Tag Archives: life

Do not accomplice me.

death, humanity, poetry, , , ,

TO THE MERCY KILLERS

If ever mercy move you murder me,
I pray you, kindly killers, let me live.
Never conspire with death to set me free,
but let me know such life as pain can give.
Even though I be a clot, an aching clench,
a stub, a stump, a butt, a scab, a knob,
a screaming pain, a putrefying stench,
still let me live, so long as life shall throb.
Even though I turn such traitor to myself
as beg to die, do not accomplice me.
Even though I seem not human, a mute shelf
of glucose, bottled blood, machinery
to swell the lungs and pump the heart — even so,
do not put out my life. Let me still glow.

-Dudley Randall, After the Killing

Drunken with the fatness.

mountains, poetry, Psalms, , ,

O Lord, Thy mercy is in heaven,
and Thy truth reacheth unto the clouds.

Thy righteousness is as the mountains of God,
Thy judgments are a great abyss.

Men and beasts wilt Thou save, O Lord.
How Thou hast multiplied Thy mercy, O God!

Let the sons of men hope in the shelter of Thy wings.

They shall be drunken with the fatness of Thy house,
and of the torrent of Thy delight shalt Thou make them to drink.

For in Thee is the fountain of life,
in Thy light shall we see light.

-From Psalm 35

Clara Porges – Bergell Mountains

The shape of what you lived.

poetry, , ,

REMEMBERING

And you wait. You wait for the one thing
that will change your life,
make it more than it is—
something wonderful, exceptional,
stones awakening, depths opening to you.

In the dusky bookstalls
old books glimmer gold and brown.
You think of lands you journeyed through,
of paintings and a dress once worn
by a woman you never found again.

And suddenly you know: that was enough.
You rise and there appears before you
in all its longings and hesitations
the shape of what you lived.

-Rainer Maria Rilke

Rilke, by Leonid Pasternak 1928