17 Comments for “Old world”

1. (click to show comment)

   “I think he will take this island home in his pocket
   And give it to his son for an apple.”
   - Wm. Shakespeare, The Tempest

   

   Posted By: Henry Gould on November 25, 2008 at 4:53 pm

2. (click to show comment)

   ‘As I was on the road, observing the littleness of the houses, the trees, the cattle and the people, I began to think myself in Lilliput. I was afraid of trampling on every traveller I met, and often called aloud to have them stand out of the way…’
   Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift

   

   Posted By: Lavinia Greenlaw on November 26, 2008 at 4:05 am

3. (click to show comment)

   A Noiseless Patient Spider
   A noiseless patient spider,
   I mark’d where on a little promontory it stood isolated,
   Mark’d how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,
   It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,
   Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.
   And you O my soul where you stand,
   Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,
   Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them,
   Till the bridge you will need be form’d, till the ductile anchor hold,
   Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.
   - Walt Whitman

   

   Posted By: Gary B. Fitzgerald on November 26, 2008 at 11:24 am

4. (click to show comment)

   Dark Pines Under Water
   This land like a mirror turns you inward
   And you become a forest in a furtive lake;
   The dark pines of your mind reach downward,
   You dream in the green of your time,
   Your memory is a row of sinking pines.
   Explorer, you tell yourself this is not what you came for
   Although it is good here, and green;
   You had meant to move with a kind of largeness,
   You had planned a heavy grace, an anguished dream.
   But the dark pines of your mind dip deeper
   And you are sinking, sinking, sleeper
   In an elementary world;
   There is something down there and you want it told.
   Gwendolyn MacEwen
   The Shadow Maker (1972)

   

   Posted By: Mary Meriam on November 26, 2008 at 10:23 pm

5. (click to show comment)

   A monster
   rising from the sea,
   ‘Will you take tea?’
   from “Gaelic Stories”, Iain Crichton Smith

   

   Posted By: Lavinia Greenlaw on November 27, 2008 at 10:05 am

6. (click to show comment)

   And you as well must die, belovèd dust
   And you as well must die, belovèd dust,
   And all your beauty stand you in no stead;
   This flawless, vital hand, this perfect head,
   This body of flame and steel, before the gust
   Of Death, or under his autumnal frost,
   Shall be as any leaf, be no less dead
   Than the first leaf that fell,this wonder fled,
   Altered, estranged, disintegrated, lost.
   Nor shall my love avail you in your hour.
   In spite of all my love, you will arise
   Upon that day and wander down the air
   Obscurely as the unattended flower,
   It mattering not how beautiful you were,
   Or how belovèd above all else that dies.
   - Edna St. Vincent Millay

   

   Posted By: Gary B. Fitzgerald on November 27, 2008 at 7:07 pm

7. (click to show comment)

   It does not matter who you are,
   It does not matter who I am.
   This book has not been purposely
   made for any reason.
   It has made itself by circumstances.
   It is aimed at nobody at all.
   It is now left just as an object by me
   to be encountered by somebody else.
   - from a notebook of W.S. Graham, ca. 1973

   

   Posted By: Don Share on November 27, 2008 at 10:35 pm

8. (click to show comment)

   That all my poems over the long years before I met you made you come true
   Hayden Carruth

   

   Posted By: Mary Meriam on November 28, 2008 at 12:43 am

9. (click to show comment)

   Call to walk comes as of true nature,
   Easy should the body move.
   And poetry comes after eight miles’ seeking,
   Mere right out of mere love.
   Ivor Gurney, Silver Birch

   

   Posted By: Lavinia Greenlaw on November 28, 2008 at 2:37 am

10. (click to show comment)

    wow ! wow ! wow !
    Yo tiny town squeezers
    whaazzup wiv yiz trippin full time on the miseriblic moment?
    Yiz wanna get like, dead busy ‘n up to all sorts of daftness
    wiv da full time unemployed penniless poet
    just offered a well paid voluntary position bein a global
    news hound, reviewin for the World Poetry Council
    Surf Collective; but it’s a bit tricky at the mo coz I’m banged up
    on the secure unit of Ward 11.
    If yous lot out there in cyberville can rustle up a snatch squad
    and have a do at smuggling me past the nurses
    when showtime explodes on the pages
    I’m your number one hack, firin on all the ink cylindrical spikes
    I can stick in and go to OD heaven on, squeeze feelin’ trainee corpses.
    Just tell me sister about the where’s ‘n when’s and make sure
    there’s a stash of unmentionables on standby
    so we can get in the right frame of mind as befits a posse
    at the press launch of such an august red alert occassion.
    wow ! wow ! wow !
    rantin great right through to the giftless of our too few true poetic
    community, banged up wiv the Ron Sillyman red alert ’bout poetry
    theft, satirically disected in that part of da ed known as the Jan Manzwotz
    Daemon Blogspot — so get clickin ‘n tell uz what yiz R finkin laah.
    Hallelujah Hallelujah
    wow ! wow ! wow !
    Hallelujah Hellelujah
    Wow ! Wow ! Wow !

    

    Posted By: Desmond Swords on November 28, 2008 at 4:03 am

11. (click to show comment)

    A cricket.

    

    Posted By: aonymous on November 28, 2008 at 8:59 am

12. (click to show comment)

    “what sort of enchantment is this?
    what art will you weild with a fagot?
    are you Hectate? are you a witch?
    a vulture, a hieroglyph,
    the sign or the name of a goddess?
    what sort of goddess is this?
    where are we? who are you?
    where is this desolate coast?
    who am I? am I a ghost?”
    H.D., Helen in Egypt

    

    Posted By: Mary Meriam on November 28, 2008 at 11:58 am

13. (click to show comment)

    For You Not Yet
    As I write, right now, your mother
    is the size of a pea.
    She will grow and be born
    and not hear of me.
    You at this time
    do not even exist and only
    by luck and grace will you be
    if your mother survives
    and gets married.
    But I write not for your mother
    or even right now.
    Now knows nothing of me.
    Now knows not what I now do.
    I write for tomorrow, for they
    not yet here.
    I have written for you.
    Copyright 2008 – HARDWOOD-77 Poems, Gary B. Fitzgerald

    

    Posted By: Gary B. Fitzgerald on November 28, 2008 at 2:21 pm

14. (click to show comment)

    High Country Weather
    Alone we are born
    And die alone;
    Yet see the red-gold cirrus
    Over snow mountain shine.
    Along the upland road
    Ride easy, stranger:
    Surrender to the sky
    Your heart of anger.
    James K. Baxter

    

    Posted By: Lavinia Greenlaw on November 28, 2008 at 3:18 pm

15. (click to show comment)

    when serpents bargain for the right to squirm
    and the sun strikes to gain a living wage-
    when thorns regard their roses with alarm
    and rainbows are insured against old age
    when every thrush may sing no new moon in
    if all screech-owls have not okayed his voice
    -and any wave signs on the dotted line
    or else an ocean is compelled to close
    when the oak begs permission of the birch
    to make an acorn – valleys accuse their
    mountains of having altitude – and march
    denounces april as a saboteur
    then we’ll believe in that incredible
    unanimal mankind (and not until)
    .
    - E.E.Cummings
    .
    Is that phone ringing?

    

    Posted By: Gary B. Fitzgerald on November 28, 2008 at 4:20 pm

16. (click to show comment)

    The composer’s name was Beagle or something,
    one of those Brits who make the world wistful
    with chorales and canticles and this piece,
    a tone poem or what-have-you,
    chimes and strings aswirl, dangerous for one
    whose eyelids and sockets have been rashing from tears.
    April Bernard, Beagle or Something

    

    Posted By: Mary Meriam on November 29, 2008 at 12:21 am

17. (click to show comment)

    The train ride to Oxford was something else.
    Profound droning weight of iron travel machine,
    farmland English backyard a pale moss green
    in the moist December light, your pulse
    is calm outside of London, Providence
    might be a way of life, a common sphere,
    fair, sensible and just – a Hertfordshire
    in an ovoid Shakespeare’s head, a salience.
    - Henry Gould, Stubborn Grew

    

    Posted By: Henry Gould on November 30, 2008 at 9:11 pm

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