in  occupied terrain
Then she bore her child with love  that gripped
And took her  like  kind armies might a town

Shaken by the wildness of  the good
She  let new life begin within her womb
Yet  those who’re occupied by what is bad
Will create not life but  their own tomb

The feminine, the artist soul,  the cup
Containers  made to hold  and so create
Can they  judge when passion takes a grip
The nature  fierce that  longs  and wills to mate?

As occupation by an egoistic force
Can make us sinful humans truly cursed

 

 

Patterns

A book of patterns. beautiful as lace
But lacking life and warmth and  zest and fun
We need more than mere geometry of space

We need the flesh ,we  need the long  embrace
Where what was two shall turn into just one.
Passion,action, jewelled  with love’s grace

What is most human is the human face
To join our eyes and smile, so  life begins
We need more than a geometry of space

To show a blank face  is to show distaste
Schizoid,alien,anguished, with no twin
Passions mindful, orchestrated ,save.

How can we experience and not waste
The precious life we get when we are born?
We need a life  connected  like the waves.

Timeless, all is woven into one
The right, the wrong, the to the fro, the calm
A book of patterns. beautiful as lace
With living flesh we make a  holy space

 

History, undigested ,splits and cracks

The nearer  peace,more savage are the acts
Abhorrent to the atheist in us all.
History, undigested ,splits and cracks

As we whites  did evil to the black
With little difference, hate in glory calls.
The nearer  peace, the more savage the acts

All of us can  disremember facts
Israeli hands  have gripped and then appalled.
History, undigested ,splits and cracks

As ,with Bomber Harris, Dresden packed
Burned  like grass the refugees to ghouls
The nearer  peace, the more savage the acts

We deny the  healing  we have lacked
For  Jews we helped destroy, psychotic fools
History, undigested ,splits and cracks

Palestine’s own Arabs are  ill ruled
And in return,  explode  like stubborn mules
The nearer love, the more  the  hatred whacks
History., unconceivable,   directs

 

O sweet spontaneous by: e.e. cummings (1894-1962)

sweet spontaneous
earth how often have
the
doting

fingers of
prurient philosophers pinched
and
poked

thee
, has the naughty thumb
of science prodded
thy

beauty, how
often have religions taken
thee upon their scraggy knees
squeezing and

buffeting thee that thou mightest conceive
gods
(but
true

to the incomparable
couch of death thy
rhythmic
lover

thou answerest

them only with

spring)

The cat waiting for a mouse

Cat-WatchingOh,  Oh,ginger cat you make your parents wince
As they watch you from the window  of their home
Why not go inside and eat their mince?

These  humans who have let you stay a dunce
And let you sleep upon  a cushion foam
Oh,Ginger you are making Mike and his wife wince

You sensed their home was warm and smelled of quince
And yet you hunt for birds and often roam
Why not go  and purr and eat sweet mince?

Adoption is a treasure fit for prince
And yet you  never write them a short poem
Oh, ginger cat you make your parents wince

Do not wash your whiskers and not rinse,
Conditioner makes your coat  get a good shine
So why not go inside and eat cat mince?

It’s hard to  draw correct cross species lines
And though you are a cat, you seem to  reign,
Oh, ginger cat, you give your parents  angst
Why not go to  town and rob a bank?

As stunning as a handbag full of lead

As useful as a nail without a head
As  stunning as a handbag full of lead
As loving as a man who seems quite dead
As tasty as a worm on  mouldy bread

These similes will indicate  to you
My bills arrive and I am getting through
As soon our morals will  be  fried in glue
Love itself will find no avenue.

As loving as a god who died for you
As  acid as a lemon when you’ve  flu
As  powerful as a tiger trapped in  zoo
Love will come and nobody  is true.

The metaphors and similes fly through
The minds of all the children who once knew
That meaning is a story writ by you
Imagination slowly saves the  few

In a narrow street, an incident.

The age of  all-out war, an accident
An Archduke shot. an Empire on the brink
In a narrow street, an incident.

Nobody stood up as a dissident
In their games, did leaders wish  to pause
The age of nuclear war, by accident?

In many narrow streets, coincidence,S
Since apples destroyed Eden, Newton  caused
In a narrow street, an incident.

Inevitably none  get all they want
From mother’s milk to dolls and other toys
The age of  all-out war, and infants’ rants

The time we have got left is rather scant
And there is  threatened bombing every day
In a narrow street, what incident?

There is no peace, just space between the wars
In her pram, the baby ignites toys
The age of all-out war, an accident?
In a narrow street, what incident?

Wilipedia: Shooting of heir to Austro-Hungarian Empire 1914

What the world is for

His mission is to have a nuclear war
Then he would be appear in history books
The only questions , what  this war for?

Nuclear bombs  to him  are shiney   toy
Although  no  future author will be left to look.
For his vocation is to start the  final war

The death instinct is stronger than we know
For suffering humans and for legal crooks
The only questions  what  this war for

How the sins,  like fish, shall  leap and glow
Until the decent are untimely hooked
So opening the gates with Nazi heirs

On  tweet all the liars and their whores
On come ghosts and Satan’s  well trained cooks
The only question, what  this war  is for.

Oh, there will be no mourners  with their rites
As millions fry  without  long drawn out fights
His destiny, to have a nuclear war
The only question , what  this world is for.

Death in a grocery store

IMG_20171211_091255.jpg

We might have died in childbirth;
We might have died in war;
None of us imagined
Death in a grocery store.

We went out buying fruit and meat,
Fresh eggs and chicken breasts.
We wanted to make dinner
For this night’s Sabbath Feast.

But noone knew that soft goodbye
Was to be our last;
A few shots and some bullets
Another life has passed.

What were our young children
going to feel tonight….?
We should be serving love and food
As candles give their light.

Candles burn in memory
Of all the innocent,
who are caught up in tragedies
That someone else invents.

Let young men delude themselves
And politicians too….
Don’t forget those murderers
Could be me and you….

We are not so different
But for circumstance.
The murderers and their victims turn
In a macabre dance.

Seeds are tested

Lightness,brighntess,sunshine make us smile
We wish for summer every single day
Yet seeds are tested in the winter  soil

In the planting many men must toil
As men must work while children learn in play
Lightness,brightness,sunshine make us smile

And many seeds are fried in olive oil
To sweeten and make spicy meaty prey
Lightness,brightness,sunshine make us smile

Like human beings ,seeds  must suffers trials
Be tested by the heat and by  disgrace
Lightness,brightness,sunshine make us smile

A moment comes when seeds burst from their vials
They grow with fervour and  enlarge,embrace
Lightness,brightness,sunshine make us smile

We all alike must wait on love and grace
Suffer and be tested by the fates
But in the end the darkness is our friend
As down its deep stair we will  each descend

I can see

I can see a gentle winter sun
Setting like a softness of pink down
As if a gentle wind made sunset come

The watercolour  mauve has overrun
Wishing to play love to winter’s frown
I can see how  winter  hurts the sun

Overhead  it’s soft grey tinged with plum
This is no right garment for a clown
But  gentle winter winds made sunset come

A blueness planetary makes  our dome
As if a verb is subtly changed to noun
I can see how  night clouds flirt with sun

All the pink is falling,falling ,gone
The sun is just a monarch with no crown
As if a low dark wind made nightfall come

My heart is watered as the colours run
Combining,dying,falling,night has won
I still see a  shadow of the sun
As if a mother wind at night fall came

 

What is this war for?

Now the Requiem precedes the war
And nobody knows quite what this war is for.
Unless it is to show the world contempt
From so called Christian leaders who’re hell bent

We talk about how great we are and fair
Yet  British soldiers roasted Kenyans over fires.
And who  has seen no burning child napalmed
Used in Vietnam  for peace and calm

We ,the warriors of Viking stock,
Conquered half the world  and natives mocked.
Now we claim we’re better than the rest
I wonder how the Holy One will test.

Judge  not all  by stereotyped ideals
When we ourselves have fractured what is Real

Meet T S Eliot

IMG_3812.jpg

https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4738/t-s-eliot-the-art-of-poetry-no-1-t-s-eliot

 

“You began to write poetry in St. Louis when you were a boy?

T.S. ELIOT

I began I think about the age of fourteen, under the inspiration of Fitzgerald’s Omar Khayyam, to write a number of very gloomy and atheistical and despairing quatrains in the same style, which fortunately I suppressed completely—so completely that they don’t exist. I never showed them to anybody. The first poem that shows is one which appeared first in the Smith Academy Record, and later in The Harvard Advocate, which was written as an exercise for my English teacher and was an imitation of Ben Jonson. He thought it very good for a boy of fifteen or sixteen. Then I wrote a few at Harvard, just enough to qualify for election to an editorship on The Harvard Advocate, which I enjoyed. Then I had an outburst during my junior and senior years. I became much more prolific, under the influence first of Baudelaire and then of Jules Laforgue, whom I discovered I think in my junior year at Harvard.

INTERVIEWER

Did anyone in particular introduce you to the French poets? Not Irving Babbitt, I suppose.

ELIOT

No, Babbitt would be the last person! The one poem that Babbitt always held up for admiration was Gray’s Elegy. And that’s a fine poem but I think this shows certain limitations on Babbitt’s part, God bless him. I have advertised my source, I think; it’s Arthur Symons’s book on French poetry*, which I came across in the Harvard Union. In those days the Harvard Union was a meeting place for any undergraduate who chose to belong to it. They had a very nice little library, like the libraries in many Harvard houses now. I liked his quotations and I went to a foreign bookshop somewhere in Boston (I’ve forgotten the name and I don’t know whether it still exists) which specialized in French and German and other foreign books and found Laforgue, and other poets. I can’t imagine why that bookshop should have had a few poets like Laforgue in stock. Goodness knows how long they’d had them or whether there were any other demands for them.”

Learning from experience

 

15241809_815532615253285_581786277584408897_n.jpghttp://www.encyclopedia.com/psychology/dictionaries-thesauruses-pictures-and-press-releases/learning-experience

“Learning from Experience.” International Dictionary of Psychoanalysis. . Encyclopedia.com. 12 Dec. 2017<http://www.encyclopedia.com>.

An Old Testament of Endurance

Air,bitter they call it,whispers to the sweet planes of my face,
Shrieks shrill to my cavities,ears,mouth and nose;penetrates all that’s open;
Probing like a surgeon’s knife,to see what healing damage it might do.
A frozen finger touches my heart;
Seems like the ice is inside me sending urgent warnings.
On that high inner mountain,you’ll feel nothing at all…
You’ll be the snowman, a bloody icicle;
An Old Testament of Endurance;
A legend like the pale polar bears, snuffling uneasily around the summit
Touching a woman’s heart is the quickest way to gain her attention
I’m looking at you;you’re in pieces.You’re a puzzle,a jigsaw with two double dynamos;
A broken racing bicycle crossed with two ice skates.
Ten motorboats crashed into a yacht and abandoned on a Swiss lake in winter.
Can I leave you scattered like this?
You’re a man in a penguin suit;
Diplomatic, attached with the coldest reserves.
You’re a spy from the court of the Vatican City
A screaming Pope;
An unbaptized demon.
A lost angel with no hands;
A half hung side of meat;
An unbroken rampant horse deluded by winds east.
We were split,one from another;
Split in ourselves too–thoughts and emotions
Are raw like meat,weeping as they are pulled apart into islands.
I see there’s a cold window between us.
I rub it with my damp coat sleeve,like children do,licking on it;
And see your eyes gleam in hope like greenish diamonds.
Yet I can’t touch you, until we learn how to melt glass.
Are you trying too as you smile weakly,
desperately holding onto this impossible slippery glass?
We’ll try  to reach you at the bottom of whatever frozen ocean you sigh in. to
Here you are,a flat and two-dimensional Prospero.
You rise like a non-U-boat already firing at the upper orders.
Here you are walking through what seemed like ruins
And you are not just alive, but burning.
Posted in free verse, Thinkings | Leave a comment

A symbol is a well

A symbol is a well  with water sweet
Like the Bedouin  wells in deserts  harsh
Never drained,  with wisdom it’s  replete

Wisdom rises up from layers deep
Not like salty words from shallow marsh
A symbol is a well  with water sweet

What we  learn is ours to live and keep
Life is saved for those who’re overparched
Never drained,  with wisdom still  replete

Keep  a guard upon the treasure heaped
Where jewels decorate the Moorish arch
A symbol is a well  with water sweet

Confident in love we take the leap
We must not ever keep a lover harsh
For  we’ll be drained, our life blood  he’ll  deplete.

What we get, we have in no way earned
But in our feelings, we have love well learned
A symbol is a well  with water  fleet
Never drained,  with wisdom it’s  replete

About symbols in poetry

Nuneham_2017-4

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/learn/glossary-terms/symbol

Extract:

Symbol

Something in the world of the senses, including an action, that reveals or is a sign for something else, often abstract or otherworldly. A rose, for example, has long been considered a symbol of love and affection.

Every word denotes, refers to, or labels something in the world, but a symbol (to which a word, of course, may point) has a concreteness not shared by language, and can point to something that transcends ordinary experience. Poets such as William Blake and W.B. Yeats often use symbols when they believe in—or seek—a transcendental (religious or spiritual) reality.

A metaphor compares two or more things that are no more and no less real than anything else in the world. For a metaphor to be symbolic, one of its pair of elements must reveal something else transcendental. In “To the Rose upon the Rood of Time,” for instance, Yeats’s image of the rose on the cross symbolizes the joining of flesh and spirit. As Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren write in their book Understanding Poetry (3rd ed., 1960),“The symbol may be regarded as a metaphor from which the first term has been omitted.”

See also allegory and imagism.

The words

The tender words invented as we loved
Now have no other speaker but myself.
Lost, unique, the husband, so beloved
And special words called forth by touch and love-
In my speech , these words no longer live
I cannot use our words, our loving wealth.
The chosen words invented as we loved
Now have no other listener but myself

On that Day

The weary Britons saddened  and dismayed
Thought isolation would bring peace and calm
So they opted to leave Europe Voting Day~

Alas,the act was real and not a Play
The Normans and the Anglo-Saxons warned
The weary Britons saddened  and dismayed

Is God not coming down   to cut  away
The  chains that tie us to the French alarms
We raved to leave old Europe Voting Day~

Britons are a mixture  strange and fey
Some of us are Celts with Viking arms
Oh. angry Britons saddened  and dismayed

The arms of God have broken as we preyed
Let refugees drown and our own  poor burn
We opted to leave Europe Voting Day

It seems   our average reading age is nine
The government,  considerate, post on line
The British poor,  inebriate, must pay
For not knowing what the EU  was that Day

What did you mean?

Come to night school and learn to breed properly
My sister never does a rite wrong
Why not learn socially and be a statistic?
Make Britain hate again.Become a fascist in three weeks of lessens   and  take our Tictocks at the end
Do  you fear Vulgar Factions? Don’t come  to Britain for a holiday.
Are all mathematicians irrational  or is  it just  certain numbers?
Why are women not  like men and other unanswerable dilemmas.Ten weeks for £10.Toast and Certificate in Frame.
Do you  creed the Daily Fail?
How to have an  Eastern horror.Come to Clacton and fry.
Learn  to write and moan both at once.
Are you shy? Come to East Wanglia. We  hate talking.Free dinners and bath on weekends.Food on bequest.Read my will
If you hate me, you’ll hate my blog more than words can say.So  don’t

Watching the snow fall in the glare of neon street lights.

 

SnowyStreet.jpgToo old for cold,
I stand, now, against the hedge,
Watching the snow fall in the glare of neon street lights.
Darkness has come early,
I think of country uplands and huddled sheep.
On Salisbury Plain, shepherds watched their flocks
Just as in Bethlehem two thousand years before.
And then, exactly when?
“Between the wars”, it stopped
Now we know there is no “Between the wars”.
And who decided
To cull the sheep and shepherds
And the space for kindness?
Now that same Plain still exists, but banned
And closed to human-kind,
For bombs, not wombs
Nor for birth of lamb, nor gypsy child, nor Saviour
Where would He go today?