Chris Veasy, The Father

Visit All «English Wednesdays»
Visit All «English Wednesdays»
mon semblable, mon frère
Our epoch takes a voluptuous satisfaction
In that perspective of the action
Which pictures us inhabiting the end
Of everything with death for only friend.
Not that we love death,
Not truly, not the fluttering breath,
The obscene shudder of the finished act—
What the doe feels when the ultimate fact
Tears at her bowels with its jaws.
Our taste is for the opulent pause
Before the end comes. If the end is certain
All of us are players at the final curtain:
All of us, silence for a time deferred,
Find time before us for one sad last word.
Victim, rebel, convert, stoic—
Every role but the heroic—
We turn our tragic faces to the stalls
To wince our moment till the curtain falls.
A world ends when its metaphor has died.
An age becomes an age, all else beside,
When sensuous poets in their pride invent
Emblems for the soul’s consent
That speak the meanings men will never know
But man-imagined images can show:
It perishes when those images, though seen,
No longer mean.
A world was ended when the womb
Where girl held God became the tomb
Where God lies buried in a man:
Botticelli’s image neither speaks nor can
To our kind. His star-guided stranger
Teaches no longer, by the child, the manger,
The meaning of the beckoning skies.
Sophocles, when his reverent actors rise
To play the king with bleeding eyes,
No longer shows us on the stage advance
God’s purpose in the terrible fatality of chance.
No woman living, when the girl and swan
Embrace in verses, feels upon
Her breast the awful thunder of that breast
Where God, made beast, is by the blood confessed.
Empty as conch shell by the waters cast
The metaphor still sounds but cannot tell,
And we, like parasite crabs, put on the shell
And drag it at the sea’s edge up and down.
This is the destiny we say we own.
But are we sure
The age that dies upon its metaphor
Among these Roman heads, these mediaeval towers,
Is ours?—
Or ours the ending of that story?
The meanings in a man that quarry
Images from blinded eyes
And white birds and the turning skies
To make a world of were not spent with these
Abandoned presences.
The journey of our history has not ceased:
Earth turns us still toward the rising east,
The metaphor still struggles in the stone,
The allegory of the flesh and bone
Still stares into the summer grass
That is its glass,
The ignorant blood
Still knocks at silence to be understood.
Poets, deserted by the world before,
Turn round into the actual air:
Invent the age! Invent the metaphor!
***
Archibald MacLeish, 1892–1982 an American poet, writer, associated with the Modernist school of poetry. He received three Pulitzer Prizes for his work. More on WikiPedia
Visit All «English Wednesdays»
richard II
My crown is a half-tamed Python,
a sometimes friend,
which sacrifices skin to hide the scars.
My ermine robes are stunted waxen wings,
and my royal ring a white banded worm
that feeds on me until I am no more.
Alas, I am consumed by ruling, crushed
by the compass of my crown, true north is south
and so I drown.
But what if I, in this confusion, should walk
upon the surface of my sorrows, and watch
all rebels rust away. For are these not men
who would hold up a torch and say look it is
the sun, tis just as just. And all shivering
the subjects would agree
it seems that even truth must bend its knee.
ambivalence
“to save our people we must sacrifice our people”
——————————————-G’Kar
I saw him today down in Circle Nine
found only decay in his hate he said
forgiveness is the highest form of faith
our souls unborn buddhas wanting freedom
from the dark he said so all life must die
I saw him today down in Circle Nine
yet I fear the matin light which you have
stoned blue with bruises he said hear my prayer
forgiveness is the highest form of faith
ascending a blind guide led me beyond
the dark asked me if the sun was rotten
I saw him today down in Circle Nine
and so the sun bled out and lost the sky
orphaned all to ineffectual fire
forgiveness is the highest form of faith
in the morning the sunrise smells of wings
and whip marks and blood and ambivalence
I saw him today down in Circle Nine
forgiveness is the highest form of faith
longinus
Go, bury the day, bless this blessed earth
with a sunken son, he like love itself,
undone. Then flood his sky with blood, give berth
to whip marks and marble and holy wealth.
All double night now for two suns are downed,
gone the one that burns and the one that’s prey,
a double dark’s where single lights are drowned,
and so I wish myself beside the day.
I gave him a coffin for his kingdom
and choirs of angel white worshipful worms .
But could I carve new, fish mistakes undone,
forge immiscible faiths so none may burn?
Dead men stay dead but stolen stories rise,
I saw him too late, his blood in my eyes.
sheol
When I died it was the opposite of drowning,
I poured fearful into some other bourn, il percorso
inizia nel paradiso all’inferno, and felt my ending die.
I awoke upon the shores of Sheol, where the waiting
dream of what, Cielo? seconda morte? and I saw there Lilacs
out of the dead land, and Lotus flowers crowning the dead.
A land of outré hope, and pregnant pauses so ancient the
unborn have crows’ feet upon their faces. I saw
there a lapis path, by the leman, and upon the path a
man of clearest cyan waiting, his bones unpicked by
whispers, his mind a shantih shrine, and there on his
varada palm no lifeline scarred the skin.
On an eternal instinct I followed with gay
abandon, ogni speranza, voi che entrate.
the path
The T-Cell snow’s falling upon the path,
upon the pilgrims buried down inside their Cistercian
robes spread, as broken wings, around them.
They have seen, with one eye closed,
as if taking aim or fearful of seeing too deeply,
this land wet with drought, this land of ros crux,
this land of Ptolemaic love,
where the Satrap-Soter breeds scythes
for mobled souls. ‘O quam cito transit gloria mundi’,
quotes the last pilgrim in selfish prayer, but thinks,
or maybe hears, this land, this snow is Jolie Laide,
and begins to feel the father inside the cold,
inside the pain,
inside the grave.
*
©Scott Devon
photo©Stratos Fountoulis, 2008
*
j. tyler blue ©2003
Photo: Beercha – file licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic
Hot air
There are more dry mouths this month.
——–More lips licked nervously in the corridors of power.
—————There are protests over brown lawns and red-handed
——–banks – people are heard to say It’s like the third world.
In the third world people save their breath
——–for the six-mile walk to get water.
Sometimes we talk about these dirty tricks.
——-Sometimes we talk clean tech, green fixes, silver bullets.
————–But we can’t seem to talk our way out of this.
——-So we chat of the new black as scorched clouds bloom;
edgy reapers of an early harvest. Laying waste,
——-in our various ways, to our shortening days.
————–Waiting for rain.
*
©Janet Lees
photo©Stratos Fountoulis, «Antwerp wall» 2009
Mrs Donna had never left her dog, Bubu, alone. Kept in her handbag they’d go to relatives, the cinema, the theatre, cafeterias, everywhere. They even travelled together every summer to the remotest places of the globe. Once they’d arrived, Bubu would sniff and roam around, moving her curly bum and wagging her tail. When Bubu showed her teeth, Mrs Donna knew something wrong was going on and took care for both of them. When Bubu was playful, Mrs Donna felt relaxed. Bubu was her radar for everything, from the moment she lost her husband.
The old lady and the dog lived together for eight years. Bubu never had a collar because Mrs Donna wanted her to be free to stay or go. From the moment she set eyes on this five inch of puppy curled inside a glass tank, she fell in love with her, the same as she had fallen in love with her late husband because he reminded her of a lonely gigantic shar-pei, that strange bulldog with the deep wrinkles and the blue tongue – only her husband’s was pink. The bell jar brought me a companion, instead of madness, thought Mrs Donna and went into the shop and bought Bubu.
At the beginning she had her on her late husband’s pillow at nights, to keep an eye on her, as she used to do with him during his sickness. Now she could see the whole of this tiny creature; with her husband she could see either his face or the back of his neck curious of the way the roots of his hair sprouted from the skin.
During the next six months Mrs Donna trained Bubu. She could walk or run, smell and do whatever she wanted on the pavements but she had to be safely tucked in the old woman’s palm to cross the road.
People were amazed with this miniature and she looked back with her twinkling button sized eyes. She wasn’t one of those dogs that lick and kiss and bark hysterically. No. Bubu was a lady. She stayed cool, gentle and a little detached from people’s affection, as if she kept all her tenderness for Mrs Donna.
© Belica Kubareli
Photo©Pinkshippo
I’m sure it was ecology
Something alive and organic
That led me to be out in the trees
And laughing madly
Into the wind.
Books forgotten; no, a lie.
Books are the seeds in the core of this fruit
Books written just around the corner
By women as curious as I
Less fortunate though
Cursed to live in disease and sexism.
Both killers of body and spirit;
How lucky am I.
But the books I scrawl my facts
And figures
And answers
And notes
Are forgotten scraps of yesterday:
He asked (my angel)
‘What do you like best and why?’
I sat on the edge of the desk,
Eyes shining and soul
On my shirt sleeve
And said one thing, then another
Mind skipping like stones
Across a lake.
Worried at first that he will read
Far too much into my final answer
Then (crazy hormonal child)
Eventually not caring if he does.
Because the answer is true.
And it’s not conventional.
It’s not everyone else’s favourite.
It’s mine because it speaks
To something within
Bypassing ears and mind and launching
Arrow like at the heart of the matter.
He is pleased, so I am;
The measure of a great mentor.
And as I leave,
I think of all the things ‘I like best’
And realise none of them
Are for anyone
But me.
So here I am, running deer like
Through woods and over stones
Praising those words that found
The key to introverted me
And turned, and listen;
The grinding of gears
As the lock opened,
And me me me poured out through
That portal like sunshine.
Throw those papers to the wind;
Let devils grasp and play
What do I like best?
I’ve only just begun to say.
© Mabh Savage
Photo©By designer Paul Cocksedge “Bourrasque” -collection of papers blowing away in the wind. Made for France’s City of Lyon’s annual Festival of Lights 2011
*
Mabh Savage’s book “A Modern Celt» is available to order at Amazon
In the dry on sea
A new wave for lifelong
The great white shark.
Te sum of laughter:
Kids splashing in the pool
On the lounge chair.
To salvage Life:
A visible catheter
On the Earth’s bend.
Taking you food
With you saves quite a lot:
Money for one.
When fear, terror
When pain, loss and worst, love.
You can’t feel alone.
Up the spirit of
A worthwhile wo/man being:
The girl’s white dog.
Small leaves
Like the palm of a hand
Tremble on its own.
Pollen-yellow horns
Examine swallows
At our touches.
Early May not long
Garden littered with shells
Thinnest tissue.
After funeral
Families retract at touch
It hugs the steam.
It’s easy to say
“The word love fucks in yr bed”
Always your own¡
Subverted Life:
Religions have perverted
The Free Spirit.
The Sacred Chao
Is for these screwed-up times.
Speak for Yourself¡
Deities change.
Gospel according to Freud
From de Dog Star¡
Erotic Poetry
Is a telegram for us?
Book of Uterus¡
Face to face with You¡
The Epistle to Paranoids
Is for Polites.
Each of these yarns
And my past to spread them:
Whole thing myself.
I got the Record
About you will learn more
And understand less.
Everything knowing
With Principia Discordia
About Nothing.
Knowledge of a sage
Put twinkles in Your Eyes.
Wisdom of a Child¡
How I found a God
A few moments of a Shit
And what I did It.
I feel that the Book
Is a classic for a Dog
Hah¡ Delusions.
Clasic Discordia
Of guerrilla ontology
Deadpan put on¡
A Love Story
I don’t know You Wo/Man
Five tons of Winds¡
A Discordian Chao
There’s no God but Goddess
And my prettiest One¡
The bud uncurls like
ruber tube protruding
Viatical settles.
Curtains open
You can’t live on love
gardenias on deck
Granada on the paint
behind the blond armoire.
You, Don the Garden
Big wave averted
as Sea walks away sea falls
waves behind Me.
An opening hand
on the Andalus patio
geranium to bloom.
*
©Daniel de Cullá
photo©Stratos Fountoulis «Paros 2008»
bio
Daniel de Cullá *1955, Poet & Writer. Painter & Photographer. Member of the Spanish Writers Association. Founder and Editor of the reviews of BodyArt, Art Culture, GALLO TRICOLOR, and ROBESPIERRE. He participates in Cultural Acts of Theatre and Performance. He’s living between Burgos, Madrid and North Hollywood.
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