(no subject)

[silverflurry.livejournal.com]

The Makers
by Howard Nemerov

Who can remember back to the first poets,
The greatest ones, greater even than Orpheus?
No one has remembered that far back
Or now considers, among the artifacts,
And bones and cantilevered inference
The past is made of, those first and greatest poets,
So lofty and disdainful of renown
They left us not a name to know them by.

They were the ones that in whatever tongue
Worded the world, that were the first to say
Star, water, stone, that said the visible
And made it bring invisibles to view
In wind and time and change, and in the mind
Itself that minded the hitherto idiot world
And spoke the speechless world and sang the towers
Of the city into the astonished sky.

They were the first great listeners, attuned
To interval, relationship, and scale,
The first to say above, beneath, beyond,
Conjurors with love, death, sleep, with bread and wine,
Who having uttered vanished from the world
Leaving no memory but the marvelous
Magical elements, the breathing shapes
And stops of breath we build our Babels of.

shakespeare -- sonnet 147

[syntheticmuse.livejournal.com]

My love is as a fever, longing still
for that which longer nurseth the disease;
feeding on that which doth preserve the ill,
the uncertain sickly appetite to please.
My reason, the physician to my love,
Angry that his prescriptions are not kept,
Hath left me, and I desperate now approve
Desire is death, which physic did except.
Past cure i am, now reason is past care,
and frantic-mad with evermore unrest;
my thoughts and my discourse as madmen's are,
at random from the truth vainly exprest;
For i have sworn thee fair, and thought thee bright
who art as black as hell, as dark as night.