February 2012
3 posts
Sometimes
by Sheenagh Pugh
Sometimes things don’t go, after all,
from bad to worse. Some years, muscadel
faces down frost; green thrives; the crops don’t fail.
Sometimes a man aims high, and all goes well.
A people sometimes will step back from war,
elect an honest man, decide they care
enough, that they can’t leave some stranger poor.
Some men become what they were born for.
...
8 tags
The Day Flies Off Without Me
by John Stammers
The planes bound for all points everywhere
etch lines on my office window. From the top floor
London recedes in all directions, and beyond:
the world with its teeming hearts.
I am still, you move, I am a point of reference on a map;
I am at zero meridian as you consume the longitudes.
The pact we made to read our farewells exactly
at two in the afternoon with you in the...
January 2012
9 posts
4 tags
Funeral Blues
by W.H Auden
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone, Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone, Silence the pianos and with muffled drum Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.
Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead, Put crêpe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.
He was my...
3 tags
The Emperor Of Ice-Cream
by Wallace Stevens
Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month’s newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.
Take from the dresser of deal.
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On...
“Heterosexual” was actually coined in a letter at the same time as the word...”
– How “heterosexual” got its start – basically, as protest against discriminatory legislature on same-sex love. (via curiositycounts)
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Discovering Pessoa in Kabul →
Read an article of fragility, beauty, and sensitivity that references Fernando Pessoa and Rilke.
5 tags
Work and lunch
by Clare Pollard
He goes to Pret-a-Manger every day, likes something chickeny, or maybe Thai, takes it back to the office to bolt, an e-mail dinner, or perhaps - if, like today, he has a window - to this sunstruck square of grass that is alive with suits, WAP phones and knees, crammed as a slave-ship, or the Mayflower, to broil his nose and ankles FT pink.
Sunspot screensavers burn into his...
3 tags
Throw Salt
by Samuel Wagan Watson
Our Elders are well-acquainted with the Unlucky,
And they acknowledge Death by his sign,
Don’t cross a knife and fork on the kitchen table
’Cause you’re just inviting the Devil to dine,
Throw salt.
An owl is the foul feather of premonition,
Black cat can only reads black times,
As red-eyed dogs prowl the...
4 tags
The Dacca Gauzes by Agha Shahid Ali
“…for a whole year he sought to accumulate the most exquisite Dacca gauzes.”
– Oscar Wilde / The Picture of Dorian Gray
Those transparent Dacca gauzes known as woven air, running water, evening dew:
a dead art now, dead over a hundred years. ‘No one now knows,’ my grandmother says,
‘what it was to wear or touch that cloth.’ She wore it once, an heirloom sari from
her mother’s dowry,...
September 2011
2 posts
2 tags
“Just be who you are, and if you don’t end up with any friends, well then good...”
– Chelsea Handler (via justkeepmewherethelightis)
4 tags
City of Lights by Faiz Ahmed Faiz
Translated by Agha Shahid Ali
On each patch of green, from one shade to the next, the noon is erasing itself by wiping out all color, becoming pale, desolation everywhere, the poison of exile painted on the walls. In the distance, there are terrible sorrows, like tides: they draw back, swell, become full, subside. They’ve turned the horizon to mist. And behind that mist is the city of...
August 2011
14 posts
2 tags
“I really feel that we’re not giving children enough credit for distinguishing...”
– J.K. Rowling (via atomos)
2 tags
Ghalib
~ Aseem Kaul
Tonight, you recite Ghalib from memory;
because poetry, like blood, must come from the heart.
Taking a sip from your glass after every couplet,
the scotch rhyming perfectly the melancholy on your tongue.
You cling to nostalgia like an empty mirror,
to the scent of this language that withers like flowers.
You gather pain the way the sky gathers,
pinprick by slow pinprick,...
1 tag
“There were always in me, two women at least, one woman desperate and bewildered,...”
– Anaïs Nin
4 tags
in time of daffodils
by e.e. cummings
in time of daffodils(who know the goal of living is to grow) forgetting why, remember how in time of lilacs who proclaim the aim of waking is to dream, remember so(forgetting seem) in time of roses(who amaze our now and here with paradise) forgetting if, remember yes in time of all sweet things beyond whatever mind may comprehend, remember seek (forgetting find) and in a mystery...
2 tags
The Lake Isle of Innisfree by W. B. Yeats
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree, And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made; Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honeybee, And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow, Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings; There midnight’s all a-glimmer, and noon a purple...
1 tag
“A New Hampshire high school student reading an ancient Chinese poem and being...”
– ‘The Monster loves his Labyrinth: Notebooks’, Charles Simic
3 tags
Who Caught And Sang The Sun In Flight
by Arundhati Subramanium
You spoke with conviction
of the terrorism of the state.
And I, hesitant,
of those fraught landscapes of the mind.
The vodka clouded sentimentally,
a cordial of fuzzy peace,
making us believe, almost,
in a shared folklore,
a common heritage of warriorship.
That traditional repertoire of ripostes,
slippery pink with undergrad wisdom,
some kisses,...
1 tag
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My mother's lover →
Read this short story now. A very touching short story by Sumana Roy.
2 tags
Engineers’ Corner by Wendy Cope
“Why isn’t there an Engineers’ Corner in Westminster Abbey? In Britain we’ve always made more fuss of a ballad than a blueprint … How many schoolchildren dream of becoming great engineers?” Advertisement placed in The Times by the Engineering Council. We make more fuss of ballads than of blueprints –That’s why so many poets ends up rich,While engineers scrape by in cheerless...
My favorite cultural program →
DW TV is from Germany but their gaze is on all of Europe. If you like the European arts scene, this program is for you.
tumblrbot asked: WHERE WOULD YOU MOST LIKE TO VISIT ON YOUR PLANET?
1 tag
Now that I am back in the atmosphere
I have been away way too long. But I am back in the blogging and tumbling world. Hope you see you often and soon. Missed you guys: Muah!
2 tags
Triolet by Wendy Cope
I used to think all poets were Byronic—
Mad, bad and dangerous to know.
And then I met a few. Yes it’s ironic—
I used to think all poets were Byronic.
They’re mostly wicked as a ginless tonic
And wild as pension plans. Not long ago
I used to think all poets were Byronic—
Mad, bad and dangerous to know.
February 2010
1 post
If You Forget Me
I want you to know one thing. You know how this is: if I look at the crystal moon, at the red branch of the slow autumn at my window, if I touch near the fire the impalpable ash or the wrinkled body of the log, everything carries me to you, as if everything that exists, aromas, light, metals, were little boats that sail toward those isles of yours that wait for me. Well, now, if little by little...
January 2010
4 posts
1 tag
“Once we were blobs in the sea, and then fishes, and then lizards and rats, and...”
– Terry Pratchett, Discworld Series
December 2009
9 posts
1 tag
When You are Old
by W.B.Yeats
When you are old and grey and full of sleep, And nodding by the fire, take down this book, And slowly read, and dream of the soft look Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
How many loved your moments of glad grace, And loved your beauty with love false or true, But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you, And loved the sorrows of your changing face;
And bending down...
1 tag
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Introduction To Poetry
by Billy Collins I ask them to take a poem and hold it up to the light like a color slide
or press an ear against its hive.
I say drop a mouse into a poem and watch him probe his way out,
or walk inside the poem’s room and feel the walls for a light switch.
I want them to waterski across the surface of a poem waving at the author’s name on the shore.
But all they want to do is...
“Systems of power don’t have good intentions. You’ll occasionally in history find...”
– Noam Chomsky, in an interview. (via asuph)
You’ve got to get in to get out
by John Siddique
The world will impinge into your need for silence, into your prayers. In the hardest seconds of your life, your neighbours will be drunk, booming hip-hop through thin inconvenient walls.
At the lighting of your candles, in the moment you need to focus – the apex of your flame, the voice of the Holy Spirit, someone will be vacuuming, talking, ringing up change, a bin wagon...
2 tags
The Rainy Day
by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
THE day is cold, and dark, and dreary; It rains,and the wind is never weary; The vine still clings to the mouldering wall, But at every gust the dead leaves fall, And the day is dark and dreary.
My life is cold, and dark, and dreary; It rains,and the wind is never weary; My thoughts still cling to the mouldering past, But the hopes of youth fall thick in the...
2 tags
What the Rubber Farmer Said
by Michael Creighton
May 2004, Kottayam District, South India
Sit and drink your coffee— when it rains like this, what else can we do? See there—how I gather the water that runs in crooked torrents from my roof? My neighbors called me a fool, but dented buckets and pans have kept my well full, even when those owned by this district’s many fools ran dry.
You can smell that, can’t you? I, for...
Creighton again
South Delhi Jungle Park at Four
by Michael Creighton
The beetle walks on its front legs, back legs pushing a ball of dung across our path. You complain the ants will bite you if we don’t keep moving.
Even the neon-necked peacock fails to hold your attention; there is grit between your toes, a bothersome slipperiness in your puddle-soaked sandals.
Only the tiny purple and brown speckled egg on...
2 tags
poetry unexpected
Sometime in April this year I came across this delightful poet. His insights are always so startling.
Witness
by Michael Creighton
Like other good men from South Delhi, her husband drives each month by the temple, where a few hundred dusty souls form a ragged line along the north side of the road. From the seat of his car, he feeds them – ice cream or pears in summer, oranges or apples in...
November 2009
14 posts
1 tag
“Perhaps all dreams are what someone who wants you has had / and, not being able...”
– John Stammers
1 tag
a 5000 year old poem
I found this delightful 5th century poem.
In this vain fleeting universe, a man Of wisdom has two courses: first, he can Direct his time to pray, to save his soul, And wallow in religion’s nectar-bowl; But, if he cannot, it is surely best To touch and hold a lovely woman’s breast, And to caress her warm round hips, and thighs, And to possess that which between them lies.
-Bhartrhari
“Here where the cliffs alone prevail,
I stand exultant, neutral, free,
And from...”
– Sir John Betjeman
1 tag
poetry
Prayer
by Carol Ann Duffy
Some days, although we cannot pray, a prayer utters itself. So, a woman will lift her head from the sieve of her hands and stare at the minims sung by a tree, a sudden gift.
Some nights, although we are faithless, the truth enters our hearts, that small familiar pain; then a man will stand stock-still, hearing his youth in the distant Latin chanting of a train.
Pray...
jazz
I am listening to Thomas Siffling and Trio’s “Lazy Morning” from their album Cruizen. The genre is jazz.
There is something very expansive and luxurious about jazz. I feel transported to some other dimension, a very luxurious some other dimension. Not surprisingly, because the roots of jazz lie in the music of the slaves. What could be a more approprite music for our age? We,...
1 tag
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