Friday, February 22, 2019
moon
the moon still full at night, so beautiful shining from behind and between the clouds,
still snow in the garden, and this morning is foggy.
the full moon disturbs my sleep, gives my heart another rhythm, beats i don't know, makes my blood rise, my mind run and my dreams weird, and my troubled soul let me not sleep most of this night.
i woke shivering, trying to move, as if fixed with sticky tape around my arm,
and a woman crept softly in my bed, put her hand around my waist, who?
- when i turned nobody was there.
i got up out of my warm blanket, and for solace i ate bread with honey. it was good.
my house looks like a battlefield, dismantled furniture leaning on empty walls, boxes of books
taking so much space that it is hard finding a passage.
and still so much collected past in these rooms.
all i do not need, i try to find out, and i move it in the courtyard,
maybe somebody will take the burden
as a gift, but up to now even the space outside fills with the shame of possession.
how did i come to be so filled with things?
i was born naked, and i will die naked.
it is best to live naked. i try.
and i will move away far to live and to die, near the sea,
in another country where i have no name yet,
leaving things and definitions.
i go for listening, deep listening.
moon, you can go, you make me restless.
come again another time, you will.
still snow in the garden, and this morning is foggy.
the full moon disturbs my sleep, gives my heart another rhythm, beats i don't know, makes my blood rise, my mind run and my dreams weird, and my troubled soul let me not sleep most of this night.
i woke shivering, trying to move, as if fixed with sticky tape around my arm,
and a woman crept softly in my bed, put her hand around my waist, who?
- when i turned nobody was there.
i got up out of my warm blanket, and for solace i ate bread with honey. it was good.
my house looks like a battlefield, dismantled furniture leaning on empty walls, boxes of books
taking so much space that it is hard finding a passage.
and still so much collected past in these rooms.
all i do not need, i try to find out, and i move it in the courtyard,
maybe somebody will take the burden
as a gift, but up to now even the space outside fills with the shame of possession.
how did i come to be so filled with things?
i was born naked, and i will die naked.
it is best to live naked. i try.
and i will move away far to live and to die, near the sea,
in another country where i have no name yet,
leaving things and definitions.
i go for listening, deep listening.
moon, you can go, you make me restless.
come again another time, you will.
Sad moon-lit night, Sakutaro Hagiwara
Drat that snatch-thief dog,
He howls at the moon from the rotting pier.
When the soul pricks up its ears,
It hears the shrill girls choiring,
Choiring
With their gloomy voices,
By the somber stone wall out at the pier.
Why is it always this way
with me?
Listen, you dog, you.
Tell me, you pale-blue, unhappy dog, you.
He howls at the moon from the rotting pier.
When the soul pricks up its ears,
It hears the shrill girls choiring,
Choiring
With their gloomy voices,
By the somber stone wall out at the pier.
Why is it always this way
with me?
Listen, you dog, you.
Tell me, you pale-blue, unhappy dog, you.
Turtle, Hagiwara Sakutaro
Turtle
There is a forest,
there is a marsh,
there is the azure,
on a man’ hand, feeling weight,
quietly a pure gold turtle sleeps,
bearing with the pain,
of this gleaming, lonely nature,
into a man’s soul gropingly it goes down,
into the depths of the azure the turtle goes down.
Memorial Day for the War Dead, Yehuda Amichai
Memorial Day for the War Dead
Memorial day for the war dead. Add now
the grief of all your losses to their grief,
even of a woman that has left you. Mix
sorrow with sorrow, like time-saving history,
which stacks holiday and sacrifice and mourning
on one day for easy, convenient memory.
Oh, sweet world soaked, like bread,
in sweet milk for the terrible toothless God.
“Behind all this some great happiness is hiding.”
No use to weep inside and to scream outside.
Behind all this perhaps some great happiness is hiding.
Memorial day. Bitter salt is dressed up
as a little girl with flowers.
The streets are cordoned off with ropes,
for the marching together of the living and the dead.
Children with a grief not their own march slowly,
like stepping over broken glass.
The flautist’s mouth will stay like that for many days.
A dead soldier swims above little heads
with the swimming movements of the dead,
with the ancient error the dead have
about the place of the living water.
A flag loses contact with reality and flies off.
A shopwindow is decorated with
dresses of beautiful women, in blue and white.
And everything in three languages:
Hebrew, Arabic, and Death.
A great and royal animal is dying
all through the night under the jasmine
tree with a constant stare at the world.
A man whose son died in the war walks in the street
like a woman with a dead embryo in her womb.
“Behind all this some great happiness is hiding.”
from "Amen", 1977
Wanting the moon, Denise Levertov
Not the moon. A flower
on the other side of the water.
The water sweeps past in flood,
dragging a whole tree by the hair,
a barn, a bridge. The flower
sings on the far bank.
Not a flower, a bird calling
hidden among the darkest trees, music
over the water, making a silence
out of the brown folds of the river's cloak.
The moon. No, a young man walking
under the trees. There are lanterns
among the leaves.
Tender, wise, merry,
his face is awake with its own light,
I see it across the water as if close up.
A jester. The music rings from his bells,
gravely, a tune of sorrow,
I dance to it on my riverbank.
on the other side of the water.
The water sweeps past in flood,
dragging a whole tree by the hair,
a barn, a bridge. The flower
sings on the far bank.
Not a flower, a bird calling
hidden among the darkest trees, music
over the water, making a silence
out of the brown folds of the river's cloak.
The moon. No, a young man walking
under the trees. There are lanterns
among the leaves.
Tender, wise, merry,
his face is awake with its own light,
I see it across the water as if close up.
A jester. The music rings from his bells,
gravely, a tune of sorrow,
I dance to it on my riverbank.
Alone and drinking under the moon, Li Po
Amongst the flowers I
am alone with my pot of wine
drinking by myself; then lifting
my cup I asked the moon
to drink with me, its reflection
and mine in the wine cup, just
the three of us; then I sigh
for the moon cannot drink,
and my shadow goes emptily along
with me never saying a word;
with no other friends here, I can
but use these two for company;
in the time of happiness, I
too must be happy with all
around me; I sit and sing
and it is as if the moon
accompanies me; then if I
dance, it is my shadow that
dances along with me; while
still not drunk, I am glad
to make the moon and my shadow
into friends, but then when
I have drunk too much, we
all part; yet these are
friends I can always count on
these who have no emotion
whatsoever; I hope that one day
we three will meet again,
deep in the Milky Way.
am alone with my pot of wine
drinking by myself; then lifting
my cup I asked the moon
to drink with me, its reflection
and mine in the wine cup, just
the three of us; then I sigh
for the moon cannot drink,
and my shadow goes emptily along
with me never saying a word;
with no other friends here, I can
but use these two for company;
in the time of happiness, I
too must be happy with all
around me; I sit and sing
and it is as if the moon
accompanies me; then if I
dance, it is my shadow that
dances along with me; while
still not drunk, I am glad
to make the moon and my shadow
into friends, but then when
I have drunk too much, we
all part; yet these are
friends I can always count on
these who have no emotion
whatsoever; I hope that one day
we three will meet again,
deep in the Milky Way.
Sad Steps, Philip Larkin
Sad Steps, Philip Larkin
Groping back to bed after a piss
I part thick curtains, and am startled by
The rapid clouds, the moon’s cleanliness.
Four o’clock: wedge-shadowed gardens lie
Under a cavernous, a wind-picked sky.
There’s something laughable about this,
The way the moon dashes through clouds that blow
Loosely as cannon-smoke to stand apart
(Stone-coloured light sharpening the roofs below)
High and preposterous and separate—
Lozenge of love! Medallion of art!
O wolves of memory! Immensements! No,
One shivers slightly, looking up there.
The hardness and the brightness and the plain
Far-reaching singleness of that wide stare
Is a reminder of the strength and pain
Of being young; that it can’t come again,
But is for others undiminished somewhere.
Anaïs Nin, On Writing, quotes, emotional experience
"In order to take action full maturity in experience is required. Novels which contribute to our emotional atrophy only deepen our blindness.And nothing that we do not discover emotionally will have the power to alter our vision.The constant evasion of emotional experience has created an immaturity which turns all experience into traumatic shocks from which the human being derives no strength or development, but neurosis."...
"This personal relationship to all things, which is condemned as subjective, limiting, I found to be the core of individuality, personality, and originality. The idea that subjectivity is an impasse is as false as the idea that objectivity leads to a larger form of life.
A deep personal relationship reaches far beyond the personal into the general. Again it is a matter of depths."
......................................................................................
"It is in the moments of emotional crisis that human beings reveal themselves most accurately. … The heightened moments … are the moments of revelation. It is the moment when the real self rises to the surface, shatters its false roles, erupts and assumes reality and identity. The fiery moments of passionate experience are the moments of wholeness and totality of the personality."
........................................................................................
"Naked truth is unbearable to most, and art is our most effective means of overcoming human resistance to truth. The writer has the same role as the surgeon and his handling of anaesthesia is as important as his skill with the knife.
Human beings, in their resistance to truth, erect fortresses and some of these fortresses can only be demolished by the dynamic power of the symbol, which reaches the emotions directly."
Phoenix
maybe i am too tired, maybe soon like one thousand years gone,
maybe i must make my fire.....a funeral pyre..
Phoenix, "Fénix' by Josignacio, Cuba :
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