Penone

"all sculpture is rooted in the experience of our body as the primary positive volume which imprints itself on the Negative of its surroundings"
Giuseppe Penone Spazio di Luce p31

Rilke

I. We are right at the start, do you see.

As though before everything. With

a thousand and one dreams behind us and

no act.

II I can imagine no knowledge holier

than this:

that you must become a beginner.

Someone who writes the first word after a 

centuries-long

dash. 

Rainer Maria Rilke 
From Notes on the Melody of Things

Enheduanna

Temple Hymn 26
The Zabalam Temple Of Inanna

O house   wrapped in beams of light
wearing shining stone jewels   wakening great awe

sanctuary of pure Inanna
    (where) divine powers the true me spread wide

    Zabalam
               shrine of the shining mountain
    shrine that welcomes the morning light
    she makes resound with desire

the Holy Woman grounds your hallowed chamber
    with desire

    your queen  Inanna of the sheepfold
    that singular woman
    the unique one

who speaks hateful words to the wicked
    who moves among the bright shining things
    who goes against rebel lands

and at twilight makes the firmament beautiful
    all on her own

    great daughter of Suen
    pure Inanna

O house of Zabalam
    has built this house on your radiant site
    and placed her seat upon your dais.

Enheduanna (2285-2250) was an Akkadian/Sumerian poet, high priestess of the main temple of Ur and daughter of Sargon the Great. She was also the first recorded author: not female author, the first recorded author in history. She created the genres, patterns and paradigms for poetry, psalms and prayers that have been used for millennia echoing through Homer, the Bible, church liturgies and hymns.

The photo is a detail of my work, Creator Spirit.

Caitriona O'Reilly

Clotho

after Camille Claudel
And in the end it was easiest to let go
of all that vigilance, the endless distaff-to-spindle rigour
of your compulsions, and allow the silks to snarl.
For a while, perhaps, you struggled to escape,
snared like an insect in your own allurements.
You had never believed that life was what happened to us.
Rather it was to strike sparks from stone repeatedly,
smoothing the planes with a morsel of bone
until your own eyes glittered in the veined torso. For here there is no place that does not see you . . .
You were a wilful girl, and wilful girls must learn
that to haul life from matter is a god’s concern.
And always there was something there you could not reach:
it flickered below the surface of the marble
like a candle behind a grimed window,
mocking your eager questions like an echo.

 from Geis (2015)

Neruda

Fredegond Shove

Revelation

Near as my hand

The transformation: (time to understand

Is long but never far,

As things desired are)

No iceberg floating at the pole; no mark

Of glittering, perfect consciousness, nor dark

And mystic root of riddles; death nor birth,

Except of heart, when flesh is changed from earth

To heaven involved in it: not at all strange,

Not set beyond the common, human range;

Possible in the steep, quotidian stream,

Possible in a dream;

Achieved when all the energies are still –

Especially the will.

Published in “Daybreak” Hogarth Press 1922

Julio Cortazar

THE HAPPY CHILD

That flash of happiness
twists in the air and settles
lightly on your hair like a petal
along with the breeze’s bees

Out of this airy happiness flows
the beauty where you go dancing
oh girl blind to the stirring
wings of a black rose

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