Day: January 15, 2023

No  bridge destroys its power, no currents sin

The geese have moved their flight path to the East
I miss the  gladness of their graceful wings
And wish I were a bird and not a beast

In the river, they have had their feast
While the sparrows watched and gently sang
The geese are gone, their flight path’s to the East

Seeing their grace at sunset gave me peace
The  natural  world such beauty to us brings
The wish I were a bird and not a beast

North East London’s  cut up by the Lea
No  bridge destroys its power, its currents sing
The geese have moved their flight path  further East

The geese do not  make nests  in a  tall tree
But dwell upon the water  like the swans
I wish I were a bird or honey bee.

As the infant  wisely grabs and clings
So the geese will fight  if threat descends
The geese have moved their flight path to the East
Oh, to fly at sunset  with the least

 

 

 

Advent flight

The ducks swim in the gaps between the ice
Cold blooded , yet kept warm by fluffy down
The river looks uncertain in this light

The sky hangs down a curtain of snow white
The sun, precocious, shines and then it frowns
The ducks swim in the gaps between the ice

Ah, think of Morecambe Bay in sunshine bright
Across the sea the Pikes stand out so proud
My river looks uncertain in this light

Britain’s mountains fierce attract like vice
Like alcohol or sex or low cut gown
Unknowing ducks swim on despite thick ice

Thanks to God for hearing and for sight
The mystery is the Love which was disowned
My river looks so cold as comes twilight

Here is Bethlehem, the little town
Where Christ was born and grew to be cut down
The ducks swim by, the swans walk on the ice
Look up and see the geese in Advent flight

Did poetry die?

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/29/opinion/eliot-waste-land-poetry.html

Of course, poetry isn’t literally dead. There have probably never been more practicing poets than there are today — graduates of M.F.A. programs working as professors in M.F.A. programs — and I wager that the gross domestic chapbook per capita rate is higher than ever. But the contemporary state of affairs is not exactly what one has in mind when one says that poetry is alive and well — as opposed to, say, on a luxe version of life support.

I’m hardly the first person to suggest that poetry is dead. But the autopsy reports have never been conclusive about the cause. From cultural conservatives we have heard that poetry died because, for political reasons, we stopped teaching the right kinds of poems, or teaching them the right way. (This was more or less the view of the critic Harold Bloom, who blamed what he called the “school of resentment” for the decline in aesthetic standards.)

O

This leaves us in the somber position of Eliot’s speaker in “Ash-Wednesday,” whose “lost heart stiffens and rejoices/In the lost lilac and the lost sea voices,” mourning the absence of something he cannot name.

More on poetry

This leaves us in the somber position of Eliot’s speaker in “Ash-Wednesday,” whose “lost heart stiffens and rejoices/In the lost lilac and the lost sea voices,” mourning the absence of something he cannot name.

More on poetry