The Nature of Daylight

Sometimes I think you hear me cry; it’s foolish I know,
I know you’re just standing in the rain, I can hear it.

DTL

"...Bedside manner lacked in famished
mothers, but with a leaf of pleasure the boys
sang in their sing-song voices of prayers, and places
where peace and ataraxia could whisk away
skeptics of all breeds, of all colour and hue,
to a place long overdue, in a book, a tome
with answers so holy bushes burned in their being
and faces told of mountains covered in scripture
like some kind of condemnation of regulations
regurgitated by diseased misanthropes
seeking unity with the enlightenment of their
imagination." Outlawed

Some people are so beautiful to see wild

yet so painful to leave free,

knowing that at some point they may wind up

... in captivity.


I'll not be the one to lock you down no...

not ever.

beautiful, clever of wild endeavour


siteless

I had to make a trip to town, so I made it a late one,
so I could capture the spring colors in the low setting sun.
Witnesses the lambs and a group of children run though fields lit with daffodils or golden rays, I couldnt tell which one.

THE SONG OF THE WRECK

by: Charles Dickens (1812-1870)

THE wind blew high, the waters raved,
A ship drove on the land,
A hundred human creatures saved
Kneel'd down upon the sand.
Threescore were drown'd, threescore were thrown
Upon the black rocks wild,
And thus among them, left alone,
They found one helpless child.

A seaman rough, to shipwreck bred,
Stood out from all the rest,
And gently laid the lonely head
Upon his honest breast.
And travelling o'er the desert wide
It was a solemn joy,
To see them, ever side by side,
The sailor and the boy.

In famine, sickness, hunger, thirst,
The two were still but one,
Until the strong man droop'd the first
And felt his labors done.
Then to a trusty friend he spake,
"Across the desert wide,
Oh, take this poor boy for my sake!"
And kiss'd the child and died.

Toiling along in weary plight
Through heavy jungle, mire,
These two came later every night
To warm them at the fire.
Until the captain said one day
"O seaman, good and kind,
To save thyself now come away,
And leave the boy behind!"

The child was slumbering near the blaze:
"O captain, let him rest
Until it sinks, when God's own ways
Shall teach us what is best!"
They watch'd the whiten'd, ashy heap,
They touch'd the child in vain;
They did not leave him there asleep,
He never woke again.

^ ^ ^ ^ ^


[link to www.youtube.com]

The Guitar

The weeping of the guitar
begins.
The goblets of dawn
are smashed.
The weeping of the guitar
begins.
Useless
to silence it.
Impossible
to silence it.
It weeps monotonously
as water weeps
as the wind weeps
over snowfields.
Impossible
to silence it.
It weeps for distant
things.
Hot southern sands
yearning for white camellias.
Weeps arrow without target
evening without morning
and the first dead bird
on the branch.
Oh, guitar!
Heart mortally wounded
by five swords.


:Federico Garcia Lorca

Ah! Sunflower

Ah Sun-flower! weary of time,
Who countest the steps of the Sun:
Seeking after that sweet golden clime
Where the travellers journey is done.

Where the Youth pined away with desire,
And the pale virgin shrouded in snow:
Arise from their graves and aspire,
Where my Sun-flower wishes to go.

William Blake



[link to www.youtube.com]


Sunflower

Till the slow daylight pale,
A willing slave, fast bound to one above,
I wait; he seems to speed, and change, and fail;
I know he will not move.

I lift my golden orb
To his, unsmitten when the roses die,
And in my broad and burning disk absorb
The splendours of his eye.

His eye is like a clear
Keen flame that searches through me: I must droop
Upon my stalk, I cannot reach his sphere;
To mine he cannot stoop.

I win not my desire,
And yet I fail not of my guerdon; lo!
A thousand flickering darts and tongues of fire
Around me spread and glow.

All rayed and crowned, I miss
No queenly state until the summer wane,
The hours flit by; none knoweth of my bliss,
And none has guessed my pain.


I follow one above,
I track the shadow of his steps, I grow
Most like to him I love
Of all that shines below

~ Dora Greenwell

The heart that has truly loved never forgets,
But as truly loves on to the close,
As the sunflower turns on her god when he sets
The same look which she turned when he rose!
~Thomas Moore


[link to www.youtube.com]

I love you as intimately as a lover
or perhaps as a dear dear brother,
and I don’t have to ever touch your face
for you to hold that infinite space.

:siteless

Earnest heart that trembles n aches,
rejoice in harping song n ring to heavens nothing of whispers;
but true proclamations high,
hear echoes back in foreign voice,
loud and sweet and wanted, pulled like breath to breast, and
rest in eternal comfort of unbound discoveries never lost again.

for
to watch you reach heavens shore, I would leave you ever more,
for you to take deserved lovers arms, i’d let my heart fall to harms
for ways of savoured delight dear renaissance,
for me to see you smile would be fair trade.

There is Another Sky
by Emily Dickinson


There is another sky,
Ever serene and fair,
And there is another sunshine,
Though it be darkness there;
Never mind faded forests, Austin,
Never mind silent fields -
Here is a little forest,
Whose leaf is ever green;
Here is a brighter garden,
Where not a frost has been;
In its unfading flowers
I hear the bright bee hum:
Prithee, my brother,
Into my garden come!

------------------------

"Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark, in the hopeless swamps of the approximate, the not-quite, the not-yet, the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish, in lonely frustration for the life you deserved, but have never been able to reach. Check your road and the nature of your battle.

The world you desired can be won. It exists, it is real, it is possible, it is yours."


-Ayn Rand




[link to www.youtube.com]



Things can be--
and their Being is grounded
in Nothing's ability to noth.

--Kenneth Burke
Language as Symbolic Action


-----------------------

I am a poet.
I walk like one.
I talk like one.
So it must be.
There is something sad in the knowing.
I am a poet. I walk like one.
I talk like one. So it must be.
I am all of these things.
And I don't want to write about
It anymore.


-- Gillian Rush --

There are two ways to live: you can live as if nothing is a miracle; you can live as if everything is a miracle.

-Albert Einstein

When I began to write, I wrote partly to put this life in order, partly because I was too shy to speak. I was silent and the poems spoke first. I was ignorant and the poems educated me. When I realized people were going to read the poems, I thought of the best way to use words, how great was my responsibility to transmit words, ideas, and acts by which we could live with liberation, love, self-respect, good humor, and joy.

From "The Two Lives" by Linda Hogan

-------------

A very small degree of hope is sufficient to cause the birth of love.

-Henri B. Stendhal

----------------------

Nothing is miserable unless you make it so.

-Boethius

------------------------------

A loving heart is the beginning of all knowledge.

-Thomas Carlyle


-------------------------------------------

You will find as you look back upon your life that the moments when you have truly lived are the moments when you have done things in the spirit of love.

-Henry Drummond


[link to www.youtube.com]

Water


A raindrop fell on my hand,
crafted from the Ganges and the Nile,

from the ascended frost of a seal's whiskers,
from water in broken pots in the cities of Ys and Tyre.

On my index finger
the Caspian Sea isn't landlocked,

and the Pacific flows meekly into the Rudava,
the one that flew in a cloud over Paris

in seventeen sixty four
on the seventh of May at three in the morning.

There are not enough lips to pronounce
your transient names, O water.

I would have to say them in every language
pronouncing all the vowels at once,

at the same time keeping silent�for the sake of a lake
that waited in vain for a name,

and is no longer on earth�as it is in the heavens,
whose stars are no longer reflected in it.

Someone was drowning; someone dying
called out for you. That was long ago and yesterday.

You extinguished houses; you carried them off
like trees, forests like cities.

You were in baptismal fonts and in the bathtubs of courtesans,
in kisses, in shrouds.

Eating away at stones, fueling rainbows.
In the sweat and dew of pyramids and lilacs.

How light all this is in the raindrop.
How delicately the world touches me.

Whenever wherever whatever has happened
is written on the water of Babel.


-Wislawa Szymborska

---------------------

The Earth is closing on us
pushing us through the last passage
and we tear off our limbs to pass through.
The Earth is squeezing us.
I wish we were its wheat
so we could die and live again.
I wish the Earth was our mother
so she'd be kind to us.

I wish we were pictures on the rocks
for our dreams to carry as mirrors.
We saw the faces of those who will throw
our children out of the window of this last space.
Our star will hang up mirrors.
Where should we go after the last frontiers?
Where should the birds fly after the last sky?
Where should the plants sleep after the last breath of air?
We will write our names with scarlet steam.
We will cut off the hand of the song to be finished by our flesh.
We will die here, here in the last passage.
Here and here our blood will plant its olive tree.


-Mahmoud Darwish

Self-Pity
by D.H. Lawrence

I never saw a wild thing
feel sorry for itself.
A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough
without ever having felt sorry for itself.
--------------

It will have sung and ruffled and chirped into eternum.

There are many things in life that will catch your eye,
but only a few will catch your heart...Pursue those
:Unknown



I don't know what it is about you that closes and opens, only something in
me understands the voice in your eyes is deeper than all roses....e.e. cummings





This is the precious present, regardless of what yesterday
was like, regardless of what tomorrow may bring. When your
inner eyes open, you can find immense beauty hidden within the
inconsequential details of daily life. When your inner ears open,
you can hear the subtle, lovely music of the universe everywhere
you go. When the heart of your heart opens, you can take deep
pleasure in the company of the people around you -- family, friends,
acquaintances, or strangers -- including those whose characters are
less than perfect, just as your character is less than perfect. When you
are open to the beauty, mystery, and grandeur of ordinary existence,
you "get it" that it always has been beautiful, mysterious,
and grand and always will be. This is the precious present....Timothy Ray Miller.

Overblown Roses
:Mimi Khalvati:


She held one up, twirling it in her hand
as if to show me how the world began
and ended in perfection. I was stunned.
How could she make a rose so woebegone,
couldn't silk stand stiff? And how could a child,
otherwise convinced of her mother's taste,
know what to think? It's overblown, she smiled,
I love roses when they're past their best.

"Overblown roses" the words rang in my head,
making sense as I suddenly saw afresh
the rose now, the rose ahead: where a petal
clings to a last breath; where my mother's flesh
and mine, going the same way, may still
be seen as beautiful, if these words are said


[link to www.youtube.com]

[link to www.youtube.com]


Entrance Of The Rivers


Beloved of the rivers,beset
By azure water and transparent drops,
Like a tree of veins your spectre
Of dark goddess biting apples:
And then awakening naked
To be tattoed by the rivers,
And in the wet heights your head
Filled the world with new dew.

Water rose to your waist,
You are made of wellsprings
And lakes shone on your forehead.
From your sources of density you drew
Water like vital tears
And hauled the riverbeds to the sand
Across the planetary night,
Crossing rough, dilated stone,
Breaking down on the way
All the salt of geology,
Cutting through forests of compact walls
Dislodging the muscles of quartz.

Pablo Neruda

[link to www.youtube.com]

Gautama Christ

The names of God and especially those of his representative
who is called Jesus or Christ according to holy books and
someone's mouth
these names have been used, worn out and left
on the shores of rivers of, of human lives
like the empty shells of a mollusk.
However when we touch these sacred but exhausted
names, these wounded scattered petals
which have come out of the oceans of love and fear
something still remains, a sip of water,
a rainbow footprint that still shimmers in the light.
While the names of God were used
by the best and the worst, by the clean and the dirty
by the white and the black, by bloody murderers
and by victims flaming gold with napalm
while Nixon with his hands
of Cain blessed those whom he condemned to death,
while fewer and fewer divine footprints were found
on the beach
people began to study colors,
the future of honey, the sign of uranium
they looked with anxiety and hope for the possibilities
of killing themselves or not killing themselves, of organizing
themselves into a fabric
of going further on, of breaking through limits without stopping.

What we came across in these blood thirsty times
with their smoke of burning trash, their dead ashes
as we weren't able to stop looking
we often stopped to look at the names of God.
We lifted them with tenderness because they reminded us
of our ancestors, of the first people, those who said the prayers;
those who discovered the hymn that united them in misfortune,
and now seeing the empty fragments which sheltered those
ancient people
we feel those smooth substances,
worn out and used up by good and by evil.

:Pablo Neruda (1904-1973)

[link to www.youtube.com]


Sonnet XVII: I do not love you as if you were brine-rose, topaz

I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz,
or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that never blooms
but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;
thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance,
risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.
I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;
so I love you because I know no other way

than this: where I does not exist, nor you,
so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,
so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.

:Pablo Neruda

The sun
Won a beauty contest and became a jewel
Set upon God’s right hand.

The earth agreed to be a toe ring on the
Beloved’s foot
And has never regretted its decision.

The mountains got tired
Of sitting amongst a sleeping audience

And are now stretching their arms
Toward the Roof.

The clouds gave my soul an idea
So I pawned my gills
And rose like a winged diamond

Ever trying to be near
More love, more love
Like you.

The Mountain got tired of sitting
Amongst a snoring crowd inside of me
And rose like a rip sun
Into my eye.

My soul gave my heart a brilliant idea
So Hafiz is rising like a
Winged diamond.


Hafiz - “The Gift” – translation by Daniel Ladinsky




Worn-out garments are shed by the body,
worn-out bodies are shed by the dweller within the body,
new bodies are donned by the dweller, like garments.

Not wounded by weapons, not burned by fire,
not dried by the wind, not wetted by water,
such is the one.

Not dried, not wetted, not burned, not wounded,
innermost essence, everywhere, always,
being of beings, changeless, eternal, for ever and ever.

Bhagavad-Gita 2:22

"Tell me one last thing," said Harry. "Is this real? Or has this been happening inside my head?"
Dumbledore beamed at him, and his voice sounded loud and strong in Harry's ears even though the bright mist was descending again, obscuring his figure.
"Of course it is happening inside your head Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?" {J. K. Rowling}

Once beneath the soft weight of kiss she shivered and the earth quivered gentle.


[link to www.youtube.com]

Once beneath the soft weight of kiss she shivered and the airs breath quivered with warmth.


[link to www.youtube.com]

Once beneath the soft weight of kiss she quivered while autumn blushed.

^^^^ [youtube] [link to www.youtube.com] ^^^^

hear listening to the night and the morning rushing up to dawn on us that sleep is scares and the week may be fierce, but not as fierce as...


Love

[link to www.youtube.com]

Out here nothin' changes
Not in a hurry anyway
You can feel the endlessness
With the comin' of the light ‘o day
You're talkin' bout a chosen place
You wanna sell it in a marketplace
Well
Well just a minute now

You're standin' on
Solid rock
Standin' on sacred ground
Livin' on borrowed time
And the winds of change
Are blowin' down the line

Right down the line

Well round about the dawn of time
The Dreaming all began
A crowd of people came
Well they were lookin' for their promised land
We're runnin' from the heart of darkness
Searchin' for the heart of light
It was their paradise...............

there is no way back over yesterdays sleeps.

You said “Hi!”

I said “Yes?”

You asked “What is your name?”

I asked, “But why?”

I felt so stupid...

I will forget you someday



[link to www.youtube.com]

To a Dandelion.

Blessings on thy sunny face,
In my heart thou hast a place,
Humble Dandelion!
Forms more lovely are around thee,
Purple violets surround thee,--
But I know thy honest heart
Never felt a moment's smart
At another's good or beauty,--
Ever at thy post of duty,
Smiling on the great and small,
Rich and poor, and wishing all
Health, and happiness, and pleasure,
Oh, thou art a golden treasure!

I remember years ago,
How I longed to see thee blow,
Humble Dandelion!
Through the meadows I would wander,
O'er the verdant pastures yonder,
Filling hands and filling lap,
Till the teacher's rap, rap, rap,
Sounding on the window sash
Dreadful as a thunder crash,
Galled me from my world ideal
To a world how sad and real,--
From a laughing sky and brook
To a dull old spelling-book;
Then with treasures hid securely,
To my seat I crept demurely.

Childhood's careless days are o'er,
Happy school days come no more,
Humble Dandelion!
Through a desert I am walking,
Hope eluding, pleasure mocking,
Every earthly fountain dry,
Yet when thou didst meet mine eye,
Something like a beam of gladness
Did illuminate my sadness,
And I hail thee as a friend
Come a holiday to spend
By the couch of pain and anguish.
Where I suffer, moan and languish.

When at length I sink to rest,
And the turf is on my breast,
Humble Dandelion!
Wilt thou when the morning breaketh,
And the balmy spring awaketh,
Bud and blossom at a breath
From the icy arms of death,
Wilt thou smile upon my tomb?
Drawing beauty from the gloom,
Making life less dark and weary,
Making death itself less dreary,
Whispering in a gentle tone
To the mourner sad and lone,
Of a spring-time when the sleeper
Will arise to bless the weeper?


My Father made this beautiful world and gave me a heart to love his works. Oh, may I love Him better than all created things!


The little plat of ground around our house is a great field of instruction and amusement to me. How little do I comprehend of all contained within it! I am glad I was not born in some great city--
where Nature had not been so kind and dear a friend.

Source: "Canadian Wild Flowers," by Helen M. Johnson.

And there beyond the pillowy fray of night the room became star light and the birds sang. The morning sees these nails stain orange squeezing juice and the roof stain orange for another two pieces of burnt raisin toast.... :siteless.



[link to www.youtube.com]

"Dreams of Heart"

Dreams of heart and mind pass,
Nothing stays with me too long,
But I have had music from a child
Within the deep solace of song;

If that should ever leave me,
Let me find death and stay
With tunes played out forgotten
Like the rain of yesterday.

When out of the night I heard,
Like the raging of the sea,
This hushed and terrible sob
Given out by all humanity.

Then I thought, " who am I
To scorn God to his face?
I will bow my head and stay
And suffer with my race."

Sara Teasdale