Fleurs du Mal Magazine
Dem unbekannten Gott
Noch einmal, eh ich weiterziehe
Und meine Blicke vorwärts sende,
Heb’ ich vereinsamt meine Hände
Zu dir empor, zu dem ich fliehe,
Dem ich in tiefster Herzenstiefe
Altäre feierlich geweiht,
Daß allezeit
Mich deine Stimme wieder riefe.
Darauf erglüht tiefeingeschrieben
Das Wort: dem unbekannten Gotte.
Sein bin ich, ob ich in der Frevler Rotte
Auch bis zur Stunde bin geblieben:
Sein bin ich – und ich fühl’ die Schlingen,
Die mich im Kampf darniederziehn
Und, mag ich fliehn,
Mich doch zu seinem Dienste zwingen.
Ich will dich kennen, Unbekannter,
Du tief in meine Seele Greifender,
Mein Leben wie ein Sturm Durchschweifender,
Du Unfaßbarer, mir Verwandter!
Ich will dich kennen, selbst dir dienen.
Friedrich Nietzsche
(1844 – 1900)
Dem unbekannten Gott
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Austrian poet and playwright Ernst Jandl died in 2000, leaving behind his partner, poet Friederike Mayröcker—and bringing to an end a half century of shared life, and shared literary work. Mayröcker immediately began attempting to come to terms with his death in the way that poets struggling with loss have done for millennia: by writing.
Requiem for Ernst Jandl is the powerfully moving outcome.
In this quiet but passionate lament that grows into a song of enthralling intensity, Mayröcker recalls memories and shared experiences, and—with the sudden, piercing perception of regrets that often accompany grief—reads Jandl’s works in a new light.
Alarmed by a sudden, existential emptiness, she reflects on the future, and the possibility of going on with her life and work in the absence of the person who, as we see in this elegy, was a constant conversational and creative partner.
Friederike Mayröcker (1924–2021) was one of the most important Austrian poets of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. She published over eighty works, including poetry, prose, radio plays and children’s books. Her work has been honoured with many prizes, including the Georg Büchner Prize and the Peter Huchel Prize. She lived in Vienna.
#new books
Requiem for Ernst Jandl
by Friederike Mayröcker
Translated by Roslyn Theobald
ISBN: 9781803090429
Pages: 96
Rights: UCP
Publication Year: 2022
Format: Paperback
Size: 5″ x 8″
Series: The Seagull Library of German Literature
Category: Poetry
£7.99
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Ernest Potters tijdens zijn eerste solo-tentoonstelling sinds lang, in Luycks Gallery, 2012. (Foto: Joep Eijkens)
Ernest Potters timmerde niet alleen als fotograaf aan de weg, maar was ook jarenlang drijvende kracht en organisator van tal van activiteiten in de Tilburgse kunstwereld. Op 10 augustus 2022 overleed hij na een kort ziekbed.
door Joep Eijkens
Ernest Potters werd in 1953 te Tilburg geboren als zoon van de bekende pottenbakkers Henk en Lies Potters. Hij volgde zijn opleiding aan St. Joost Breda en was sinds 1974 werkzaam als fotograaf/fotojournalist. Vanaf de jaren zeventig werkte hij als freelance fotograaf onder meer voor muziekbladen als OOR en Hitkrant, voor het maandblad Jazz Nu en diverse landelijke dag- en weekbladen. Maar ook voor uiteenlopende (kunst)instellingen en andere opdrachtgevers in Tilburg en daarbuiten, waaronder diverse muziek-, dans- en theatergezelschappen.
Potters fotografeerde talloze theater- en dansvoorstellingen. Tot zijn favoriete onderwerpen hoorden architectuur en muzikanten. Wat dat laatste betreft was hij apetrots op een portret dat hij schoot van zijn idool Frank Zappa.
Ruimte X
Maar Potters was beslist méér dan fotograaf. Zo stichtte hij in 1980 met zijn toenmalige levenspartner, danseres Nora van den Eeckhout, Het Danshuis, gevestigd in de Telexstraat in Tilburg. Het betreffende pand werd later onder de naam Ruimte-X een bekend ‘multidisciplinair kunstenpodium’ waar tussen 1998 en 2012 talloze exposities, voorstellingen en culturele bijeenkomsten plaatsvonden. Potters hoorde bovendien tot degenen die aan de wieg stonden van de succesvolle Werkplaats L’Avventura Tilburg.
Ook kreeg Ernst Potters naam door de kunstexposities die hij elders in de stad organiseerde tijdens de Tilburgse kermis. En door de in literatuur, beeldende kunst, theater en muziek gespecialiseerde uitgeverij teleXpress die hij runde met zijn partner Ingrid Luycks. De producten waren steeds mooi verzorgde publicaties. Zijn eerste foto-expositie had hij in 1976 in het cultureel centrum Boerderij Denissen in Berkel-Enschot. Daarna volgden exposities in binnen- en buitenland.
Qua Vadis
In 2012 sloot Ruimte X de deuren en concentreerde Ernest Potters zich weer meer op zijn werk als fotograaf. Het was in de galerie van Luycks dat hij in datzelfde jaar voor het eerst sinds lange tijd weer solo eigen fotografisch werk exposeerde onder de titel Quo Vadis. Diverse solo- en duo-exposities volgden daarna, eveneens in Luycks Gallery.
Potters timmerde de afgelopen jaren sowieso steviger aan de weg als fotograaf. Zo begon hij eind 2020 op Instagram met een soort dagboek in foto’s van dingen en plekken die hij onderweg tegenkwam. Al dan niet alledaagse voorwerpen en plekken waaraan vrijwel niemand aandacht schenkt: van een weggegooid bierblikje op een hoop straatstenen tot een abstract detail van een stukje architectuur. Alsof hij wilde zeggen dat schoonheid ook op straat is te vinden, als je er maar oog voor hebt.
Ernest Potters maakte ook, en regelmatig in samenwerking met anderen, diverse fotoboeken zoals Hoog-Gaat-Ie. Fotoboek van de Tilburgse kermis met Paul Spapens en Lauran Wijffels, en vorig jaar nog Het nieuwe ritme van Tilburg. Dat was een coproductie met de eveneens Tilburgse fotograaf Wil van Dusseldorp over de metamorfose die de voormalige textielstad onderging sinds de jaren zestig. Potters nam daarin vooral het afgelopen decennium voor zijn rekening, met kleurenfoto’s die hij speciaal voor dit boek maakte. Het werd uitgegeven door stichting De NWE Stijl, waarin Ingrid Luycks één van de drijvende krachten is. Potters was ook de bedenker van tal van opmerkelijke boekconcepten en uitgaven, waaronder De Kanonbal. Requiem voor een wielrenner en dichtbundels van diverse Tilburgse stadsdichters.
Om ideeën zat Ernest Potters nooit verlegen en hij was ook altijd bereid ideeën van anderen de ruimte geven, vaak letterlijk in Ruimte X. Zijn betrokkenheid bij Tilburg was groot en hij zal in die stad worden gemist, maar zijn wereld was eindeloos veel groter dan stad of provincie.
Eerder gepubliceerd in: Brabant Cultureel. Digitaal podium voor kunst en cultuur
© Joep Eijkens, 11 augustus 2022
https://www.brabantcultureel.nl/
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From award-winning writer and journalist Felicity McLean comes Red, a spirited and striking contemporary retelling of the Ned Kelly story
It’s the early 1990s and Ruby ‘Red’ McCoy dreams about one day leaving her weatherboard house on the Central Coast of New South Wales, where her best friend, Stevie, is loose with the truth, and her dad, Sid, is always on the wrong side of the law.
But wild, whip-smart Red can’t stay out of trouble to save her life, and Sid’s latest hustle is more harebrained than usual.
Meanwhile, Sergeant Trevor Healy seems to have a vendetta against every generation of the McCoys.
Told in Ruby’s vivid, inimitable voice, Red is part True Grit, part Blue Murder. It’s a story of police persecution. Of dodgy deals and even dodgier cars.
And of a family history that refuses to stay in the past. A sharp, provocative and savagely funny novel.
Felicity McLean’s debut novel, The Van Apfel Girls are Gone, has been published in more than half a dozen countries. It was a Barnes & Noble ‘Discover Great New Writers’ pick in the US, and was shortlisted for the Indie Book Awards, and longlisted for the UK’s Dagger Awards, and the Davitt. Her book, Body Lengths, co-written with Olympian Leisel Jones, was Apple Books ‘Best Biography of 2015’ and won the 2016 Australian Book Industry Awards ‘Reader’s Choice’ for Small Publisher Adult Book of the Year.
# new book
Red
by Felicity McLean
Novel
Format: Paperback
Language: English
Number Of Pages: 256
Published: 18th May 2022
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
ISBN: 9781460755099
ISBN-10: 146075509X
$21.22
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A veritable crime lover’s delight from a true master of mystery and suspense. Experience the #1 New York Times best-selling author as never before in this dark and thrilling short story collection that takes us on a journey of twisted minds and vengeful hearts.
Jo Nesbø is known the world over as a consummate mystery/thriller writer. Famed for his deft characterization, hair-raising suspense and shocking twists, Nesbø’s dexterity with the dark corners of the human heart is on full display in these inventive and enthralling stories.
A detective with a nose for jealousy is on the trail of a man suspected of murdering his twin; a bereaved father must decide whether vengeance has a place in the new world order after a pandemic brings about the collapse of society; a garbage man fresh off a bender tries to piece together what happened the night before; a hired assassin matches wits against his greatest adversary in a dangerous game for survival; and an instantly electric connection between passengers on a flight to London may spell romance, or something more sinister.
With Nesbø’s characteristic gift for outstanding atmosphere and gut-wrenching revelations, The Jealousy Man confirms that he is at the peak of his abilities.
Jo Nesbo is one of the world’s bestselling crime writers, with The Leopard, Phantom, Police, The Son and his latest Harry Hole novel, The Thirst, all topping the Sunday Times bestseller charts. He’s an international number one bestseller and his books are published in 50 languages, selling over 33 million copies around the world. Before becoming a crime writer, Nesbo played football for Norway’s premier league team Molde, but his dream of playing professionally for Spurs was dashed when he tore ligaments in his knee at the age of eighteen. After three years military service he attended business school and formed the band Di derre (‘Them There’). They topped the charts in Norway, but Nesbo continued working as a financial analyst, crunching numbers during the day and gigging at night. When commissioned by a publisher to write a memoir about life on the road with his band, he instead came up with the plot for his first Harry Hole crime novel, The Bat.
The Jealousy Man and Other Stories
by Jo Nesbo (Author)
Translator: Robert Ferguson
Publisher: Knopf; First Edition
(October 5, 2021)
Language: English
Hardcover
528 pages
ISBN-10: 0593321006
ISBN-13: 978-0593321003
$16.99
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Season of Dares leans into fragments of the scriptures, narratives and mythologies of a Korean adoptee’s childhood in the rural American West.
Fearlessly, it revisits and explores the physical and spiritual landscapes of those communities and the tensions between the impulses that shaped them–violence and tenderness, stoicism and sentimentalism, self-reliance and belief in divine providence.
Born in South Korea and raised in Montana and Colorado, Leah Silvieus now travels between Florida and New York as a yacht chief stewardess.
Silvieus is the author of a chapbook, Anemochory (Hyacinth Girl Press 2016), and a books editor for Hyphen magazine. She is also a Kundiman fellow and the recipient of awards and fellowships from The Academy of American Poets, Fulbright, and the Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation.
Leah Silvieus holds an MFA from the University of Miami.
Season of Dares
by Leah Silvieus (Author)
Publisher: Bull City Press
2018
Language: English
Paperback: 28 pages
ISBN-10: 149517879X
ISBN-13: 978-1495178795
$23.20
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The Song Of Iron
I
Not yet hast Thou sounded
Thy clangorous music,
Whose strings are under the mountains…
Not yet hast Thou spoken
The blooded, implacable Word…
But I hear in the Iron singing –
In the triumphant roaring of the steam and pistons pounding –
Thy barbaric exhortation…
And the blood leaps in my arteries, unreproved,
Answering Thy call…
All my spirit is inundated with the tumultuous passion of Thy Voice,
And sings exultant with the Iron,
For now I know I too am of Thy Chosen…
Oh fashioned in fire –
Needing flame for Thy ultimate word –
Behold me, a cupola
Poured to Thy use!
Heed not my tremulous body
That faints in the grip of Thy gauntlet.
Break it… and cast it aside…
But make of my spirit
That dares and endures
Thy crucible…
Pour through my soul
Thy molten, world-whelming song.
… Here at Thy uttermost gate
Like a new Mary, I wait…
II
Charge the blast furnace, workman…
Open the valves –
Drive the fires high…
(Night is above the gates).
How golden-hot the ore is
From the cupola spurting,
Tossing the flaming petals
Over the silt and furnace ash –
Blown leaves, devastating,
Falling about the world…
Out of the furnace mouth –
Out of the giant mouth –
The raging, turgid, mouth –
Fall fiery blossoms
Gold with the gold of buttercups
In a field at sunset,
Or huskier gold of dandelions,
Warmed in sun-leavings,
Or changing to the paler hue
At the creamy hearts of primroses.
Charge the converter, workman –
Tired from the long night?
But the earth shall suck up darkness –
The earth that holds so much…
And out of these molten flowers,
Shall shape the heavy fruit…
Then open the valves –
Drive the fires high,
Your blossoms nurturing.
(Day is at the gates
And a young wind…)
Put by your rod, comrade,
And look with me, shading your eyes…
Do you not see –
Through the lucent haze
Out of the converter rising –
In the spirals of fire
Smiting and blinding,
A shadowy shape
White as a flame of sacrifice,
Like a lily swaying?
III
The ore leaping in the crucibles,
The ore communicant,
Sending faint thrills along the leads…
Fire is running along the roots of the mountains…
I feel the long recoil of earth
As under a mighty quickening…
(Dawn is aglow in the light of the Iron…)
All palpitant, I wait…
IV
Here ye, Dictators – late Lords of the Iron,
Shut in your council rooms, palsied, depowered –
The blooded, implacable Word?
Not whispered in cloture, one to the other,
(Brother in fear of the fear of his brother…)
But chanted and thundered
On the brazen, articulate tongues of the Iron
Babbling in flame…
Sung to the rhythm of prisons dismantled,
Manacles riven and ramparts defaced…
(Hearts death-anointed yet hearing life calling…)
Ankle chains bursting and gallows unbraced…
Sung to the rhythm of arsenals burning…
Clangor of iron smashing on iron,
Turmoil of metal and dissonant baying
Of mail-sided monsters shattered asunder…
Hulks of black turbines all mangled and roaring,
Battering egress through ramparted walls…
Mouthing of engines, made rabid with power,
Into the holocaust snorting and plunging…
Mighty converters torn from their axis,
Flung to the furnaces, vomiting fire,
Jumbled in white-heaten masses disshapen…
Writhing in flame-tortured levers of iron…
Gnashing of steel serpents twisting and dying…
Screeching of steam-glutted cauldrons rending…
Shock of leviathans prone on each other…
Scaled flanks touching, ore entering ore…
Steel haunches closing and grappling and swaying
In the waltz of the mating locked mammoths of iron,
Tasting the turbulent fury of living,
Mad with a moment’s exuberant living!
Crash of devastating hammers despoiling..
Hands inexorable, marring
What hands had so cunningly moulded…
Structures of steel welded, subtily tempered,
Marvelous wrought of the wizards of ore,
Torn into octaves discordantly clashing,
Chords never final but onward progressing
In monstrous fusion of sound ever smiting on sound
in mad vortices whirling…
Till the ear, tortured, shrieks for cessation
Of the raving inharmonies hatefully mingling…
The fierce obligato the steel pipes are screaming…
The blare of the rude molten music of Iron…
Lola Ridge
(1873-1941)
The Song Of Iron
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An astonishing collection about interconnectedness—between the human and nonhuman, ancestors and ourselves—from National Book Critics Circle Award winner, National Book Award finalist and U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón.
“I have always been too sensitive, a weeper / from a long line of weepers,” writes Limón.
“I am the hurting kind.”
What does it mean to be the hurting kind?
To be sensitive not only to the world’s pain and joys, but to the meanings that bend in the scrim between the natural world and the human world?
To divine the relationships between us all?
To perceive ourselves in other beings—and to know that those beings are resolutely their own, that they “do not / care to be seen as symbols”?
With Limón’s remarkable ability to trace thought, The Hurting Kind explores those questions—incorporating others’ stories and ways of knowing, making surprising turns, and always reaching a place of startling insight.
These poems slip through the seasons, teeming with horses and kingfishers and the gleaming eyes of fish.
And they honor parents, stepparents, and grandparents: the sacrifices made, the separate lives lived, the tendernesses extended to a hurting child; the abundance, in retrospect, of having two families.
Along the way,we glimpse loss. There are flashes of the pandemic, ghosts whose presence manifests in unexpected memories and the mysterious behavior of pets left behind. But The Hurting Kind is filled, above all, with connection and the delight of being in the world.
“Slippery and waddle thieving my tomatoes still / green in the morning’s shade,” writes Limón of a groundhog in her garden, “she is doing what she can to survive.”
Ada Limón grew up in Glen Ellen and Sonoma, California. A graduate of New York University’s MFA Creative Writing Program, she has received fellowships from the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and won the Chicago Literary Award for Poetry. She is the author of three books of poetry, Lucky Wreck (Autumn House Press, 2006), This Big Fake World (Pearl Editions, 2007), and Sharks in the Rivers (Milkweed Editions, 2010). She is currently at work on a novel, a book of essays, and a new collection of poems. Ada Limón became the 24th Poet Laureate of the United States in July of 2022.
The Hurting Kind
by Ada Limón (Author)
Publisher: Milkweed Editions
May 10, 2022
Language: English
Hardcover: 120 pages
ISBN-10: 1639550496
ISBN-13: 978-1639550494
$17.99
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Theo van Doesburg (1883 – 1931)
was behalve beeldend kunstenaar ook criticus, tijdschriftredacteur, architect, dichter en wat al niet. en wat al niet.
Alles in zijn leven deed hij met een enorme gedrevenheid en doorzettingsvermogen. Steeds verkondigde hij luidruchtig zijn visie, en hij was niet gediend van tegenspraak.
Voortdurend was hij bezig zijn leven en dat van anderen richting te geven.
Als redacteur van De Stijl, het tijdschrift dat hij in 1917 met Piet Mondriaan en andere geestverwanten had opgericht, kwam hij in contact met iedereen die er in het modernistische Europa toe deed.
Over Van Doesburg zijn duizenden publicaties verschenen, maar deze monumentale biografie, waarvoor de auteurs talloze archieven in Europa en Amerika raadpleegden, is de eerste die alle facetten van dit veelkantige leven belicht.
Hans Renders (1957), verbonden aan de Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, schreef de geruchtmakende biografie van Jan Hanlo en is als criticus werkzaam voor Het Parool en Vrij Nederland. In 2000 publiceerde hij bij De Bezige Bij het boek Braak, over het vermaarde tijdschrijft van de Vijftigers waarin onder meer Remco Campert en Lucebert publiceerden. In 2004 verscheen zijn biografie van Jan Campert, Wie weet slaag ik in de dood en een bloemlezing uit het dichterlijke oeuvre van Jan Campert. Datzelfde jaar verscheen de door hem samengestelde uitgave Gevaarlijk Drukwerk. Een vrije uitgeverij in oorlogstijd. Renders is mede-oprichter van de Jan Hanlo-Essayprijs, redacteur van ZL (Literair-Historisch Tijdschrift) en medewerker van Histoire des Médias; Revue d’histoire en American Journalism History.
Sjoerd van Faassen is geassocieerd onderzoeker bij rkd- Nederlands Instituut voor Kunstgeschiedenis en werkte mee aan Van Doesburgs Oeuvrecatalogus. Hij bezorgde twee uitgaven met Van Doesburgs correspondentie, en publiceerde onder meer een monografie over Nederlands-Belgische modernistische netwerken in het interbellum. Hij is redacteur van het cultuurhistorische tijdschrift Rode Haring. Onder zijn redactie verscheen onder meer Roomse ruzie, over het literaire tijdschrift De Gemeenschap (1925-1941).
Ik sta helemaal alleen
Biografie Theo van Doesburg
Auteur(s): Hans Renders, Sjoerd van Faassen
ISBN: 9789403134314
NUR: 641
Type: Gebonden
Aantal pagina’s: 784
Uitgever: De Bezige Bij
Verschijningsdatum: 29-09-2022
Prijs: 49,99
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Poetry. An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe is a middle-of-the-night poetic conversation with Marilyn Monroe that explores obsessions, addictions, abuse, objectification, marriage, work, children, childlessness and death.
Pressing on the themes of her acclaimed debut, Give a Girl Chaos, Seaborn illuminates the biographical and emotional journey of Marilyn as intimacies whispered between two women.
These are women who have lived “on the glittering edge” and know that when a third husband “draws a blank page from his typewriter,” it means she needs to go to work in a world dominated by men.
In An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe, Marilyn is a resilient, intelligent feminist who understands how to accumulate and wield power in the 1950’s. She is also vulnerable, exploited, and broken in so many ways.
We see the speaker discover Marilyn until “then she is everywhere,” a haunting presence that becomes both muse and reflection. Seaborn invites us into the poetic soul of the world’s most famous woman with poems that celebrate and mourn. An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe is a sequined meditation on what keeps us up at night and what fills our dreams.
Heidi Seaborn wrote poetry as teenager then pursued a career as a business executive. She moved 27 times, raised three children, divorced and remarried and then after a 40-year hiatus, returned to poetry in 2016. Since then she’s authored two full-length collections of poetry and three chapbooks of poetry, won or been shortlisted for over two dozen awards and been published widely. She is Executive Editor of THE ADROIT JOURNAL and holds an MFA in Poetry from NYU and a BA from Stanford University. She lives in Seattle.
An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe
by Heidi Seaborn (Author)
Paperback
June 10, 2021
Pages: 84
Publisher: PANK Books (June 10, 2021)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 194858719X
ISBN-13: 978-1948587198
$18.00
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With her first full-length poetry collection, Warsan Shire introduces us to a young girl, who, in the absence of a nurturing guide, makes her own way toward womanhood.
Drawing from her own life, as well as pop culture and news headlines, Shire finds vivid, unique details in the experiences of refugees and immigrants, mothers and daughters, Black women and teenage girls. In Shire’s hands, lives spring into fullness. This is noisy life, full of music and weeping and surahs and sirens and birds. This is fragrant life, full of blood and perfume and shisha smoke and jasmine and incense.
This is polychrome life, full of henna and moonlight and lipstick and turmeric and kohl. The long-awaited collection from one of our most exciting contemporary poets, this book is a blessing, an incantatory celebration of resilience and survival. Each reader will come away changed.
Warsan Shire is a Somali British writer and poet born in Nairobi and raised in London. She has written two chapbooks, Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth and Her Blue Body. She was awarded the inaugural Brunel International African Poetry Prize and served as the first Young Poet Laureate of London. She is the youngest member of the Royal Society of Literature and is included in the Penguin Modern Poets series. Shire wrote the poetry for the Peabody Award–winning visual album Lemonade and the Disney film Black Is King in collaboration with Beyoncé Knowles-Carter. She also wrote the short film Brave Girl Rising, highlighting the voices and faces of Somali girls in Africa’s largest refugee camp. Warsan Shire lives in Los Angeles with her husband and two children. Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head is her full-length debut poetry collection.
Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head
Poems
By Warsan Shire
Category: Poetry
Publisher : Random House Trade Paperbacks
(March 1, 2022)
Language: English
Paperback
96 pages
ISBN-10: 0593134354
ISBN-13: 978-0593134351
$17.00
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A Little Poem
A happy vicar I might have been
Two hundred years ago
To preach upon eternal doom
And watch my walnuts grow;
But born, alas, in an evil time,
I missed that pleasant haven,
For the hair has grown on my upper lip
And the clergy are all clean-shaven.
And later still the times were good,
We were so easy to please,
We rocked our troubled thoughts to sleep
On the bosoms of the trees.
All ignorant we dared to own
The joys we now dissemble;
The greenfinch on the apple bough
Could make my enemies tremble.
But girl’s bellies and apricots,
Roach in a shaded stream,
Horses, ducks in flight at dawn,
All these are a dream.
It is forbidden to dream again;
We maim our joys or hide them:
Horses are made of chromium steel
And little fat men shall ride them.
I am the worm who never turned,
The eunuch without a harem;
Between the priest and the commissar
I walk like Eugene Aram;
And the commissar is telling my fortune
While the radio plays,
But the priest has promised an Austin Seven,
For Duggie always pays.
I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls,
And woke to find it true;
I wasn’t born for an age like this;
Was Smith? Was Jones? Were you?
George Orwell
(1903 – 1950)
A Little Poem
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