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Ourselves Alone*
One morning, when dreaming in deep meditation,
I met a sweet colleen a-making her moan.
With sighing and sobbing she cried and lamented;
“Oh, where is my lost one, and where has he flown?
“My house it is small, and my field is but little,
Yet round flew my wheel as I sat in the sun,
He crossed the deep sea and went forth for my battle:
Oh, has he proved faithless—the fight is not won?”
And then I said: “Kathleen, ah! do you remember
When you were a queen, and your castles were strong,
You cried for the love of a cold-hearted stranger,
And in your fair island you planted the wrong?
“And oh,” I cried, “Kathleen, I once heard you weeping
And sighing and sobbing and making your moan.
You sang of a lost one, a dear one, a false one—
‘Oh, gone is my blackbird, and where has he flown?’
“Ah! many came forth to the sound of your crying,
And fought down the years for the freedom you pined.
How many lie still, in their cold exile sleeping,
Who sought in far lands your lost blackbird to find?
“And many are caught in the net of the stranger,
And all but forgotten the sound of your name,
For other loves call them to help and to save them:
They fell to dishonour—we hold them in shame.
“Oh, why drive me forth from your hearth into exile
And into far dangers? Your house is my own.
Faithful I serve, as I ever did serve you,
Standing together, ourselves—and alone.”
*Sinn Fein Amhain
Dora Maria Sigerson Shorter
(1866 – 1918)
Ourselves Alone
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Shards of colours
I paint the world in the wet,
in colours mixed with liquid light,
and like tears of love, reality emerges
and seals itself therein.
The dormant awakes everywhere,
in my silence, in my journey,
and like the joy of happiness,
truth emerges and beauty stands.
An empty space in the universe
offers itself up to the feast before it.
Colours as miracles, drops of God’s
love for the immensity before us all.
I wash my hands after the day’s work,
the colours trickle from my fingers
like fish with sacred wings, I am given
these tiny shards of shimmering miracles,
and then when I wake the following day,
to my surprise, I find small traces remain
to remind me to rejoice in them again.
Vincent Berquez
Poem: Shards of colours
Vincent Berquez is a London–based artist and poet
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Natur
Hinter den Häusern der Stadt, dort wo die Verbotstafeln
stehn,
beginnt Gottes freie Natur, die den Menschen gehört.
Parzelliert und in Grundbüchern eingetragen sind
die Quellen, die Äcker, die Wälder, der Wind,
die Tannen, die Eichen, die Buchen, die Linden,
die Hasen, die Hirsche, der Lerchenschlag,
der Mond in den Nächten, die Sonne am Achtstundentag
und die Vögel, die, von Sorgen angeblich unbeschwert,
die segensreiche Ordnung dieser Welt verkünden – –
Leibeigene Eichkätzchen springen auf Eichen,
als wären sie unabhängig vom Kapital – –
und wissen nicht, daß unterdessen Förster ohne Zahl
auf hinterlistigen Pfaden zum Schießen schleichen – –
Nur die Schriftsteller wandern umher und werden Wunder
gewahr
und schreiben Gedichte, Skizzen und Romane,
sie leben in ihrem göttlichen Wahne
und sterben vom menschlichen Honorar.
Joseph Roth
(1894 – 1939)
Natur
Lachen links – 1. 2. 1924
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More in: Archive Q-R, Archive Q-R, Joseph Roth, MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY - department of ravens & crows, birds of prey, riding a zebra, spring, summer, autumn, winter
An Goethe
Das Unvergängliche
Ist nur dein Gleichnis!
Gott der Verfängliche
Ist Dichter-Erschleichnis…
Welt-Rad, das rollende,
Streift Ziel auf Ziel:
Not – nennt′ s der Grollende,
Der Narr nennt′ s – Spiel…
Welt-Spiel, das herrische,
Mischt Sein und Schein: –
Das Ewig-Närrische
Mischt uns – hinein!…
Friedrich Nietzsche
(1844 – 1900)
An Goethe
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From the frontlines of climate catastrophe, a poet watches the sea approach her doorstep.
Born and raised in Florida, Heather Sellers grew up in an extraordinarily difficult home. The natural world provided a life-giving respite from domestic violence. She found, in the tropical flora and fauna, great beauty and meaningful connection. She made her way by trying to learn the name of every flower, every insect, every fish and shell and tree she encountered.
In this collection of poems, Sellers laments its loss, while observing, over the course of a year, daily life of the people and other animals around her, on her street, and in her low-lying coastal town, where new high rises soar into the sky as the storm clouds gather with increasing intensity and the future of the community—and seemingly life as we know it—becomes more and more uncertain.
Sprung from her daily observation journals, haunted by ghosts from the past, Field Notes from the Flood Zone is a double love letter: to a beautiful and fragile landscape, and to the vulnerable young girl who grew up in that world. It is an elegy for the two great shaping forces in a life, heartbreaking family struggle and a collective lost treasure, our stunning, singular, desecrated Florida, and all its remnant beauty.
Heather Sellers is the author of four poetry collections: Field Notes from the Flood Zone (BOA, 2022); The Present State of the Garden (Lynx House Press, 2021); The Boys I Borrow (New Issues Press, 2007), which was a finalist for the James Laughlin Award; and Drinking Girls and Their Dresses (Ahsahta Press, 2002). She is also the author of the memoir You Don’t Look Like Anyone I Know (Riverhead, 2011), which was an O, the Oprah Magazine Book of the Month Club Choice and an Editor’s Choice at the New York Times, and the craft book The Practice of Creative Writing (Macmillan St. Martins Bedford, 2021), now in its fourth edition.
Her writing has been featured in numerous publications and anthologies, including Best American Essays, Creative Nonfiction, Good Housekeeping, The New York Times, O, the Oprah Magazine, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, Reader’s Digest, The Sun, and Tin House. She has been awarded a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and a residency at The MacDowell Colony. She teaches poetry and nonfiction in the MFA program at the University of South Florida. A native Floridian, she divides her time between St. Petersburg, Florida, and Manhattan.
Field Notes from the Flood Zone
By Heather Sellers
Publisher: BOA Editions Ltd. (April 26, 2022)
Language: English
Paperback: 80 pages
ISBN-10: 1950774570
ISBN-13 : 978-1950774579
$ 17.00
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The author’s address to
The Town Council of Edinburgh
Your poet humbly means and shaws.
That, contrair to just rights and laws,
I’ve suffer’d muckle wrang.
By Lucky Raid * and ballad-singers,
Wha thumb’d with their coarse dirty fingers
Sweet Adie’s funeral sang.
They spoil’d my sense, and staw my cash.
My muse’s pride murgully’d ;
And printing it like their vile trash.
The honest lieges whilly’d.
Allan Ramsay
(1684-1758)
The author’s address to The Town Council of Edinburgh
* A printer’s relict, who, with the hawkers, reprinted my pastoral on Mr. Addison, without my knowledge, on ugly paper, full of errors.
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No art has been denounced as often as poetry. It’s even bemoaned by poets: “I, too, dislike it,” wrote Marianne Moore.
“Many more people agree they hate poetry,” Ben Lerner writes, “than can agree what poetry is. I, too, dislike it and have largely organized my life around it and do not experience that as a contradiction because poetry and the hatred of poetry are inextricable in ways it is my purpose to explore.”
In this inventive and lucid essay, Lerner takes the hatred of poetry as the starting point of his defense of the art. He examines poetry’s greatest haters (beginning with Plato‘s famous claim that an ideal city had no place for poets, who would only corrupt and mislead the young) and both its greatest and worst practitioners, providing inspired close readings of Keats, Dickinson, McGonagall, Whitman, and others.
Throughout, he attempts to explain the noble failure at the heart of every truly great and truly horrible poem: the impulse to launch the experience of an individual into a timeless communal existence. In The Hatred of Poetry, Lerner has crafted an entertaining, personal, and entirely original examination of a vocation no less essential for being impossible.
Ben Lerner was born in Topeka, Kansas, in 1979. He has received fellowships from the Fulbright, Guggenheim, Howard, and MacArthur Foundations. His first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station, won the 2012 Believer Book Award, and excerpts from 10:04 have been awarded The Paris Review’s Terry Southern Prize. He has published three poetry collections: The Lichtenberg Figures, Angle of Yaw (a finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry),and Mean Free Path. Lerner is a professor of English at Brooklyn College.
The Hatred of Poetry
by Ben Lerner
Publisher: FSG Originals
First Edition (June 7, 2016)
Language : English
Paperback
96 pages
ISBN-10 : 0865478201
ISBN-13 : 978-0865478206
$ 8.99
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Soldaten
Alle haben diesen müden
seltsamen Zug in den bleichen Gesichtern:
In ihren Augen zittert ein schüchtern
taumelndes Ahnen von Heimat und Frieden . . .
Alle tragen sie an den müden
Füßen den Staub von zerwanderten Jahren:
Durch viele Länder sind sie gefahren
und haben noch nicht nach Hause gefunden . . .
Manchmal nur röten sich ihre Wangen,
wenn sie frohe Kunde erlauschen,
und sie sitzen zusammen und tauschen
flüsternde Reden von süßem Verlangen . . .
Ihre harten, zerrissenen Hände
faltet die Demut, und kindheitsverwehte
Worte fassen sie still im Gebete:
Herr, mach ein Ende! O Herr, gib ein Ende! . . .
Joseph Roth
(1894 – 1939)
Soldaten
Prager Tagblatt – 10.2.1918
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Award-winning poet Maya C. Popa suggests that our restless desires are inseparable from our mortality in this pressing and precise collection.
Rooting out profound meaning in language to wrench us from the moorings of the familiar and into the realm of the extraordinary, the volume asks, how do we articulate what’s by definition inarticulable? Where does sight end and imagination begin?
Lucid and musically rich, these poems sound an appeal to a dwindling natural world and summon moments from the lives of literary forbearers—John Milton’s visit to Galileo, a vase broken by Marcel Proust—to unveil fresh wonder in the unlikely meetings of the past. Popa dramatizes the difficulties of loving a world that is at once rich with beauty and full of opportunities for grief, and reveals that the natural arc of wonder, from astonishment to reflection, more deeply connects us with our humanity.
Maya C. Popa is the author of American Faith, recipient of the 2020 North American Book Prize. Her poems have appeared in the Nation, Poetry, and the Paris Review, among other publications. She lives in New York City.
Wound Is the Origin of Wonder
by Maya C. Popa
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company (November 8, 2022)
Language: English
Hardcover: 96 pages
ISBN-10: 1324021365
ISBN-13: 978-1324021360
Price $26.95
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Orphée
. . . Je compose en esprit, sous les myrtes, Orphée
L’Admirable ! . . . le feu, des cirques purs descend ;
Il change le mont chauve en auguste trophée
D’où s’exhale d’un dieu l’acte retentissant.
Si le dieu chante, il rompt le site tout-puissant ;
Le soleil voit l’horreur du mouvement des pierres ;
Une plainte inouïe appelle éblouissants
Les hauts murs d’or harmonieux d’un sanctuaire.
Il chante, assis au bord du ciel splendide, Orphée !
Le roc marche, et trébuche; et chaque pierre fée
Se sent un poids nouveau qui vers l’azur délire !
D’un Temple à demi nu le soir baigne l’essor,
Et soi-même il s’assemble et s’ordonne dans l’or
À l’âme immense du grand hymne sur la lyre !
Paul Valéry
(1871-1945)
Orphée
Poème
Album de vers anciens
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Heterdaad
Avondgrauwen glijdt over omfloerste bekentenissen
van lijdzame biechtelingen. Op de zolders hunner
zielen zullen spijt noch verwijten verstoffen. Er
klinken vermaningen aan de bedeesde teugels
van de nacht maar er zal, hoe traag ook kousen op
worden getrokken, tegen ochtend geen verweer zijn.
Bert Bevers
Heterdaad
uit de bundel in voorbereiding Bedekte termen
Bert Bevers is dichter en schrijver
Hij woont en werkt in Antwerpen (Be)
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