Day 741: Lessons From the Sea

 

Pablo Neruda adored the sea. To him it was Muse, teacher, magic. This poem is taken from his sea poem collection 'On the Blue Shore of Silence' and ends our sea-themed month of July. 


The Sea - Pablo Neruda

I need the sea because it teaches me,
I don’t know if I learn music or awareness,
if it’s a single wave or its vast existence,
or only its harsh voice or its shining
suggestion of fishes and ships.
The fact is that until I fall asleep,
in some magnetic way I move in
the university of the waves.

It’s not simply the shells crunched
as if some shivering planet
were giving signs of its gradual death;
no, I reconstruct the day out of a fragment,
the stalactite from a sliver of salt,
and the great god out of a spoonful.

What it taught me before, I keep. It’s air
ceaseless wind, water and sand.

It seems a small thing for a young man,
to have come here to live with his own fire;
nevertheless, the pulse that rose
and fell in its abyss,
the cracking of the blue cold,
the gradual wearing away of the star,
the soft unfolding of the wave
squandering snow with its foam,
the quiet power out there, sure
as a stone shrine in the depths,
replaced my world in which were growing
stubborn sorrow, gathering oblivion,
and my life changed suddenly:
as I became part of its pure movement.

Day 740: Tiger, Tiger

 

Yesterday was Global Tiger Day, a day designated to raising awareness of the dwindling numbers of tigers now left in the wild. 

I thought it appropriate as such to post a poem about tigers. This one by Blake is perhaps the most famous. If you'd like to read more poems on tigers, or their part in fiction, I've just finished a blog on them with my favourite selections at: http://a-blog-of-ones-own.blogspot.ie/2014/07/tigers-in-red-weather_33.html

The Tyger - William Blake

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,.
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand, dare seize the fire?

And what shoulder, & what art.
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears,
And watered heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

Day 739: A Retrospect of Humidity

 

This time last week in Ireland we were basking (and sweating) in the sun. Well our annual blip of a heatwave has come and gone I think it's fair to say, and although temperatures only got up to the high twenties, the humidity was fierce. Nope, we don't miss it - or - do we? 

On that note, here's an Australian poet on surviving the hot humid summers of down under - which in fairness, make ours look a tad amateur. And just look at the language he uses - inventive and exuberant, with a 3D accuracy quality that is big and brash and impressively brilliant.

A Retrospect of Humidity - Les Murray

All the air conditioners now slacken
their hummed carrier wave. Once again
we've served our three months with remissions
in the steam and dry iron of this seaboard.
In jellied glare, through the nettle-rash season
we've watched the sky's fermenting laundry
portend downpours. Some came, and steamed away,
and we were clutched back into the rancid
saline midnights of orifice weather,
to damp grittiness and wiping off the air.

Metaphors slump irritably together in
the muggy weeks. Shark and jellyfish shallows
become suburbs where you breathe a fat towel;
babies burst like tomatoes with discomfort
in the cotton-wrapped pointing street markets;
the Lycra-bulging surf drips from non-swimmers
miles from shore, and somehow includes soil.
Skins, touching, soak each other. Skin touching
any surface wets that and itself
in a kind of mutual digestion.
Throbbing heads grow lianas of nonsense.

It's our annual visit to the latitudes
of rice, kerosene and resignation,
an averted, temporary visit
unrelated, for most, to the attitudes
of festive northbound jets gaining height -
closer, for some few, to the memory
of ulcers scraped with a tin spoon
or sweated faces bowing before dry
where the flesh is worn inside out,
all the hunger-organs clutched in rank nylon,
by those for whom exhaustion is spirit:

an intrusive, heart-narrowing season
at this far southern foot of the monsoon.
As the kleenex flower, the hibiscus
drops its browning wads, we forget
annually, as one forgets a sickness.
The stifling days will never come again,
not now that we've seen the first sweater
tugged down on the beauties of division
and inside the rain's millions, a risen
loaf of cat on a cool night verandah. 

Day 738: Fishing in the Susquehanna

 

Is Art merely artifice, an imitation of life, or something much more? I think Billy Collins answers that question here, in his characteristic subtle fashion. 

Fishing on the Susquehanna in July - Billy Collins

I have never been fishing on the Susquehanna

or on any river for that matter

to be perfectly honest.

Not in July or any month

have I had the pleasure — if it is a pleasure —

of fishing on the Susquehanna.

I am more likely to be found

in a quiet room like this one —

a painting of a woman on the wall,

a bowl of tangerines on the table —

trying to manufacture the sensation

of fishing on the Susquehanna.

There is little doubt

that others have been fishing

on the Susquehanna,

rowing upstream in a wooden boat,

sliding the oars under the water

then raising them to drip in the light.

But the nearest I have ever come to

fishing on the Susquehanna

was one afternoon in a museum in Philadelphia

when I balanced a little egg of time

in front of a painting

in which that river curled around a bend

under a blue cloud-ruffled sky,

dense trees along the banks,

and a fellow with a red bandanna

sitting in a small, green

flat-bottom boat

holding the thin whip of a pole.

That is something I am unlikely

ever to do, I remember

saying to myself and the person next to me.

Then I blinked and moved on

to other American scenes

of haystacks, water whitening over rocks,

even one of a brown hare

who seemed so wired with alertness

I imagined him springing right out of the frame.

Day 737: Terns for Thought

 'Don’t think just now of the trudging forward of thought,/But of the wing-drive of unquestioning affirmation...'

Sometimes I stumble across poems for here by serendipity. Today is such an example. I opened my Mary Oliver book to pick a poem for today and the first one I came to - 'Terns' - exactly fit with not only my seaside theme for this month, but also my random thoughts (and slight fascination) over the last few days about seagulls and seabirds - perfect! 

There is something quite hypnotic about watching seagulls at the beach - their swooping movements, their shrieking calls, their calm hovering or floating. Mary Oliver pins it perfectly here, as always. Each and every nature sight is a means of epiphany for her, and here the seagulls are messengers, affirmations of just being, not endlessly questioning, worrying.

I have the perfect song to go with today's poem too if you feel musically inclined - a new song from David Gray, 'Gulls', which is sublime. You can listen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iF-xx8mMWIo

Terns - Mary Oliver

Don't think just now of the trudging forward of thought,

but of the wing-drive of unquestioning affirmation.

It's summer, you never saw such a blue sky,

and here they are, those white birds with quick wings,

sweeping over the waves,

chattering and plunging,

their thin beaks snapping, their hard eyes

happy as little nails.

The years to come -- this is a promise --

will grant you ample time

to try the difficult steps in the empire of thought

where you seek for the shining proofs you think you must have.

But nothing you ever understand will be sweeter, or more binding,

than this deepest affinity between your eyes and the world.

The flock thickens

over the roiling, salt brightness.  Listen,

maybe such devotion, in which one holds the world

in the clasp of attention, isn't the perfect prayer,

but it must be close, for the sorrow, whose name is doubt,

is thus subdued, and not through the weaponry of reason,

but of pure submission.  Tell me, what else

could beauty be for?  And now the tide

is at its very crown,

the white birds sprinkle down,

gathering up the loose silver, rising

as if weightless.  It isn't instruction, or a parable.

It isn't for any vanity or ambition

except for the one allowed, to stay alive.

It's only a nimble frolic

over the waves.  And you find, for hours,

you cannot even remember the questions

that weigh so in your mind.

Day 736: Ebb Tide

Lyrical and lovely, Sara Teasdale:
 

Ebb Tide - Sara Teasdale 

When the long day goes by
 And I do not see your face,
The old wild, restless sorrow
 Steals from its hiding place.

My day is barren and broken,
 Bereft of light and song,
A sea beach bleak and windy
 That moans the whole day long.

To the empty beach at ebb tide,
 Bare with its rocks and scars,
Come back like the sea with singing,
 And light of a million stars. 

Day 735: Anything Can Happen

This poem is the equivalent of an action movie! Look at all the verbs of movement and brash nouns. The great gusto of things 'happening' is caught brilliantly here by Heaney.

Anything Can Happen - Seamus Heaney 

Anything can happen. You know how Jupiter
Will mostly wait for clouds to gather head
Before he hurls the lightning? Well, just now
He galloped his thunder cart and his horses

Across a clear blue sky. It shook the earth
And the clogged underearth, the River Styx,
The winding streams, the Atlantic shore itself.
Anything can happen, the tallest towers

Be overturned, those in high places daunted,
Those overlooked regarded. Stropped-beak Fortune
Swoops, making the air gasp, tearing the crest off one,
Setting it down bleeding on the next.

Ground gives. The heaven’s weight
Lifts up off Atlas like a kettle-lid.
Capstones shift, nothing resettles right.
Telluric ash and fire-spores boil away.

Day 734: Strawberrying

'...ripe/to bursting, they might be hearts...'

Some wonderful descriptions of the summer fruit here.  And one can't help but equate them all with the lushness of passion. 
 

Strawberrying - May Swenson

My hands are murder-red. Many a plump head
drops on the heap in the basket. Or, ripe
to bursting, they might be hearts, matching
the blackbirds's wing-fleck. Gripped to a reed
he shrieks his ko-ka-ree in the next field.
He's left his peck in some juicy cheeks, when
at first blush and mostly white, they showed
streaks of sweetness to the marauder.

We're picking near the shore, the morning
sunny, a slight wind moving rough-veined leaves
our hands rumple among. Fingers find by feel
the ready fruit in clusters. Here and there,
their squishy wounds....Flesh was perfect
yesterday....June was for gorging....
sweet hearts young and firm before decay.

"Take only the biggest and not too ripe,"
a mother calls to her girl and boy, barefoot
in the furrows. "Don't step on any. Don't
change rows. Don't eat too many." Mesmerized
by the largesse, the children squat and pull
and pick handfuls of rich scarlets, half
for the baskets, half for avid mouths.
Soon, whole faces are stained.

A crop this big begs for plunder. Ripeness
wants to be ravished, as udders of cow when hard,
the blue-veined bags distended, ache to be stripped.
Hunkered in mud between the rows, sun burning
the backs of our necks, we grope for, and rip loose
soft nippled heads. If they bleed—too soft—
let them stay. Let them rot in the heat.

When, hidden away in a damp hollow under moldy
leaves, I come upon a clump of heart-shapes
once red, now spiderspit-gray, intact but empty,
still attached to their dead stems—
families smothered as at Pompeii—I rise
and stretch. I eat one more big ripe lopped
head. Red-handed, I leave the field.

Day 733: Mermaid Love

Yeats is no doubt referencing his unrequited love for Maud Gonne here (who else?) But oh, doesn't he say so much in so little, proving that brevity can be the best breach of the heart.


 
The Mermaid - WB Yeats

A mermaid found a swimming lad,
Picked him for her own,
Pressed her body to his body,
Laughed; and plunging down
Forgot in cruel happiness
That even lovers drown. 

Day 732: Starfish

Fascinating creatures aren't they?

Starfish - Mary Oliver

In the sea rocks,
in the stone pockets
under the tide’s lip,
in water dense as blindness

they slid
like sponges,
like too many thumbs.
I knew this, and what I wanted 

was to draw my hands back
from the water – what I wanted
was to be willing
to be afraid.

But I stayed there,
I crouched on the stone wall
while the sea poured its harsh song
through the sluices,

while I waited for the gritty lightning
of their touch, while I stared
down through the tide’s leaving
where sometimes I could see them –

their stubborn flesh
lounging on my knuckles.
What good does it do
to lie all day in the sun

loving what is easy?
It never grew easy,
but at last I grew peaceful:
all summer

my fear diminished
as they bloomed through the water
like flowers, like flecks
of an uncertain dream,

while I lay on the rocks, reaching
into the darkness, learning
little by little to love
our only world.

Day 731: Cyclops

 

Innovative as always - Margaret Atwood reinventing myth.

 

Cyclops - Margaret Atwood

You, going along the path,
mosquito-doped, with no moon, the flashlight
a single orange eye

unable to see what is beyond
the capsule of your dim
sight, what shape

contracts to a heart
with terror, bumps
among the leaves, what makes
a bristling noise like a fur throat
Is it true you do not wish to hurt them?

Is it true you have no fear?
Take off your shoes then,
let your eyes go bare,
swim in their darkness as in a river

do not disguise
yourself in armour.

They watch you from hiding:
you are a chemical
smell, a cold fire, you are
giant and indefinable

In their monstrous night
thick with possible claws
where danger is not knowing,
you are the hugest monster.

Day 730: Definitions of Poetry

Today Poem a Day is exactly two years old. When I first started this blog, my aim was for a year of daily poems but when the end date came, I couldn't finish and decided to keep on. Now, I think I will keep going until I reach the grand total of one thousand poems!

I'd like to say thanks, once again, to all my loyal following. A lot of inboxes around the world are just about bursting with poems at this point I'd imagine! Some of you I know, some of you I don't. Apart from a few staunch commentators, I don't get many comments here. And I would love to know if you are enjoying the poems. So do drop me a line here if you feel so inclined. Just click on the link to here at the bottom of your daily email. I'd love to hear your suggestions on any preferred poems and poets to post!

Here's to the magical wonder of poetry! ~

Definitions of Poetry - Carl Sandburg


1. Poetry is a projection across silence of cadences arranged to break that silence with definite intentions of echoes, syllables, wave lengths.

2. Poetry is an art practised with the terribly plastic material of human language.

3. Poetry is the report of a nuance between two moments, when people say, 'Listen!' and 'Did you see it' 'Did you hear it? What was it?'

4. Poetry is the tracing of the trajectories of a finite sound to the infinite points of its echoes.

5. Poetry is a sequence of dots and dashes, spelling depths, crypts, cross-lights, and moon wisps.

6. Poetry is a puppet-show, where riders of skyrockets and divers of sea fathoms gossip about the sixth sense and the fourth dimension.

7. Poetry is a plan for a slit in the face of a bronze fountain goat and the path of fresh drinking water.

8. Poetry is a slipknot tightened around a time-beat of one thought, two thoughts, and a last interweaving thought there is not yet a number for.

9. Poetry is an echo asking a shadow dancer to be a partner.

10. Poetry is the journal of a sea animal living on land, wanting to fly the air.

11. Poetry is a series of explanations of life, fading off into horizons too swift for explanations.

12. Poetry is a fossil rock-print of a fin and a wing, with an illegible oath between.

13. Poetry is an exhibit of one pendulum connecting with other and unseen pendulums inside and outside the one seen.

14. Poetry is a sky dark with a wild-duck migration.

15. Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable.

16. Poetry is any page from a sketchbook of outlines of a doorknob with thumb-prints of dust, blood, dreams.

17. Poetry is a type-font design for an alphabet of fun, hate, love, death.

18. Poetry is the cipher key to the five mystic wishes packed in a hollow silver bullet fed to a flying fish.

19. Poetry is a theorem of a yellow-silk handkerchief knotted with riddles, sealed in a balloon tied to the tail of a kite flying in a white wind against a blue sky in spring.

20. Poetry is a dance music measuring buck-and-wing follies along with the gravest and stateliest dead-marches.

21. Poetry is a sliver of the moon lost in the belly of a golden frog.

22. Poetry is a mock of a cry at finding a million dollars and a mock of a laugh at losing it.

23. Poetry is the silence and speech between a wet struggling root of a flower and a sunlit blossom of that flower.

24. Poetry is the harnessing of the paradox of earth cradling life and then entombing it.

25. Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess about what is seen during a moment.

26. Poetry is a fresh morning spider-web telling a story of moonlit hours of weaving and waiting during a night.

27. Poetry is a statement of a series of equations, with numbers and symbols changing like the changes of mirrors, pools, skies, the only never-changing sign being the sign of infinity.

28. Poetry is a packsack of invisible keepsakes.

29. Poetry is a section of river-fog and moving boat-lights, delivered between bridges and whistles, so one says, "Oh!" and another, "How?"
30. Poetry is a kinetic arrangement of static syllables.

31. Poetry is the arithmetic of the easiest way and the primrose path, matched up with foam-flanked horses, bloody knuckles, and bones, on the hard ways to the stars.

32. Poetry is a shuffling of boxes of illusions buckled with a strap of facts.

33. Poetry is an enumeration of birds, bees, babies, butterflies, bugs, bambinos, babayagas, and bipeds, beating their way up bewildering bastions.

34. Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away.

35. Poetry is the establishment of a metaphorical link between white butterfly-wings and the scraps of torn-up love-letters.

36. Poetry is the achievement of the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.

37. Poetry is a mystic, sensuous mathematic of fire, smoke-stacks, waffles, pansies, people, and purple sunsets.

38. Poetry is the capture of a picture, a song, or a flair, in a deliberate prism of words.

Day 729: Seafarer

Seafarer - Archibald MacLeish

And learn O voyager to walk
The roll of earth, the pitch and fall
That swings across these trees those stars:
That swings the sunlight up the wall.

And learn upon these narrow beds
To sleep in spite of sea, in spite
Of sound the rushing planet makes:
And learn to sleep against this ground. 

Day 728: Rambling Rose

Rambling Rose - Alice Oswald

She could be any woman at all,
caught off-guard on-guard.
With her hands stroking or strangling and maybe
with her intentions half interred.
But she is as she is. Her foot is always
filing away at its cord.
And what she's really after
is to wander.

She forgets who she is.
She could be so small
she almost has no smell.
She feels like anyone at all.
When you walk up to her,
she keeps quite still,
but what she answers to
is never loud enough to know.

Eaten away by outwardness,
her eyes are empty.
They could be watching you
or not, they work indifferently
like lit-up glass and if you ask
why she won't speak, why should she?
When what she really wants
is to wander.

You know what women are like:
Sandra, Sabrina.
They pretend to be settled,
peering round under
the hoods of their names.
Alcestis, Clytemnestra.
She could be either of those.
She scarcely knows.

She goes on thinking something
just over your shoulder.
This could be the last day
before you lose her.
But what's the use
of saying one thing or another?
When what she's really after
is to wander.

Day 727: Daddy Longlegs

Out of all the house-invading summer bugs, I think the daddy longlegs is the least irksome. And who
would have thought that they could represent so much? A fantastic little poem:

Daddy Longlegs - Ted Kooser 

Here, on fine long legs springy as steel,

a life rides, sealed in a small brown pill

that skims along over the basement floor

wrapped up in a simple obsession.

Eight legs reach out like the master ribs

of a web in which some thought is caught

dead center in its own small world,

a thought so far from the touch of things

that we can only guess at it. If mine,

it would be the secret dream

of walking alone across the floor of my life

with an easy grace, and with love enough

to live on at the center of myself.

Day 726: Red

Now this is just breath-taking writing. A tour-de-force of description, emotion and affecting characterisation. Ted Hughes, from the collection 'Birthday Letters' -  the entire volume of course, dedicated to his deceased wife, Sylvia Plath.

Red - Ted Hughes

Red was your colour.
If not red, then white. But red
Was what you wrapped around you.
Blood-red. Was it blood?
Was it red-ochre, for warming the dead?
Haematite to make immortal
The precious heirloom bones, the family bones.

When you had your way finally
Our room was red. A judgement chamber.
Shut casket for gems. The carpet of blood
Patterned with darkenings, congealments.
The curtains - ruby corduroy blood,
Sheer blood-falls from ceiling to floor.
The cushions the same. The same
Raw carmine along the window-seat.
A throbbing cell. Aztec altar - temple.

Only the bookshelves escaped into whiteness.

And outside the window
Poppies thin and wrinkle-frail
As the skin on blood,
Salvias, that your father named you after,
Like blood lobbing from a gash,
And roses, the heart's last gouts,
Catastrophic, arterial, doomed.

Your velvet long full skirt, a swathe of blood,
A lavish burgundy.
Your lips a dipped, deep crimson.

You revelled in red.
I felt it raw - like the crisp gauze edges
Of a stiffening wound. I could touch
The open vein in it, the crusted gleam.

Everything you painted you painted white
Then splashed it with roses, defeated it,
Leaned over it, dripping roses,
Weeping roses, and more roses,
Then sometimes, among them, a little blue bird.

Blue was better for you. Blue was wings.
Kingfisher blue silks from San Francisco
Folded your pregnancy
In crucible caresses.
Blue was your kindly spirit - not a ghoul
But electrified, a guardian, thoughtful.

In the pit of red
You hid from the bone-clinic whiteness.

But the jewel you lost was blue.

Day 725: Rain in Summer

"St Swithin’s Day, if it does rain

Full forty days, it will remain

St Swithin’s Day, if it be fair

For forty days, t'will rain no more."

Traditionally, if it rains today on St Swithin's Day, then it will rain for the entire summer. It is raining today in Ireland. Oh, no.


Lodged - Robert Frost

The rain to the wind said,
'You push and I'll pelt.'
They so smote the garden bed
That the flowers actually knelt,
And lay lodged - though not dead.
I know how the flowers felt.

Day 724: Bastille Day

 

Liberty Leading the People ~ Eugéne Delacroix, 1830

Today is Bastille Day, the 14 du Juillet, when the French celebrate the beginning of their mighty Revolution with the storming of the Bastille prison, what Coleridge termed in his poem 'France: An Ode' as the moment when France 'stamped her strong foot and said she would be free.' And so a fascinating era began on this day in 1789 that would change all of history.

The poem for today is by French poet Paul Éluard, an ode of rousing allegiance to the most beloved and passionate ideal of the French: liberty. The poem was written in 1942 when Éluard was a member of the Resistance and France was under Nazi Occupation. Thousands of copies of it were dropped by parachute by the British Royal Air Corps in an effort to rouse the people to the Resistance cause. Demonstrating once again, the power of poetry.  

 

Liberty - Paul Éluard

On my notebooks from school
On my desk and the trees
On the sand on the snow
I write your name
 

On every page read
On all the white sheets
Stone blood paper or ash
I write your name

On the golden images
On the soldier’s weapons
On the crowns of kings
I write your name

On the jungle the desert
The nests and the bushes
On the echo of childhood
I write your name

On the wonder of nights
On the white bread of days
On the seasons engaged
I write your name

On all my blue rags
On the pond mildewed sun
On the lake living moon
I write your name

On the fields the horizon
The wings of the birds
On the windmill of shadows
I write your name 

On every piece of dawn
On the sea on the ships
On the demented mountain
I write your name

On the foam of the clouds
On the sweat of the storm
On dark insipid rain
I write your name

On the glittering forms
On the bells of colour
On physical truth
I write your name

On the wakened paths
On the opened ways
On the scattered places
I write your name

On the lamp that gives light
On the lamp that is drowned
On my house reunited
I write your name

On the bisected fruit
Of my mirror and room
On my bed’s empty shell
I write your name

On my dog greedy tender
On his listening ears
On his awkward paws
I write your name

On the sill of my door
On familiar things
On the fire’s sacred stream
I write your name

On all flesh that’s in tune
On the brows of my friends
On each hand that extends
I write your name

On the glass of surprises
On lips that attend
High over the silence
I write your name

On my ravaged refuges
On my fallen lighthouses
On the walls of my boredom
I write your name

On passionless absence
On naked solitude
On the marches of death
I write your name

On health that’s regained
On danger that’s past
On hope without memories
I write your name

By the power of the word
I regain my life
I was born to know you
And to name you

Liberty.

Liberté ~ Paul Éluard

Sur mes cahiers d’écolier
Sur mon pupitre et les arbres
Sur le sable sur la neige
J’écris ton nom

Sur toutes les pages lues
Sur toutes les pages blanches
Pierre sang papier ou cendre
J’écris ton nom

Sur les images dorées
Sur les armes des guerriers
Sur la couronne des rois
J’écris ton nom

Sur la jungle et le désert
Sur les nids sur les genêts
Sur l’écho de mon enfance
J’écris ton nom

Sur les merveilles des nuits
Sur le pain blanc des journées
Sur les saisons fiancées
J’écris ton nom

Sur tous mes chiffons d’azur
Sur l’étang soleil moisi
Sur le lac lune vivante
J’écris ton nom

Sur les champs sur l’horizon
Sur les ailes des oiseaux
Et sur le moulin des ombres
J’écris ton nom

Sur chaque bouffée d’aurore
Sur la mer sur les bateaux
Sur la montagne démente
J’écris ton nom

Sur la mousse des nuages
Sur les sueurs de l’orage
Sur la pluie épaisse et fade
J’écris ton nom

Sur les formes scintillantes
Sur les cloches des couleurs
Sur la vérité physique
J’écris ton nom

Sur les sentiers éveillés
Sur les routes déployées
Sur les places qui débordent
J’écris ton nom

Sur la lampe qui s’allume
Sur la lampe qui s’éteint
Sur mes maisons réunies
J’écris ton nom

Sur le fruit coupé en deux
Du miroir et de ma chambre
Sur mon lit coquille vide
J’écris ton nom

Sur mon chien gourmand et tendre
Sur ses oreilles dressées
Sur sa patte maladroite
J’écris ton nom

Sur le tremplin de ma porte
Sur les objets familiers
Sur le flot du feu béni
J’écris ton nom

Sur toute chair accordée
Sur le front de mes amis
Sur chaque main qui se tend
J’écris ton nom

Sur la vitre des surprises
Sur les lèvres attentives
Bien au-dessus du silence
J’écris ton nom

Sur mes refuges détruits
Sur mes phares écroulés
Sur les murs de mon ennui
J’écris ton nom

Sur l’absence sans désir
Sur la solitude nue
Sur les marches de la mort
J’écris ton nom

Sur la santé revenue
Sur le risque disparu
Sur l’espoir sans souvenir
J’écris ton nom

Et par le pouvoir d’un mot
Je recommence ma vie
Je suis né pour te connaître
Pour te nommer

Liberté.

Day 723: In Flight

 

In Flight - Jennifer K. Sweeney 

 

The Himalayan legend says

there are beautiful white birds

that live completely in flight.

They are born in the air,

must learn to fly before falling

and die also in their flying.

Maybe you have been born

into such a life

with the bottom dropping out.

Maybe gravity is claiming you

and you feel

ghost-scripted.

For the one who lives inside the fall,

the sky beneath the sky of all.