Baudelaire

L'invitation au voyage

Mon enfant, ma soeur,
Songe à la douceur
D'aller là-bas vivre ensemble!
Aimer à loisir,
Aimer et mourir
Au pays qui te ressemble!
Les soleils mouillés
De ces ciels brouillés
Pour mon esprit ont les charmes
Si mystérieux
De tes traîtres yeux,
Brillant à travers leurs larmes.
Là, tout n'est qu'ordre et beauté,
Luxe, calme et volupté.
Des meubles luisants,
Polis par les ans,
Décoreraient notre chambre;
Les plus rares fleurs
Mêlant leurs odeurs
Aux vagues senteurs de l'ambre,
Les riches plafonds,
Les miroirs profonds,
La splendeur orientale,
Tout y parlerait
À l'âme en secret
Sa douce langue natale.
Là, tout n'est qu'ordre et beauté,
Luxe, calme et volupté.
Vois sur ces canaux
Dormir ces vaisseaux
Dont l'humeur est vagabonde;
C'est pour assouvir
Ton moindre désir
Qu'ils viennent du bout du monde.
— Les soleils couchants
Revêtent les champs,
Les canaux, la ville entière,
D'hyacinthe et d'or;
Le monde s'endort
Dans une chaude lumière.
Là, tout n'est qu'ordre et beauté,
Luxe, calme et volupté.

— Charles Baudelaire

Rilke The Archaic Torso of Apollo

We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.

Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Stephen Mitchell, found here

Rumi

Today, like every other day, we wake up empty
and frightened. Don't open the door to the study
and begin reading. Take down a musical instrument.

Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundred of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

from The Essential Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks

John Siddique

I discovered John Siddique's poetry in mid-2010 with his fourth collection Recital, An Anthology (Salt Publishing 2009).

I must admit that a major drawcard (at first) by his use of a Genesis lyric as a poem title, but then I was drawn into his world of gentle observation and commentary and found that reading his poems felt like reading his heart. 

You've got to get in to get out
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 bleeping as it reverses, builders
swearing into the distance you put by pulling into
yourself. It sounds like they are calling your name.

Keats and Shelley

On Saturday we went to Keats-Shelley House to hear English actor Julian Sands read from KSH's own edition of Keats' and Shelley's poems (for which he also wrote the preface, and was kind enough to sign after the perfomance).

KSH is a tiny museum right next to the Spanish Steps, where Keats lived and died in 1821. The museum has beautifully preserved the house as it was in Keats' time, including the small bedroom and bed where he died of tuberculosis.

Julian Sands gave a wonderful performance, informal and friendly, infused with his enthusiasm for Keats and Shelley's work and sensitive to the nuances of language and meaning. I love reading poetry, but 'On First looking into Chapman's Homer', 'Ozymandias', 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' and 'To a Skylark' are almost over-familiar to those of us who studied literature in the 20th century, and my tastes have moved on to other writers, in and outside the canon. But hearing someone read these poems with passion and understanding and vigour was almost like hearing them for the first time, but with a delicious layer of knowing, and remembering what is was like to discover them as a teenager.

The last poem of the Keats section of the program was one I hadn't seen before - his last poem, a fragment written in the margins of a manuscript, short, unfinished but full of potent images of mortality and contradictions- is it chilling and/or comforting?

This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb,
So haunt thy days and chilly thy dreaming nights
That thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood
So in my veins red life might stream again,
And thou be conscience-calmed—see here it is—
I hold it towards you.

the first words

how odd to find myself going back to blogger, to blogging. But this will be a kind of chapbook - mainly of poems and scraps of writing that I like and want to keep in one place, so I don't have to trawl through my old blog, or worse, Fb to find that piece that connected to my heart.

And the first poem for this blog is one that I had to find by searching back through my old blog, textileseahorse, by one of my favourite poets - Rainer Maria Rilke.  

There is total silence. Upright in overgrown
paths stands the scent of bygone colour.
The sky holds back a long hard rain
The leaves climb stairways through the air.
                                                          Rainer Maria Rilke
from The Inner Sky poems, notes dreams by Rainer Maria Rilke translated by Damion Searls Godine NY 2010