roomE: the adventures of Mister Knowbody

[ruknowhere]

[ruknowhere]

"In the desert" by Stephen Crane.

In the desert

I saw a creature, naked, bestial,

Who, squatting upon the ground,

Held his heart in his hands,

And ate of it.

I said: “Is it good, friend?”

“It is bitter – bitter,” he answered;

“But I like it

Because it is bitter,

And because it is my heart.”

[ruknowhere]

[wellconstructedsentences]

Soul and soil are not separate. Neither are wind and spirit, nor water and tears. We are eroding and evolving, at once, like the red rock landscape before me. Our grief is our love. Our love will be our undoing as we quietly disengage from the collective madness of the patriarchal mind that says aggression is the way forward.

Erosion by Terry Tempest Williams

[ruknowhere]

WAITING AND WATCHING

Under the light of the moon

and the bright of the night stars

emerging Sun provides just hints of color

Of this day that is to come

Markers usually lost in time

calm sadness and recognition

of that lost and that found

my only wish would be to leave it on your lips

[slackville]

Independence

Freedom from control or influence of another or others

Liberty

The condition of being free from confinement, servitude, or forced labor.

The condition of being free from oppressive restriction or control by a government or other power.

A right to engage in certain actions without control or interference by a government or other power.

ex: "the liberties protected by the Bill of Rights."

Justice

fairness in the way people are dealt with

[ruknowhere]

Czesław Mitosz

Polish poet, diplomat, prosaist writer, and translator. Nobel Prize winner (1911-2004)

A Song on the End of the World

On the day the world ends

A bee circles a clover,

A fisherman mends a glimmering net.

Happy porpoises jump in the sea,

By the rainspout young sparrows are playing

And the snake is gold-skinned as it should always be.

On the day the world ends

Women walk through the fields under their umbrellas,

A drunkard grows sleepy at the edge of a lawn,

Vegetable peddlers shout in the street

And a yellow-sailed boat comes nearer the island,

The voice of a violin lasts in the air

And leads into a starry night.

And those who expected lightning and thunder

Are disappointed.

And those who expected signs and archangels’ trumps

Do not believe it is happening now.

As long as the sun and the moon are above,

As long as the bumblebee visits a rose,

As long as rosy infants are born

No one believes it is happening now.

Only a white-haired old man, who would be a prophet

Yet is not a prophet, for he’s much too busy,

Repeats while he binds his tomatoes:

There will be no other end of the world,

There will be no other end of the world

[ruknowhere]

https://voetica.com/poem/2103 (with audio reading)

Theodore Roethke

All the Earth, All the Air

1

I stand with standing stones.

The stones stay where they are.

The twiny winders wind;

The little fishes move.

A ripple wakes the pond.

2

This joy's my fall. I am! -

A man rich as a cat,

A cat in the fork of a tree,

When she shakes out her hair.

I think of that, and laugh.

3

All innocence and wit,

She keeps my wishes warm;

When, easy as a beast,

She steps along the street,

I start to leave myself.

4

The truly beautiful,

Their bodies cannot lie:

The blossom stings the bee.

The ground needs the abyss,

Say the stones, say the fish.

5

A field recedes in sleep.

Where are the dead? Before me

Floats a single star.

A tree glides with the moon.

The field is mine! Is mine!

6

In a lurking-place I lurk,

One with the sullen dark.

What's hell but a cold heart?

But who, faced with her face,

Would not rejoice?

[ruknowhere]

https://voetica.com/poem/2842 (with audio recording)

Richard Wilbur

Praise In Summer

Obscurely yet most surely called to praise,

As sometimes summer calls us all, I said

The hills are heavens full of branching ways

Where star-nosed moles fly overhead the dead;

I said the trees are mines in air, I said

See how the sparrow burrows in the sky!

And then I wondered why this mad instead

Perverts our praise to uncreation, why

Such savor's in this wrenching things awry.

Does sense so stale that it must needs derange

The world to know it? To a praiseful eye

Should it not be enough of fresh and strange

That trees grow green, and moles can course in clay,

And sparrows sweep the ceiling of our day?

[ruknowhere]

William Carlos Williams

A La Lune

Slowly rising, slowly strengthening moon,

Pardon us our fear in pride:

Pardon us our troubled quietnesses!

Aye, pardon us, O moon,

Round, bright upon the darkening!

Pardon us our little journeys endlessly repeated!

All halting tendernesses pardon us,

O high moon!

For you, nooning by night,

You having crept to the full,

You, O moon, must have understanding of these things.

[ruknowhere]

“The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected. Even when the revolutionist might himself repent of his revolution, the traditionalist is already defending it as part of his tradition. Thus we have two great types — the advanced person who rushes us into ruin, and the retrospective person who admires the ruins. He admires them especially by moonlight, not to say moonshine. Each new blunder of the progressive or prig becomes instantly a legend of immemorial antiquity for the snob.”

–G. K. Chesterton

[ruknowhere]

"And a softness came from the starlight and filled me to the bone." W.B. Yeats

[ruknowhere]

We went down into the silent garden. Dawn is the time when nothing breathes, the hour of silence. Everything is transfixed, only the light moves.

- Leonora Carrington

Veil after veil of thin dusky gauze is lifted, and by degrees the forms and colours of things are restored to them, and we watch the dawn remaking the world in its antique pattern.

- Oscar Wilde

[ruknowhere]

“They think that intelligence is about noticing things are relevant (detecting patterns); in a complex world, intelligence consists in ignoring things that are irrelevant (avoiding false patterns).”

- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Nassim Nicholas Taleb[a] (/ˈtɑːləb/; born 12 September 1960) is a Lebanese-American New York University professor, essayist, mathematical statistician, former option trader, risk analyst, and aphorist. His work concerns problems of randomness, probability, complexity, and uncertainty

[ruknowhere]

"All in this world has broken. All that's left is silence. (Leave me in this field weeping.)"

- Federico Garcia Lorca, "La Soleá;" Lorca: Selected Poems

[ruknowhere]

Mood in the pad

Mad in the pod

Too mod to nod

Yet open for gods

[ruknowhere]

"You, who opens suns in my heart."

— Alfonsina Storni, from "The Siren" in Mask & Clover: Poems

Artwork: Joffzart

Credit: Belles-lettres