Poem Of The Week - David Whyte

Via my good friend Claudio who sent me David Whyte's reading of this poem on YouTube. Thank-you Claudio! Also worth hearing is Leave Everything You Know Behind.

Everything Is Waiting For You

Your great mistake is to act the drama
as if you were alone. As if life
were a progressive and cunning crime
with no witness to the tiny hidden
transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny
the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely,
even you, at times, have felt the grand array;
the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding
out your solo voice. You must note
the way the soap dish enables you,
or the window latch grants you freedom.
Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.
The stairs are your mentor of things
to come, the doors have always been there
to frighten you and invite you,
and the tiny speaker in the phone
is your dream-ladder to divinity.

Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into
the conversation. The kettle is singing
even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots
have left their arrogant aloofness and
seen the good in you at last. All the birds
and creatures of the world are unutterably
themselves. Everything is waiting for you.

Poem Of The Week - Goethe

I've said before that I love when my seemingly diverse interests collide. I never anticipated any meaningful chemistry from the intersection of motorbikes and poetry though. And how wrong I was. Courtesy of Olaf Tiemann's gorgeous Honda CB750 Café Racer I bring you Goethe, another poem giving voice to the otherwise inexpressible. What is it that draws you in until you are lost?

The Fisher

The water rolled, the water swelled;
A fisher sat thereby,
And quitely his angle held;
Chilled to his heart was he.
The water in dreamy motion kept,
As he sat in dreamy mood;
A wave hove up - and a damsel stepped,
All dripping, from the flood.

She sang to him, she spake to him:
"Why wilt thou lure away
My sweet brood by thy human art
To the deadly light of day?
Ah! knewest thou how light of heart
The little fishes live.
Thou wouldst come down, all as thou art,
And thy true life receive."

"Bathes not the sun with all his skies?
Bathes not the moon by night,
To breathe my dew awhile, and rise
All smiling doubly bright?
And tempt the not the deep, deep skies,
Here spread in watery blue?
And tempt the not thine own dark eyes
Down through th' eternal dew?"

The water rolled, the water swelled;
It wetted his bare feet;
A something through his bosom thrilled;
He seemed his love to meet,
She spake to him, she sang to him;
With him 'twas quickly o'er:
Half she drew him, half sank he in,
And never was seen more.

Poem Of The Week- Anna Akhmatova

Anna Akhmatova is another poet introduced to me by a friend and another I owe a debt of gratitude for. Anna Akhmatova tells you the truth, you catch your breath, your heart skips a beat maybe you bite your tounge but always you want more.

In Human Closeness There...

In human closeness there is a secret edge,
Nor love nor passion can pass it above,
Let lips with lips be joined in silent rage,
And hearts be burst asunder with the love.

And friendship, too, is powerless plot,
And so years of bliss with noble tends,
When your heart is free and known not,
The slow languor of the earthy sense.

And they who strive to reach this edge are mad,
But they who reached are shocked with anguish hard --
Now you know why beneath your hand
You do not feel the beating of my heart.

Poem Of The Week- Wallace Stevens

This poem represents one of those odd little intersections in my life which I enjoy so much, it's read out at one of Landmark Education's courses. But it's a poem that speaks for itself.

So far male poets have dominated my selections, I'm not sure how that happened but I promise to remedy it with the next poem. Have a favourite female poet? Let me know in the comments below.


Of Mere Being

The palm at the end of the mind,
Beyond the last thought, rises
In the bronze distance.

A gold-feathered bird
Sings in the palm, without human meaning,
Without human feeling, a foreign song.

You know then that it is not the reason
That makes us happy or unhappy.
The bird sings. Its feathers shine.

The palm stands on the edge of space.
The wind moves slowly in the branches.
The bird's fire-fangled feathers dangle down.

Another 2 second guide to the Landmark Forum

Landmarks programs are like Tai Chi for the mind. You discover ways to be free from the habitual patterns of the mind. The occurring world transforms. In place of struggle there is flow.

Poem Of The Week - Māris Čaklais

I can't tell you a whole lot about Māris Čaklais, the best information I could find, in English at least, was sadly an announcement of his death. I was given a copy of his book Premonition by a friend otherwise I am sure I would never have encountered him. No doubt Robert Frost was correct when he said "Poetry is what gets lost in translation" nonetheless this is a gem of a book with some beautiful poems, I hope you enjoy this one.

A Little Fairy Tale

It was all in the land
Whose gates are now locked against me,
Whose keys I have lost-
In my childhood.

As in everyone's childhood,
I, too, had a fairy tale,
And like everyone's fairy-tale
Mine, too, had a princess.

She did not converse like grown-ups.
She spoke our own language.
The princess sang songs.

When, behind the window, the car
Hooted, to carry the princess away,
We clung to our princess-aunt's skirts
And we cried.

When our breath had melted them all-
Every flower of ice on the window-pane,
Only then, we remembered
To finish playing at soldiers.

It was all long ago.
And the fairy-tales
Which even now I believe in
Are of a somewhat different order.

Why do I speak of it then?

There are times when the past, like a child,
Clings to one's skirts, and cries-
And one does not know what to do.

Poem Of The Week - Rabindranath Tagore

Another in my irregular Poem Of The Week series. I don't remember when/where I first encountered Rabindranath Tagore but lines from his works have been fixtures in my quote file for a long while. It was the anniversary of Rabindranath Tagore's birth yesterday so I'm a day late, I hope he and you can forgive me.

If any-one can shed light on the "Iffe" in "In the Iffe of the seeker" please comment below and also please do share your favourite poets/poems.

I

I wonder if I know him
In whose speech is my voice,
In whose movement is my being,
Whose skill is in my lines,
Whose melody is in my songs
In joy and sorrow.
I thought he was chained within me,
Contained by tears and laughter,
Work and play.
I thought he was my very self
Coming to an end with my death.
Why then in a flood of joy do I feel him
In the sight and touch of my beloved?
This 'I' beyond self I found
On the shores of the shining sea.
Therefore I know
This 'I' is not imprisoned within my bounds.
Losing myself, I find him
Beyond the borders of time and space.
Through the Ages
I come to know his Shining Self
In the Iffe of the seeker,
In the voice of the poet.
From the dark clouds pour the rains.
I sit and think:
Bearing so many forms, so many names,
I come down, crossing the threshold
Of countless births and deaths.
The Supreme undivided, complete in himself,
Embracing past and present,
Dwells in Man.
Within Him I shall find myself -
The 'I' that reaches everywhere.

Poem Of The Week- Redhawk

I first discovered Redhawk through New Edition bookshop when it was on the café strip in Fremantle, they always had the best poetry section of any bookshop in the state, not sure if they still do but Borders in the city has a good range. I picked up a copy of the Art of Dying and I loved what I read, had to take it home with me. The copy I brought has page 69 torn out; that poem must be really good, I hope whoever has it really appreciates it. It's hard to pick a favourite from the book, for me Redhawk is good everywhere but I've been thinking about this poem all week so here it is.

Who's your favourite poet/favourite poem? Let me know in the comments, I love to discover new poets through peoples recommendations.

Some Meditations on the Art of Poetry

Given 2 good choices, both unfettered
in their meaning, the simpler is better.

Mastery of rhyme was understood by Frost:
impossible to say which rhymed word came first;

that rhyme is most sound
which surprises when it's found.

Irony is the rarest of quality in verse,
wit next; their absence is a curse.

Brevity is not only the soul of wit,
no virtue in verse overshadows it.

If the queen of virtue is brevity,
her handmaiden is humility.

Who things they've found the truth, hesitate
and when they write it down, understate.

If the choice is form or meaning,
form needs weaning.

Real art is hard, but the hardest part is
ars celare artis.

What is seen in great poems as art
is in truth the urgency of the heart.

Those who believe they are the source
sew the seeds of their remorse;

those who serve something higher
step into a holy fire

where they burn.
This is what the best poets learn.

The secret to revision is well known:
cut it to the bone.

The secret to reading well:
risk the whisper, conserve the yell;

let the poem create the spell,
chatter in-between is mostly hell;

keep it shy of an hour,
and mix wit with power,

grief
with comic relief.

From the Art Of Dying by Redhawk

Computer Meet Compressor

For a while now my computer has been screaming like a banshee every time I've turned it on. I thought it was had the bomb, on it's way out, kaput. It would start off quietly enough but slowly get louder and louder until it was unbearable. I complained about it at work the other day and someone suggested that maybe it needed a bit of de-dusting. I scoffed at the idea because it's never been in any particularly dusty environment. But since I was on holidays this week and I had to move the compressor (we recently moved house and the compressor was still at the old place) and it gave me the excuse to go to the hardware shop (a treat in itself) and buy one of those funky blowing attachments I thought I would give it a go. I got all the bits home performed the essential assembly and then introduced the computer to the compressor. Wasn't there some dust and lint and, well stuff in there! I could hardly breathe for a few minutes. The blower attachment worked a treat and you know what? The computer is back to it's old quiet self now. I never thought the power tools in the garage could fix computer problems before, I wonder what other problems I can solve, the angle grinder hasn't been used for a while...