kairon13's Journal

1:32am: Not here
And not likely to be in the near future, either to post or to read.

Not much point.

I'll be around elsewhere.

12:49am: I feel lonely.

I feel like crying out 'I want to go home.'

But I am home.  In theory at least.

12:00am: Last post for Poetry Month - a bit of Shakespeare.
Sonnet 98

From you have I been absent in the spring,
When proud-pied April dress'd in all his trim
Hath put a spirit of youth in every thing,
That heavy Saturn laugh'd and leap'd with him.
Yet nor the lays of birds nor the sweet smell
Of different flowers in odour and in hue
Could make me any summer's story tell,
Or from their proud lap pluck them where they grew;
Nor did I wonder at the lily's white,
Nor praise the deep vermilion in the rose;
They were but sweet, but figures of delight,
Drawn after you, you pattern of all those.
Yet seem'd it winter still, and, you away,
As with your shadow I with these did play.

Sonnet 57
Being your slave, what should I do but tend
Upon the hours and times of your desire?
I have no precious time at all to spend,
Nor services to do, till you require.
Nor dare I chide the world-without-end hour
Whilst I, my sovereign, watch the clock for you,
Nor think the bitterness of absence sour
When you have bid your servant once adieu;
Nor dare I question with my jealous thought
Where you may be, or your affairs suppose,
But, like a sad slave, stay and think of nought
Save, where you are how happy you make those.
So true a fool is love that in your will,
Though you do any thing, he thinks no ill.

and on a lighter note:

Sonnet 130

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips' red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damask'd, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound;
I grant I never saw a goddess go;
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground:
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.

 
William Shakespeare.

12:47am: Poetry Month - cruel but almost over...
From The Waste Land

I. The Burial of the Dead

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.
Bin gar keine Russin, stamm' aus Litauen, echt deutsch.
And when we were children, staying at the arch-duke's,
My cousin's, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie,
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
In the mountains, there you feel free.
I read, much of the night, and go south in winter.



T S Eliot

12:13am: Poetry Month
I've been thinking a lot about magpies the last few days, so when I came across this I had to post it.

Mating Calls

It is not so much the song
Of the hump-backed whale, reaching
Through a hundred miles of sea
To his love that strikes us. We
Can be heard further than he.

It is not the albatross
Either, with his strident voice
Promising the most tender
'Always' in tones of thunder.
Our vows may well go under.

Some kind of magpie keeps on
Singing, when his mate has gone,
Not only his notes but hers.
This moves us to pride and tears
That love should make us such bores.

Patricia Beer

2:08pm: Poetry month - another of my own
A very old one of mine, from which I've pruned the teenage-angsty first line - I think it works better without it.

A half-heard footstep shudders in the mind.
In troubled sleep, I reach out as if blind
To feel your face.  An emptiness, instead.

A child, his mother gone now he has fed
Does not more puzzled reach than I to find
The well-remembered flesh, so lately kind.

And like a child, I weep alone in bed.

12:28am: Symptoms of Love

Love is universal migraine,
A bright stain on the vision
Blotting out reason.

Symptoms of true love
Are leanness, jealousy,
Laggard dawns;

Are omens and nightmares -
Listening for a knock,
Waiting for a sign:

For a touch of her fingers
In a darkened room,
For a searching look.

Take courage, lover!
Could you endure such pain
At any hand but hers?

Robert Graves

12:47am: Poetry month - Gerard Manley Hopkins
The Windhover: To Christ Our Lord

I caught this morning morning's minion, king-
dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird,--the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.


Gerard Manley Hopkins

11:31pm: Poetry Month - A poor thing but mine own
For Persephone

This is not binding. There is nothing owed.
A promise gained by force or stealth
Or from a hungry child who craved some sweetness
Is no such thing. No obligation holds
No matter what your mother says.
Let her make winter from her grief, but know
She could have rescued summer had she fought.
Go now - you know the way which Orpheus trod.
Follow the cobweb thread of haunting music
Upward from Hell...

12:02am: Poetry Month - William Butler Yeats
Aedh wishes for the Cloths of Heaven

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.

W B Yeats

12:47am: Poetry Month - lyric
All night beside the rose, the rose,
All night by the rose I lay.
I dared not steal the rose itself,
But bore the flower away.

Anon
(Mediaeval lyric)

11:34pm: Poetry Month - Dylan Thomas
And Death Shall Have No Dominion

And death shall have no dominion.
Dead men naked they shall be one
With the man in the wind and the west moon;
When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,
They shall have stars at elbow and foot;
Though they go mad they shall be sane,
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;
Though lovers be lost love shall not;
And death shall have no dominion.

And death shall have no dominion.
Under the windings of the sea
They lying long shall not die windily;
Twisting on racks when sinews give way,
Strapped to a wheel, yet they shall not break;
Faith in their hands shall snap in two,
And the unicorn evils run them through;
Split all ends up they shan't crack;
And death shall have no dominion.

And death shall have no dominion.
No more may gulls cry at their ears
Or waves break loud on the seashores;
Where blew a flower may a flower no more
Lift its head to the blows of the rain;
Through they be mad and dead as nails,
Heads of the characters hammer through daisies;
Break in the sun till the sun breaks down,
And death shall have no dominion.

Dylan Thomas

12:42am: Poetry Month - Ms Parker gets her priorities right!
Fighting Words

Say my love is easy had,
   Say I'm bitten raw with pride,
Say I am too often sad ---
   Still behold me at your side.

Say I'm neither brave nor young,
   Say I woo and coddle care,
Say the devil touched my tongue ---
   Still you have my heart to wear.

But say my verses do not scan,
And I get me another man!

Dorothy Parker

12:30am: For Poetry Month
Marigolds

With a fork drive Nature out,
She will ever yet return;
Hedge the flowerbed all about,
Pull or stab or cut or burn,
She will ever yet return.

Look: the constant marigold
Springs again from hidden roots.
Baffled gardener, you behold
New beginnings and new shoots
Spring again from hidden roots.
Pull or stab or cut or burn,
They will ever yet return.

Gardener, cursing at the weed,
Ere you curse it further, say:
Who but you planted the seed
In my fertile heart, one day?
Ere you curse me further, say!
New beginnings and new shoots
Spring again from hidden roots.
Pull or stab or cut or burn,
Love must ever yet return.

Robert Graves

12:48am: Poetry Month - Peace is Milk
PEACE IS MILK - Adrian Mitchell


Peace is milk
War is acid
The elephant dreams of milk
Acid blood
Beats through the veins
Of the monstrous, vulture-weight fly
Shaking, rocking his framework.

The elephants, their gentle thinking shredded
By drugs disseminated in the electricity supply,
sell their children, buy tickets for the Zoo
And form a dead-eyed queue
Which stretches from the decorative, spiked gates
To the enormous shed where the flies are perching.

Peace is milk
War is acid
Sometimes an elephant finds a bucket of milk.
SWASH! and its empty
The fly feeds continually
The fly bulges with acid
Or he needs more.  And more.

5:35pm: I'm here :)
First post - just testing!