Category Archives: poetry

Let the day grow on you upward.

nature, poetry

Is this poem about death, about a body laid to rest in the grave? In particular the line about ants walking over the eyelids makes me think so.

EARTH

Let the day grow on you upward
through your feet,
the vegetal knuckles,

to your knees of stone,
until by evening you are a black tree;
feel, with evening,

the swifts thicken your hair,
the new moon rising out of your forehead,
and the moonlit veins of silver

running from your armpits
like rivulets under white leaves.
Sleep, as ants

cross over your eyelids.
You have never possessed anything
as deeply as this.

This is all you have owned
from the first outcry
through forever;

you can never be dispossessed.

-Derek Walcott

The wide and luminous eye.

poetry, time, ,

IN POSITION

I want to tell you about time, how strangely
it behaves when you haven’t got much of it left:
after 60 say, or 70, when you’d think it would

find itself squeezed so hard that like melting
ice it would surely begin to shrink, each day
looking smaller and smaller – well, it’s not so.

The rules change, a single hour can grow huge
and quiet, full of reflections like an old river,
its slow-turning eddies and whirls showing you

every face of your life in a fluid design –
your children for instance, how you see them
deepened and changed, not merely by age, but by

time itself, its wide and luminous eye; and you
realise at last that your every gift to them – love,
your very life, should they need it – will not

and cannot come back; it wasn’t a gift at all
but a borrowing, a baton for them to pass on in
their turn. Look, there they are in this

shimmering distance, rushing through their kind
of time, moving faster than you yet not catching up.
You’re alone. And slowly you begin to discern

the queer outline of what’s to come: the bend in
the river beyond which, moving steadily, head up
(you hope), you will simply vanish from sight.

-Lauris Dorothy Edmond (1924 – 2000)
New Zealand

Waikato River, New Zealand

Did they also fade away?

poetry, ,

FLOWER

A withered flower lies forgotten
Inside a book, before my eyes:
My soul awakes, all of the sudden,
And I begin to fantasize:

Where did it grow? Among which plants?
How long ago? And picked by whom,
By foreign or familiar hands?
Did it already start to bloom?

Placed here in tribute to a date,
Or to a fateful separation?
Or to a stroll under the shade,
Alone, without a destination?

Is he or she alive today?
Where did they find their hidden nook?
Or did they also fade away,
Just like this flower in the book?

-Alexander Pushkin
     Translated by Andrey Kneller

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

photo source

A cat-sized hole.

poetry,

A SMALL-SIZED MYSTERY

Leave a door open long enough,
a cat will enter.
Leave food, it will stay.
Soon, on cold nights,
you’ll be saying “Excuse me”
if you want to get out of your chair.
But one thing you’ll never hear from a cat
is “Excuse me.”
Nor Einstein’s famous theorem.
Nor “The quality of mercy is not strained.”
In the dictionary of Cat, mercy is missing.
In this world where much is missing,
a cat fills only a cat-sized hole.
Yet your whole body turns toward it
again and again because it is there.

-Jane Hirshfield

 

The picture is from some time back,
when I welcomed the many stray-ish cats in the neighborhood,
and fed them what cat food was left over after our cat died.
This one was particularly bold, but not friendly at all.