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.

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

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