Painter's blog including Residency at Creekside Centre, Deptford Quartrains, Hong Kong and China
I don’t know about you but I have a terrible habit of stumbling across poems, buying the book and then ignoring it forever. Well, now that we’re in lock-down I have decided to take down a volume of poetry every day and spend and hour reading. I will then post a poem on this website.
My love, my rose,
my journey across the Polish plain has begun:
I’m a small boy happy and amazed
a small boy
looking at his first picture book
of people
animals
objects, plants.
Letter from Poland
Translated by John Berger
These men, Dino
who hold tattered shreds of light
where are they going
in this gloom, Dino?
You, me too:
we are with them, Dino.
We too Dino
Have glimpsed the blue sky.
On a Painting by Abidine, entitled The Long March
Translated by John Berger
from THE SHIP OF DEATH
Build then the ship of death, for you must take
the longest journey, to oblivion.
And die the death, the long and painful death
that lies between the old self and the new.
Already our bodies are fallen, bruised, badly bruised,
already our souls are oozing through the exit
of the cruel bruise.
Already the dark and endless ocean of the end
is washing in through the breaches of our wounds,
already the flood is upon us.
Oh build your ship of death, your little ark
and furnish it with food, with little cakes, and wine
for the dark flight down oblivion.
D H Lawrence (1885-1930)
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.
The Sun of whose terrain we creatures are,
Is the director of all human love,
Unit of time, and circle round the earth,
And we are the commotion born of love
And slanted rays of that illustrious star,
Peregrine of the crowded fields of birth,
The crowded lane, the market and the tower.
Like sight in pictures, real at remove,
Such is our motion on dimensional earth.
Down by the river, where the ragged are,
Continuous the cries and noise of birth,
While to the muddy edge dark fishes move,
And over all, like death, or sloping hill,
Is nature, which is larger and more still.
Charles Madge
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy,
But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy;
The Youth, who daily farther from the east
Must travel, still is Nature’s Priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended;
At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.
William Wordsworth
(1770-1850)
