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

Imtiaz Dharker

Women Bathing

All our lives, in every city, 
out of every landscape
the waters of the Alhambra
have been murmuring to us.
From fountains, from watercourses,
from the secret pools in courtyards,
voices calling across centuries.

The other women are bathing
in the moonlight.

‘Come,’ they say, ‘Come out of the day’s heat,
out of shaded rooms, let’s escape and slip away,
let the veils fall, one by one.
Slide into the pools that lie like mirrors of the sky,
and let the moon wash over our bodies.’

Bodies lush, generously-hipped.
Bodies like pomegranates,
bursting with promises.

 from The Terrorist At My Table (Tarset: Bloodaxe, 2006)

Louise Bogan

Leave-Taking

I do not know where either of us can turn

Just at first, waking from the sleep of each other.

I do not know how we can bear

The river struck by the gold plummet of the moon,

Or many trees shaken together in the darkness.

We shall wish not to be alone

And that love were not dispersed and set free—

Though you defeat me,

And I be heavy upon you.

But like earth heaped over the heart

Is love grown perfect.

Like a shell over the beat of life

Is love perfect to the last.

So let it be the same

Whether we turn to the dark or to the kiss of another;

Let us know this for leavetaking,

That I may not be heavy upon you,

That you may blind me no more.

Originally published in Poetry, August 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

Tennyson

Tennyson's poetry is not popular nowadays, but I am a bit of a fan of things Victorian - as well as Tennyson, I like William Morris, the Pre-Raphaelites and Julia Margaret Cameron, but Tennyson is almost the archetypal Victorian with his literary career spanning much of the nineteenth century. So far, so bourgeois! 

Published in Tennyson's Poems, Chiefly Lyrical in 1830 Mariana is not strictly speaking a Victorian poem. For context, in 1830 Coleridge and Wordsworth were still alive but Keats, Shelley and Byron had all flamed into fame and died during the previous decade. Victoria herself wouldn't come to the throne for another seven years, and the other Behemoths of Victorian literature (Dickens, Thackeray, the Brontes) were in the future.  For me there are echoes of Donne's Nocturnal Upon St Lucy's Day  - another poem full of lost love, cold and darkness.

It is often linked to Millais painting of the same name (painted in 1851), which certainly conveys the ennui of Tennyson's Mariana, but I think the feel of the poem is much more like some of the works by Samuel Palmer, like this one held in Tate Britain, an ink and gouache on card made around the same time. The world is monochromatic, darkening, the mood is solitary and wistful.

Samuel Palmer, Landscape Girl Standing, c1826 

©Tate Photo ©Tate CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 (Unported)

Mariana in the Moated Grange

With blackest moss the flower-plots

Were thickly crusted, one and all:

The rusted nails fell from the knots

That held the pear to the gable-wall.

The broken sheds look'd sad and strange:

Unlifted was the clinking latch;

Weeded and worn the ancient thatch

Upon the lonely moated grange.

She only said, "My life is dreary,

He cometh not," she said;

She said, "I am aweary, aweary,

I would that I were dead!"

Her tears fell with the dews at even;

Her tears fell ere the dews were dried;

She could not look on the sweet heaven,

Either at morn or eventide.

After the flitting of the bats,

When thickest dark did trance the sky,

She drew her casement-curtain by,

And glanced athwart the glooming flats.

She only said, "The night is dreary,

He cometh not," she said;

She said, "I am aweary, aweary,

I would that I were dead!"

Upon the middle of the night,

Waking she heard the night-fowl crow:

The cock sung out an hour ere light:

From the dark fen the oxen's low

Came to her: without hope of change,

In sleep she seem'd to walk forlorn,

Till cold winds woke the gray-eyed morn

About the lonely moated grange.

She only said, "The day is dreary,

He cometh not," she said;

She said, "I am aweary, aweary,

I would that I were dead!"

About a stone-cast from the wall

A sluice with blacken'd waters slept,

And o'er it many, round and small,

The cluster'd marish-mosses crept.

Hard by a poplar shook alway,

All silver-green with gnarled bark:

For leagues no other tree did mark

The level waste, the rounding gray.

She only said, "My life is dreary,

He cometh not," she said;

She said "I am aweary, aweary

I would that I were dead!"

All day within the dreamy house,

The doors upon their hinges creak'd;

The blue fly sung in the pane; the mouse

Behind the mouldering wainscot shriek'd,

Or from the crevice peer'd about.

Old faces glimmer'd thro' the doors

Old footsteps trod the upper floors,

Old voices called her from without.

She only said, "My life is dreary,

He cometh not," she said;

She said, "I am aweary, aweary,

I would that I were dead!"

The sparrow's chirrup on the roof,

The slow clock ticking, and the sound

Which to the wooing wind aloof

The poplar made, did all confound

Her sense; but most she loathed the hour

When the thick-moted sunbeam lay

Athwart the chambers, and the day

Was sloping toward his western bower.

Then said she, "I am very dreary,

He will not come," she said;

She wept, "I am aweary, aweary,

Oh God, that I were dead!"

Neruda

Sonnet XVII
I don't love you as if you were the salt-rose, topaz
or arrow of carnations that propagate fire:
I love you as certain dark things are loved,
secretly, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that doesn't bloom and carries
hidden within itself the light of those flowers,
and thanks to your love, darkly in my body
lives the dense fragrance that rises from the earth.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where,
I love you simply, without problems or pride:
I love you in this way because I don't know any other way of loving

but this, in which there is no I or you,
so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand,
so intimate that when I fall asleep it is your eyes that close.

Pablo Neruda (translated by Stephen Mitchell)

HD

Eurydice

I

So you have swept me back,

I who could have walked with the live souls

above the earth,

I who could have slept among the live flowers

at last;

so for your arrogance

and your ruthlessness

I am swept back

where dead lichens drip

dead cinders upon moss of ash;

so for your arrogance

I am broken at last,

I who had lived unconscious,

who was almost forgot;

if you had let me wait

I had grown from listlessness

into peace,

if you had let me rest with the dead,

I had forgot you

and the past.

II

Here only flame upon flame

and black among the red sparks,

streaks of black and light

grown colourless;

why did you turn back,

that hell should be reinhabited

of myself thus

swept into nothingness?

why did you glance back?

why did you hesitate for that moment?

why did you bend your face

caught with the flame of the upper earth,

above my face?

what was it that crossed my face

with the light from yours

and your glance?

what was it you saw in my face?

the light of your own face,

the fire of your own presence?

What had my face to offer

but reflex of the earth,

hyacinth colour

caught from the raw fissure in the rock

where the light struck,

and the colour of azure crocuses

and the bright surface of gold crocuses

and of the wind-flower,

swift in its veins as lightning

and as white.

                               III

Saffron from the fringe of the earth,

wild saffron that has bent

over the sharp edge of earth,

all the flowers that cut through the earth,

all, all the flowers are lost;

everything is lost,

everything is crossed with black,

black upon black

and worse than black,

this colourless light.

                               IV

Fringe upon fringe

of blue crocuses,

crocuses, walled against blue of themselves,

blue of that upper earth,

blue of the depth upon depth of flowers,

lost;

flowers,

if I could have taken once my breath of them,

enough of them,

more than earth,

even than of the upper earth,

had passed with me

beneath the earth;

if I could have caught up from the earth,

the whole of the flowers of the earth,

if once I could have breathed into myself

the very golden crocuses

and the red,

and the very golden hearts of the first saffron,

the whole of the golden mass,

the whole of the great fragrance,

I could have dared the loss.

                              V

So for your arrogance

and your ruthlessness

I have lost the earth   

and the flowers of the earth,

and the live souls above the earth,

and you who passed across the light

and reached

ruthless;

you who have your own light,

who are to yourself a presence,

who need no presence;

yet for all your arrogance

and your glance,

I tell you this:

such loss is no loss,

such terror, such coils and strands and pitfalls

of blackness,

such terror

is no loss; 

hell is no worse than your earth

above the earth,

hell is no worse,

no, nor your flowers

nor your veins of light

nor your presence,

a loss;

my hell is no worse than yours

though you pass among the flowers and speak

with the spirits above earth.

                               VI

Against the black

I have more fervour

than you in all the splendour of that place,

against the blackness

and the stark grey

I have more light;

and the flowers,

if I should tell you,

you would turn from your own fit paths

toward hell,

turn again and glance back

and I would sink into a place

even more terrible than this.

                              VII

At least I have the flowers of myself,

and my thoughts, no god

can take that;

I have the fervour of myself for a presence

and my own spirit for light;

and my spirit with its loss

knows this;

though small against the black,

small against the formless rocks,

hell must break before I am lost;

before I am lost,

hell must open like a red rose

for the dead to pass.

Julio Cortazar

Autumn Summary

 

In evening’s dome each bird is a point of memory.
It’s amazing sometimes how the year's fervor
returns, returns without a body, returns for no reason at all,
how beauty, so brief in its violent love,
saves us an echo as night falls.

And so, what can you do but stand there slack-armed,
your heart overloaded and that taste of dust
that was a rose or a road—
Flight outflies the wing.
Without humility you know this remnant
was wrung from the dark by the work of silence?
that the branch in your hand, the dark tear
are your inheritance, the man with his story,
the lamp shining its light.

Rabindranath Tagore

because today is a special day, and because I love and am loved.

I seem to have loved you in numberless forms, numberless times…
In life after life, in age after age, forever.
My spellbound heart has made and remade the necklace of songs,
That you take as a gift, wear round your neck in your many forms,
In life after life, in age after age, forever.

Whenever I hear old chronicles of love, it's age-old pain,
It's ancient tale of being apart or together.
As I stare on and on into the past, in the end you emerge,
Clad in the light of a pole-star piercing the darkness of time:
You become an image of what is remembered forever.

You and I have floated here on the stream that brings from the fount.
At the heart of time, love of one for another.
We have played along side millions of lovers, shared in the same
Shy sweetness of meeting, the same distressful tears of farewell-
Old love but in shapes that renew and renew forever.

Today it is heaped at your feet, it has found its end in you
The love of all man’s days both past and forever:
Universal joy, universal sorrow, universal life.
The memories of all loves merging with this one love of ours –
And the songs of every poet past and forever.

 Rabindranath Tagore

Blake - A Poison Tree

A Poison Tree 

I was angry with my friend; 

I told my wrath, my wrath did end.

I was angry with my foe: 

I told it not, my wrath did grow. 

And I waterd it in fears,

Night & morning with my tears: 

And I sunned it with smiles,

And with soft deceitful wiles. 

And it grew both day and night. 

Till it bore an apple bright. 

And my foe beheld it shine,

And he knew that it was mine. 

And into my garden stole, 

When the night had veild the pole; 

In the morning glad I see; 

My foe outstretched beneath the tree.
William Blake  

Blake is one of my favourite artists - a mystic, a visionary, precise, a wild thinker, a Kipling's cat. I first came across A Poison Tree when I was at school: at seventeen I enjoyed its rhythms, cleverness and glee. But it spoke to me in a different way decades later when I was living a life riven by jealousy, betrayal, anger and despair. And I felt completely powerless.

I hated the corrosive bite of jealousy, hated the weakness, knew I was in the wrong and resented it. My salvation, always but especially then, was art. The colours of my life then were the bilious green of jealousy, the red of passion and anger, the purple of grief for what I had lost, and the black of despair. I put them all into this textile piece, inspired by Blake and by George Eliot who wrote Anger and jealousy can no more bear to lose sight of their objects than love and One of the tortures of jealousy is that it can never turn its eyes away from the thing that pains it.

'Jealousy' is one a few cathartic pieces I made during that spiky time but it is my favourite. Every step of its creation released a different painful aspect of an impossible situation. And while it didn't, couldn't, change that situation it was my shouting into the tempest, my Medusa moment.

Felicity Griffin Clark 'Jealousy' (120x95cm)

full moon scraps

to add to this online chapbook, some visuals - my artwork, my photos, my past moons

John Siddique

Ivy Moon

At the end were only words.
The words survived our flesh.

The you said, let it be dark,
and it was dark,

and I said as long as there
are words we go on.

There is no separating out.
Speak in to the dark and it is good,

and we made a firm promise of
those words, there will be no division.

We took back the day and night.
Undid our concepts of heaven and hell.

Spun the day and the night back
into the clock.

Let us be dark, without image.
No longer trying to see what is good.

John Siddique Recital Salt Publishing 2009