These are the Clouds

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Re: These are the Clouds

Postby Blue » Sat Sep 08, 2018 8:52 am

THE BLIND SEER OF AMBON
W.S. Merwin

I always knew that I came from
another language

and now even when I can no longer see
I continue to arrive at words

but the leaves
and the shells were already here
and my fingers finding them echo
the untold light and depth

I was betrayed into my true calling
and denied in my advancement
I may have seemed somewhat strange
caring in my own time for living things
with no value that we know
languages wash over them one wave at a time

when the houses fell
in the earthquake
I lost my wife
and my daughter
it all roared and stood still
falling
where they were in daylight

I named for my wife a flower
as though I could name a flower
my wife dark and luminous
and not there
I lost the drawings of the flowers
in fire

I lost the studies
of the flowers
my first six books in the sea

then I saw that the flowers themselves
were gone
they were indeed gone
I saw
that my wife was gone
then I saw that my daughter was gone
afterwards my eyes themselves were gone

one day I was looking
at infinite small creatures
on the bright sand
and the next day is this
hearing after music
so this is the way I see now

I take a shell in my hand
new to itself and to me
I feel the thinness the warmth and the cold
I listen to the water
which is the story welling up
I remember the colors and their lives
everything takes me by surprise
it is all awake in the darkness
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Re: These are the Clouds

Postby chump » Wed Sep 12, 2018 10:01 pm

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Re: These are the Clouds

Postby Blue » Thu Sep 13, 2018 6:46 am

Hey chump, is that your work? Nice. I made some photo/paintings that look similar.
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Re: These are the Clouds

Postby chump » Thu Sep 13, 2018 7:11 am

Well... I took those pictures at the botanic gardens here a few years ago, then spun 'round upside down.
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Re: These are the Clouds

Postby chump » Wed Sep 19, 2018 7:18 pm

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Re: These are the Clouds

Postby Cordelia » Mon Oct 01, 2018 11:01 am

The World

Then we walked through the elmy decay
overhanging the world. When I wake

in the ahistorical dark to feel the clay,
unkilned, of my chest, I still mark the time

when I was your grasshopper, slowly
getting better, rounding myself closer

to a final integer. You liked to doven
at your piano, crafting my name with wire

and hammer, using your science to hatch
primaeval nymphs, fly-winged, unready.

But I won’t dwell. In the version at hand
I use my own daft compass, the bad math

of it, to read the sky, to find in its grid
the particular square of screen door

that harbors the heavens’ most irksome
mosquito. Back to sleep in the Bed

Outside Time, my noctilucent thoughts
demand comfort—dear earthlings, I say,

you are so much more than your smoke
signals,
but they want only the myth

of you, your waking again from stone.
If you come back come back to me

as lanthanum, brittle and spooky and rare,
and I will lend you a bundle of capillaries

from my cheek, a lock of hair—make of me
what you will. Don’t leave me as this shape

in bed, muck of sheets over spur of hip,
the rocks that reveal nothing, never

having revealed themselves.

~ Gerard Coletta ~
The greatest sin is to be unconscious. ~ Carl Jung

We may not choose the parameters of our destiny. But we give it its content. ~ Dag Hammarskjold 'Waymarks'
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Re: These are the Clouds

Postby Cordelia » Mon Oct 01, 2018 11:03 am

Image

Image
The greatest sin is to be unconscious. ~ Carl Jung

We may not choose the parameters of our destiny. But we give it its content. ~ Dag Hammarskjold 'Waymarks'
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Re: These are the Clouds

Postby Cordelia » Sat Oct 06, 2018 7:54 am

All Souls

Did someone say that there would be an end,
An end, Oh, an end, to love and mourning?
Such voices speak when sleep and waking blend,
The cold bleak voices of the early morning
When all the birds are dumb in dark November—
Remember and forget, forget, remember.

After the false night, warm true voices, wake!
Voice of the dead that touches the cold living,
Through the pale sunlight once more gravely speak.
Tell me again, while the last leaves are falling:
“Dear child, what has been once so interwoven
Cannot be raveled, nor the gift ungiven.”

Now the dead move through all of us still glowing,
Mother and child, lover and lover mated,
Are wound and bound together and enflowing.
What has been plaited cannot be unplaited—
Only the strands grow richer with each loss
And memory makes kings and queens of us.

Dark into light, light into darkness, spin.
When all the birds have flown to some real haven,
We who find shelter in the warmth within,
Listen, and feel new-cherished, new-forgiven,
As the lost human voices speak through us and blend
Our complex love, our mourning without end.

~ May Sarton ~


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The greatest sin is to be unconscious. ~ Carl Jung

We may not choose the parameters of our destiny. But we give it its content. ~ Dag Hammarskjold 'Waymarks'
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Re: These are the Clouds

Postby dada » Sat Oct 06, 2018 7:13 pm

cloud-configurating updates
no longer care what you are wishin'
It's tombstone blue
all over now
at Rigorous intuition

watching clash of the ti-d-bowls
and during intermission
Read the Times
are changin channels
now on Rigorous intuition

play bungling bay raid over moscow
blizzard's new holy war attrition
tweeting 'moticon hellos
to the desolation crows
of Rigorous Intuition

Max whispers on his shoe phone
hear the dirt he is a dishin'
"Chief, would you believe?
that Surkov's lurking
over Rigorous Intuition"

So yet another politician
had an accident while fishin'
you can see eden's
padlocked pearly gates
from rigorous intuition

throw twenty-three hail mary's
for your acts of constriction
your mind is dirty
it's alright ma,
it's only rigorous intuition
Both his words and manner of speech seemed at first totally unfamiliar to me, and yet somehow they stirred memories - as an actor might be stirred by the forgotten lines of some role he had played far away and long ago.
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Re: These are the Clouds

Postby Cordelia » Tue Oct 16, 2018 11:18 am

Image

Image


Venetian Epigrams I


Sarcophagi, urns, were all covered with lifelike scenes,
fauns dancing with girls from a Bacchanalian choir,
paired-off, goat-footed creatures puffing their cheeks,
forcing ear-splitting notes from the blaring horns.
Cymbals and drumbeats, the marble is seen and is heard.
How delightful the fruit in the beaks of fluttering birds!
No startling noise can scare them, or scare away love,
Amor, whose torch waves more gladly in this happy throng.
So fullness overcomes death, and the ashes within
seem still, in their silent house, to feel love’s delight.
So may the Poet’s sarcophagus be adorned,
with this book the writer has filled with the beauty of life.

~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ~

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The greatest sin is to be unconscious. ~ Carl Jung

We may not choose the parameters of our destiny. But we give it its content. ~ Dag Hammarskjold 'Waymarks'
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Re: These are the Clouds

Postby Cordelia » Sat Nov 03, 2018 7:46 am

Nothing Gold Can Stay

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

~Robert Frost~

Image

Image


Image




https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FwX5BceD4Jo
The greatest sin is to be unconscious. ~ Carl Jung

We may not choose the parameters of our destiny. But we give it its content. ~ Dag Hammarskjold 'Waymarks'
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Re: These are the Clouds

Postby chump » Sat Nov 03, 2018 11:14 am

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Re: These are the Clouds

Postby chump » Sun Nov 04, 2018 10:42 pm

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Re: These are the Clouds

Postby Cordelia » Sat Nov 10, 2018 8:59 am

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Image


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The greatest sin is to be unconscious. ~ Carl Jung

We may not choose the parameters of our destiny. But we give it its content. ~ Dag Hammarskjold 'Waymarks'
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Re: These are the Clouds

Postby Cordelia » Wed Nov 21, 2018 11:52 am

Controlled Burn

It’s as if the apartment is on fire,
smoke clinging low to the ground,
a filthy sweet fog rolling in from
the southwest to dirty up the city.

In the barbecue restaurant, all tang
and wood scented, every eye
is fixed on the news, necks craned,
as anchors with serious voices
express concern, but no answers,
then cut to war in the Middle East
while tongues go back to licking ribs.

Later, it will be explained as a series
of human errors, 3,000 acres burning,
misunderstanding of wind patterns,
and inevitable oversight panels,
so someone can take the blame.

Driving home, sun filters through
the haze, sets every skyscraper on fire,
a preamble to coming night, and the air
smells like past and premonition.

~ Collin Kelley ~


You cannot put a Fire out—
A Thing that can ignite
Can go, itself, without a Fan—
Upon the slowest Night—

You cannot fold a Flood—
And put it in a Drawer—
Because the Winds would find it out—
And tell your Cedar Floor—

~ Emily Dickinson ~

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The greatest sin is to be unconscious. ~ Carl Jung

We may not choose the parameters of our destiny. But we give it its content. ~ Dag Hammarskjold 'Waymarks'
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