roomE: the adventures of Mister Knowbody

[ruknowhere]

Best Society

- Philip Larkin

When I was a child, I thought,

Casually, that solitude

Never needed to be sought.

Something everybody had,

Like nakedness, it lay at hand,

Not specially right or specially wrong,

A plentiful and obvious thing

Not at all hard to understand.

Then, after twenty, it became

At once more difficult to get

And more desired - though all the same

More undesirable; for what

You are alone has, to achieve

The rank of fact, to be expressed

In terms of others, or it's just

A compensating make-believe.

Much better stay in company!

To love you must have someone else,

Giving requires a legatee,

Good neighbours need whole parishfuls

Of folk to do it on - in short,

Our virtues are all social; if,

Deprived of solitude, you chafe,

It's clear you're not the virtuous sort.

Viciously, then, I lock my door.

The gas-fire breathes. The wind outside

Ushers in evening rain. Once more

Uncontradicting solitude

Supports me on its giant palm;

And like a sea-anemone

Or simple snail, there cautiously

Unfolds, emerges, what I am.

[ruknowhere]

Proverbs and Songs

by Antonio Machado

English version by Robert Bly

Original Language Spanish

Dedicated to Jose Ortega y Gasset

I

The eye you see is not

an eye because you see it;

it is an eye because it sees you.

II

To talk with someone,

ask a question first,

then -- listen.

III

Narcissism

is an ugly fault,

and now it's a boring fault too.

IV

But look in your mirror for the other one,

the other one who walks by your side.

V

Between living and dreaming

there is a third thing.

Guess it.

VI

This Narcissus of ours

can't see his face in the mirror

because he has become the mirror.

VII

New century? Still

firing up the same forge?

Is the water still going along in its bed?

VIII

Every instant is Still.

IX

The sun in Aries. My window

is open to the cool air.

Oh the sound of the water far off!

The evening awakens the river.

X

In the old farmhouse

-- a high tower with storks! --

the gregarious sound falls silent,

and in the field where no one is,

water makes a sound among the rocks.

XI

Just as before, I'm interested

in water held in;

but now water in living

rock of my chest.

XII

When you hear water, does its sound tell you

if it's from a mountain or farm,

city street, formal garden, or orchard?

XIII

What I find surprises me:

leaves of the garden balm

smell of lemonwood.

XIV

Don't trace out your profile,

forget your side view --

all that is outer stuff.

XV

Look for your other half

who walks always next to you

and tends to be what you aren't.

XVI

When spring comes,

go to the flowers --

why keep on sucking wax?

XVII

In my solitude

I have seen things very clearly

that were not true.

XVIII

Water is good, so is thirst;

shadow is good, so is sun;

the honey from the rosemarys

and the honey of the bare fields.

XIX

Only one creed stands:

quod elixum est ne asato.

Don't roast what's already boiled.

XX

Sing on, sing on, sing on,

the cricket in his cage

near his darling tomato.

XXI

Form your letters slowly and well:

making things well

is more important than making them.

XXII

All the same...

Ah yes! All the same,

moving the legs fast is important,

as the snail said to the greyhound.

XXIII

There are really men of action now!

The marsh was dreaming

of its mosquitoes.

XXIV

Wake up, you poets:

let echoes end,

and voices begin.

XXV

But don't hunt for dissonance;

because, in the end, there is no dissonance.

When the sound is heard people dance.

XXVI

What the poet is searching for

is not the fundamental I

but the deep you.

XXVII

The eyes you're longing for --

listen now --

the eyes you see yourself in

are eyes because they see you.

XXVIII

Beyond living and dreaming

there is something more important:

waking up.

XXIX

Now someone has come up with this!

Cogito ergo non sum.

What an exaggeration!

XXX

I thought my fire was out,

and stirred the ashes...

I burnt my fingers.

XXXI

Pay attention now:

a heart that's all by itself

is not a heart.

XXXII

I've caught a glimpse of him in dreams:

expert hunter of himself,

every minute in ambush.

XXXIII

He caught his bad man:

the one who on sunny days

walks with head down.

XXXIV

If a poem becomes common,

passed around, hand to hand, it's OK:

gold is chosen for coins.

XXXV

If it's good to live,

then it's better to be asleep dreaming,

and best of all,

mother, is to awake.

XXXVI

Sunlight is good for waking,

but I prefer bells --

the best thing about morning.

XXXVII

Among the figs I am soft.

Among the rocks I am hard.

That's bad!

XXXVIII

When I am alone

how close my friends are;

when I am with them

how distant they are!

XXXIX

Now, poet, your prophecy?

“Tomorrow what is dumb will speak,

the human heart and the stone.”

XL

But art?

It is pure and intense play,

so it is like pure and intense life,

so it is like pure and intense fire.

You'll see the coal burning

[ruknowhere]

Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven

- W. B. Yeats

Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,

Enwrought with golden and silver light,

The blue and the dim and the dark cloths

Of night and light and the half light,

I would spread the cloths under your feet:

But I, being poor, have only my dreams;

I have spread my dreams under your feet;

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

[ruknowhere]

The Sufis say that, if we are to speak well, our words must pass three gates. At the first gate we ask:Are these words true? At the second:Are they necessary? At the third: Are they kind?

[ruknowhere]

Walt Whitman // “The secret of it all, is to write in the gush, the throb, the flood, of the moment...to put things down without deliberation...without worrying about their style...without waiting for a fit time or place. I always worked that way. I took the first scrap of paper, the first doorstep, the first desk, and wrote, wrote, wrote… By writing at the instant the very heartbeat of life is caught.”

[ruknowhere]

They had seen a thing that was unearthly. They were in a trance from the strong spell of its beauty."

- Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

[ruknowhere]

It’s dark because you are trying too hard.

Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly.

Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply.

Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.

I was so preposterously serious in those days, such a humorless little prig.

Lightly, lightly – it’s the best advice ever given me.

When it comes to dying even. Nothing ponderous, or portentous, or emphatic.

No rhetoric, no tremolos,

no self conscious persona putting on its celebrated imitation of Christ or Little Nell.

And of course, no theology, no metaphysics.

Just the fact of dying and the fact of the clear light.

So throw away your baggage and go forward.

There are quicks ands all about you, sucking at your feet,

trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair.

That’s why you must walk so lightly.

Lightly my darling,

on tiptoes and no luggage,

not even a sponge bag,

completely unencumbered.

~Aldous Huxley,Island

[ruknowhere]

It is always important to know when something has reached its end. Closing circles, shutting doors, finishing chapters, it doesn't matter what we call it; what matters is to leave in the past those moments in life that are over."

- Paulo Coelho

Painting; Michaël Brack (b.1975, France).

Hotel II

Oil on canvas.

[ruknowhere]

[ymutate]

Veil upon veil, thought upon thought Let go of them all, for they only hide the truth.

— Rumi

[ruknowhere]

Poetry and the Civil Rights Movement

Poems, readings, poetry news and the entire 110-year archive of POETRY magazine.

[ymutate]

“We cannot tell the precise moment when friendship is formed. As in filling a vessel drop by drop, there is at last a drop which makes it run over; so in a series of kindnesses there is at last one which makes the heart run over.”

— Ray Bradbury

[ruknowhere]

[ruknowhere]

A memory of tomorrow

from a moment forgotten

I was stronger then

Happier

yet now more

content

Tomorrow's memory

- roomE

[radical-revolution]

Ocean Vuong: “We survive by becoming each other’s witnesses.”

[slackville]

"There have never been any 'Good Old Days,' there have just been days." - Kurt Vonnegut

Credit: Kusala Bhikshu

[ruknowhere]

In the dark times

Will there also be singing?

Yes, there will also be singing.

About the dark times.

- Bertolt Brecht

Permanence, perseverance and persistence in spite of all obstacles, discouragements, and impossibilities: It is this, that in all things distinguishes the strong soul from the weak. --Thomas Carlyle

“Space opens and from the heart of the matter sheds a descending grace that makes, for a moment, that naked thing, Being, a thing to understand.”

- Norman MacCaig, quoted in He Held Radical Light: the Art of Faith, the Faith of Art by Christian Wiman