I heard a strange noise from the bedroom and went to see what it was. I think Harriet was having a bad dream. Poor dog!
Category: Poetry
The Rest I Know
(More from the bad poetry corner, courtesy of me and Homer.)
The rest I know
In order of wanting
Long contain’d
Some nobler quarrel
Silent slept
And heard no more.
Having Spoke in Vain
Unseen maids wait
Where shame late fled
Oh righteous sword
Brave boaster
Go once more
Thy rage bids thee
Fall upon the field
Forc’d, entranc’d, dissolv’d away
Having spoke in vain
This is another found poem from Alexander Pope’s translation of Homer’s Iliad. This one is in response to a new round of rageful comments from the ubiquitous misogynists that feminist blogs tend to attract. And then there were a couple of instances this week, at work, when one of my male coworkers asked me a question and then proceeded to talk LOUDLY over me while I tried to answer him. It was one of those soul destroying sort of weeks when I wonder why I bother.
O Careful Wish
With giant Pride
And all his hundred hands
His remembrance call
To hurl
To heap
To know
His wide dominion
And disgrace
Nurs’d for future woes
O careful Wish
Thy vessels sail
From danger threats
To move
Behold
The farthest grace
Twelve days returning
Spoke the rolling waves
Unclose
Aftermath
This is what’s left over, after the cut-and-paste poetry project. I have zillions of little pieces of paper that I’m not quite sure what to do with. I can’t bring myself to throw them away, but I don’t know that I’ll ever have a use for them.
Y-Z
As promised, a day late, but finally and truly finished at last. The full set can be found here. All the text was taken from Wallace Bruce’s Wanderers, a book of very, very, very bad Victorian poetry.
You smile at the story,
you call it absurd —
That far-away evening in June
disturbed
Carved deep in the stone
like a rune
I have heard,
True to the letter, and every word.
Zodiacal light lingering bright,
Up which the white-winged angels fly
Mercy and hope in the starlit sky.
W-X
What of the voyage
and what of the night?
Serenely sleeping
in soft moonlight
and their hearts grew calm
as the waters bright
X and Y
What shall they do
When stranger than legend
and fiction is truth?
S-T-U-V
Strange phantoms taught
of that remorseless date
A tale that a mother
might sing to her babe
To anchor at last
in the Harbor of Dreams
A land of love
where memory sleeps.
Ulysses-like
from the misty deep,
While over the wake
the shadows sleep
Vision or dream, prophetic still
Of all the land wherein we dwell
Older hears are waiting
still
P-Q-R
Pin-cushioned dolls
white with snow
Where are the wanderers
years ago?
Questions never fully answered
Cold comfort
for the weary head
Returning across the horizon blue
Is this the ship our fathers knew?
M-N-O
Moonlight floods
like liquid leaven
The stars in their courses
nearer heaven
No annal like this
through all history’s range
The warp and the woof
of the chronicle strange
O, how the Pleiades would stare
In one heart shall their melody share
For I played in my childhood there
red paper boat 