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Poetry
Jun 9, 2010 9:20:47 GMT
Post by suze on Jun 9, 2010 9:20:47 GMT
I know ppl soemtimes like to share a poem or two
This one is amazing --
How to walk on a knife edge -
First, remember that this may hurt, your feet may bleed because it must be done in bare feet; shoes are no good, in fact you must be completely naked. Then, placing one foot on the cold steel, press down until you can feel the knife's edge along the whole of your sole. Quickly transfer your weight to the other foot. You must keep moving: any hesitation at this stage could be fatal. Halfway along there is always the temptation to look back and see how far you've travelled. Resist. Keep your eye instead on the next millimetre of metal and then the next and the next. If you keep your head you may make it to the other side without flaying your feet to ribbons. Then you can look back and wonder how you managed for so long, to stay upright on that unremitting tightrope.
Hugh Dunkerley
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Poetry
Jun 9, 2010 9:25:04 GMT
Post by suze on Jun 9, 2010 9:25:04 GMT
I think this is amazing for the depiction of tension and yet at the same time the day by day coping that we do with difficult things, and looking back over them you wonder how you did it .. keeping going on the next millimetre of metal and then the next and the next.
I like the way the whole thing is an extended metaphor for a lesson about tightrope walking. It's done as series of instructions. AND I like it that walking on a knife-edge is, itself, a metaphor for any difficult thing anyone has ever had to do, and keep doing, because stopping doing it could be fatal.
I love that final line, the scansion and the repetitive sounds in the words upright and unremitting tightrope put close together give me a little shiver of recogniton and yet satisfaction too. I have chance to reflect that I have stayed upright. Upright is good!
I think this id great stuff, by Hugh Dunkerley though I've not heard of him b4, I just saw this posted on a.n.other forum!
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Poetry
Jun 9, 2010 9:34:52 GMT
Post by suze on Jun 9, 2010 9:34:52 GMT
Here's another from the same other board!
Late Fragment
And did you get what you wanted from this life, even so? I did. And what did you want? To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth.
by Raymond Carver
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Poetry
Jun 9, 2010 9:50:18 GMT
Post by suze on Jun 9, 2010 9:50:18 GMT
This is one of the first poems I remember really loving at school --- we 'did" Browning for O-level ...
I have just missed the exact time of year that he is enthusing about .. but it still feels relevant .. the weather and the blossom and the birds were great this May, and I've always thought I'd rather live here than abroad! Abroad is ok, but it's not home, is it! England looks especially beautiful just now ... in all its tiny natural details ....
Home Thoughts, From Abroad
OH, to be in England Now that April's there, And whoever wakes in England Sees, some morning, unaware, That the lowest boughs and the brush-wood sheaf Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf, While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough In England -- now!
And after April, when May follows, And the whitethroat builds, and all the swallows! Hark, where my blossomed pear-tree in the hedge Leans to the field and scatters on the clover Blossoms and dewdrops--at the bent spray's edge-- That's the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over, Lest you should think he never could recapture The first fine careless rapture! And though the fields look rough with hoary dew, All will be gay when noontide wakes anew The buttercups, the little children's dower -- Far brighter than this gaudy melon-flower!
Robert Browning
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Poetry
Jun 13, 2010 10:07:29 GMT
Post by anne on Jun 13, 2010 10:07:29 GMT
Hi - we have two poetry threads..would it be possible to add Pauline's poetry thread to this one suze? Or for Pauline to add her poems on here?
I love what you've written about the Dunkerley poem, suze - I think many of us have that shiver of recognition you mention
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Poetry
Jun 13, 2010 11:40:01 GMT
Post by suze on Jun 13, 2010 11:40:01 GMT
I dunno how to merge threads, it'snot offered at the bottom in my admin buttons ..
perhaps poppy will just cut and paste it over here!
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Poetry
Jun 13, 2010 15:37:51 GMT
Post by Pauline on Jun 13, 2010 15:37:51 GMT
A poem by Jenny Joseph
When I am an old woman, I shall wear purple, With a red hat, which doesn’t go and doesn’t suit me, And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves and satin sandals, and say we’ve no money for butter. I shall sit down on the pavement when I’m tired, and gobble up samples in shops and press alarm bells, And run my stick along the public railings, And make up for the sobriety of my youth………..
From Sentinel
I've moved my poem here, so you can delete the other thread if you like. Didn't see this thread before.
When I am old, I shall have no pension And my flat will always be cold, With empty cupboards and no heating. I shall sit in a blanket all day and no-one will know I’ve never moved, Because no-one has time to visit.............................. You can delete t'other thread now if you like. I've copied this over.
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Poetry
Jun 20, 2010 11:06:18 GMT
Post by suze on Jun 20, 2010 11:06:18 GMT
This is a poem that our friend Liz wrote for us ... it combines her experience of going to watch the eclipse that year, with B and I starting our relationship. It's lovely having a poem written for you, and we used it as part of the service at our Civil Partnership. Eclipse of the MoonDecember 1992 For Sue and Brigid Light, a living curve, filled two cupped hands: brilliant silvered peace soaked through thirsty stones into the sodden earth. The air clear as cold water, sheened through with moonlight. Marking the slow hour, a dark mouth opened, a black tongue licked down to the last crescent and past that sliver of light; melting to dissolution. Hill, tree and wind merged into the same shadow, swallowed, drawn in, leaving the taste of clean rain. The dark wait began: an inhalation held, pent in pounded ribs, until the pulse broke. Over the bare shoulder of the hill a catch of light brightened as the closed lips parted and spoke their only word, which was light. The speaking tree offered ripe yellow fruit, growing full in the palm of a hand. Calling it lightened the night heavy sky spread stars like leaves over the listening land.
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Poetry
Jun 20, 2010 20:21:42 GMT
Post by anne on Jun 20, 2010 20:21:42 GMT
Beautiful, I'm welling up a little bit reading this .. the sense of journey from darkness to light
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Poetry
Jun 21, 2010 7:10:21 GMT
Post by Pauline on Jun 21, 2010 7:10:21 GMT
Yes Sue, a brilliant poem. I have found a nice poem in chapter 4 of the book I am reading about the biography of Bram Stoker, who wrote 'Dracula'. The poem however is actually written by Oscar Whilde for his wife Constance. .......................
For if of these fallen petals One to you seems fair, Love will waft it till it settles On your hair. And when the wind & winter harden All the loveless land It will whisper of the garden You will understand.
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karen
Full Member
WHEEeeee.......urk
Posts: 168
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Poetry
Jun 21, 2010 10:05:21 GMT
Post by karen on Jun 21, 2010 10:05:21 GMT
not quite the same thing, I got this as spam trying to sell me cracked software today
"all the dovelike moans beguiles. all the dovelike moans beguiles. where shall we find thy like? ah, stay!"
for some reason I quite like that
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Poetry
Jun 22, 2010 1:04:55 GMT
Post by suze on Jun 22, 2010 1:04:55 GMT
interesting way to sell software!
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Poetry
Jul 1, 2010 20:55:58 GMT
Post by anne on Jul 1, 2010 20:55:58 GMT
One of my favourites ..
The Fish by Elizabeth Bishop I caught a tremendous fish and held him beside the boat half out of water, with my hook fast in a corner of his mouth. He didn't fight. He hadn't fought at all. He hung a grunting weight, battered and venerable and homely. Here and there his brown skin hung in strips like ancient wallpaper, and its pattern of darker brown was like wallpaper: shapes like full-blown roses stained and lost through age. He was speckled and barnacles, fine rosettes of lime, and infested with tiny white sea-lice, and underneath two or three rags of green weed hung down. While his gills were breathing in the terrible oxygen --the frightening gills, fresh and crisp with blood, that can cut so badly-- I thought of the coarse white flesh packed in like feathers, the big bones and the little bones, the dramatic reds and blacks of his shiny entrails, and the pink swim-bladder like a big peony. I looked into his eyes which were far larger than mine but shallower, and yellowed, the irises backed and packed with tarnished tinfoil seen through the lenses of old scratched isinglass. They shifted a little, but not to return my stare. --It was more like the tipping of an object toward the light. I admired his sullen face, the mechanism of his jaw, and then I saw that from his lower lip --if you could call it a lip grim, wet, and weaponlike, hung five old pieces of fish-line, or four and a wire leader with the swivel still attached, with all their five big hooks grown firmly in his mouth. A green line, frayed at the end where he broke it, two heavier lines, and a fine black thread still crimped from the strain and snap when it broke and he got away. Like medals with their ribbons frayed and wavering, a five-haired beard of wisdom trailing from his aching jaw. I stared and stared and victory filled up the little rented boat, from the pool of bilge where oil had spread a rainbow around the rusted engine to the bailer rusted orange, the sun-cracked thwarts, the oarlocks on their strings, the gunnels--until everything was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow! And I let the fish go.
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Poetry
Jul 12, 2010 11:12:21 GMT
Post by Pauline on Jul 12, 2010 11:12:21 GMT
Toads
Why should I let the toad work Squat on my life? Can’t I use my wit as a pitchfork And drive the brute off?
Six days of the week it soils With its sickening poison- Just for the price of a few bills! That’s out of proportion.
Lots of folk live on their wits: Lecturers, lispers, Losels, loblolly-men, louts- They don’t end as paupers;
Lots of folk live up lanes With fires in a bucket, Eat windfalls and tinned sardines- They seem to like it.
Their nippers have got bare feet, Their unspeakable wives Are skinny as whippets- and yet No one actually starves.
Ah, were I courageous enough To shout Stuff your pension! But I know, all too well, that’s the stuff That dreams are made on:
For something sufficiently toad-like Squats in me, too; Its hunkers are heavy as hard luck, And cold as snow,
And will never allow me to blarney My way to getting The fame and the girl and the money All at one sitting.
I don’t say, one bodies the other One’s spiritual truth; But I do say it’s hard to lose either, When you have both. ................................ I quite like this poem by Philip Larkin. Maybe those of us who are retired for one reason or another find a message in this.
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Poetry
Dec 20, 2010 19:51:05 GMT
Post by Pauline on Dec 20, 2010 19:51:05 GMT
'A Prayer for Clowns'
"God bless all clowns Who star the world with laughter Who ring the rafters With a flying jest, Who make the world spin merry on its way And somehow add more beauty to each day. God bless all clowns So poor the world would be Lacking their piquant touch, hilarity, The belly-laughs, the ringing, lovely mirth That makes a friendly place of this earth. God bless all clowns- Give them a long good life, Make bright their way-they're a race apart! All comest most who turn their hearts' pain Into a dazzling jest to lift the heart. God bless all clowns".
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