Sylvia Plath

[agata.livejournal.com]

Sylvia Plath - A Better Resurrection

I have no wit, I have no words, no tears;
My heart within me like a stone
Is numbed too much for hopes or fears;
Look right, look left, I dwell alone;
A lift mine eyes, but dimmed with grief
No everlasting hills I see;
My life is like the falling leaf;
O Jesus, quicken me.

Maids Are Bickering

[upatmidnight.livejournal.com]

Maids are bickering in the hall
The day is warm
Last night's perfume
I lie alone in this
cool room

My mind is calm and swirling
like the marble pages of an
old book

I'm a cold clean skeleton
scarecrow on a hill
in April
Wind eases the arches
of my boney Kingdom
Wind whistles thru my mind
and soul
My life is an open book
or a T.V confession



by: Jim Morrison
~Notebook Poems~
The American Night

(no subject)

[seamusd.livejournal.com]

David Wojahn

Choiron

The custom in Athens was to shave it, a practice
thought to be imported from the Persians or the Medes,

shave it smoothly & anoint it with perfumed oils,
so that it glistened when exposed, lamplight dappling

the labial folds; shave it & bejewel it,
scent & shimmer of its maquillage; Thracian ochres,

unguents to redouble its roseate hues,
& compliment its heightening tumescence;

shave it to recall some bald, idealized & gracile suavity,
the frankness of prepubescent girls. Choiros,

meaning cunt, but when it is so lavishly enfetishized,
when it is readied with such ceremony, the proper term

is Choiron, the diminutive, applied to emphasize its artfull
display--cuntlet, little cunt, daintiest of figs,

although an exact translation is impossible,
& those who seek to render it as pussy, or snatch,

or twat or variants thereof, choose to ignore
its more earnest, indeed more hallowed, connotations.

On the Babrinsky Vase in Munich, attributed to Philoneos,
the Hetaera sits with legs spread wide as two companion

Hetaerae kneel with razors at her crotch,
a bowl beside them--soap or oil in which

to dip their instruments. Already the pudendum's nearly hairless.
Foley interprets the scene as rape, citing Foucault:

"the razor's symbolism is of course. . .quite obvious." But shall we
beg to differ? Shall we hymn instead its sleek

& lambent petals? Choiron, how sweetly
do you shine. How shall we praise thy fecund estuaries,

lips to enfold thy alter, nubbed & tremoring,
& salty upon the tongue? Beloved, it has been a year

of sorrow unabated, the dead upon thy smoldering pyres
too numerous to reckon, the barrenness, the sleeplessness,

the keening nights exhausted from our petty wars. Saturday afternoon--
you're dozing on the chaise lounge, paperback collapsed

beside you on the carpet, chemise hiked up so that I
may wake you: glottal, umlaut, circle & the tongue extended

full to taste the wettening, saline & wordless tongue,
alembic to nothing but the purest longing & release & the gates

wherein so long we have dwelled in grieving
now shall open. O groan & the consanguineous cries.

Tongue to the door, tongue to the door
& briny with these fluent juices.

(from Spirit Cabinet, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002)

Robert Frost

[ian-gazarek.livejournal.com]

"Mowing"

There was never a sound beside the wood but one,
And that was my long scythe whispering to the ground.
What was it it whispered? I knew not well myself;
Perhaps it was something about the heat of the sun,
Something, perhaps, about the lack of sound—
And that was why it whispered and did not speak.
It was no dream of the gift of idle hours,
Or easy gold at the hand of fey or elf:
Anything more than the truth would have seemed too weak
To the earnest love that laid in the swale in rows,
Not without feeble-pointed spikes of flowers
(Pale orchises), and scared a bright green snake.
The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows.
My long scythe whispered and left the hay to make.

one of my favorite Hebrew poets.

[rainolive.livejournal.com]

LULLABY/ Shimon Adaf


There are children in the morning,
They are leaning out for love, they will
Lean that way forever.
Leonard Cohen


Father,
who always misses the target,
consumed by love like a match,
stooped over a book.
Stealthily,
November is poured into the air,
an awkward moon struck between the ribs of the street, droves
of mist trample in the dark.
When he spreads his hands open
on the slippery table,
in his cold and ruined sleep,
it’s hard to believe he crossed the sea and once beheld snow,
in the shrunken homes of Morocco,
toward the end of the forties,
the cradle of time.



© Translation: Gabriel Levin