Lament (O how all things are far removed) - Rainer Maria Rilke

[dferahgo.livejournal.com]

O how all things are far removed
and long have passed away.
I do believe the star,
whose light my face reflects,
is dead and has been so
for many thousand years.

I had a vision of a passing boat
and heard some voices saying disquieting things.
I heard a clock strike in some distant house...
but in which house?...

I long to quiet my anxious heart
and stand beneath the sky's immensity.
I long to pray...
And one of all the stars
must still exist.
I do believe that I would know
which one alone
endured,
and which like a white city stands
at the ray's end shining in the heavens.


Translated by Albert Ernest Flemming

Two Richard Brautigan poems.

[amieinstereo.livejournal.com]

Liz Looks At Herself in the Mirror
__________________________________
Part 5

She's very depressed.
Nothing went right today,
so she doesn't believe that
she's there.


Seconds
_______

With so short a time to live and think
about stuff, I've spent just about the right time on this
butterfly.
20


-Richard Brautigan.

My Father Gets Up in the Middle of the Night to Watch an Old Movie

[strangeidea.livejournal.com]

Heard this one on the Writer's Almanac a while ago, and I'd been meaning to share.  Enjoy.

My Father Gets Up in the Middle of the Night to Watch an Old Movie
by Dennis Trudell.

On cable television. Because he can't sleep.
My father gets up in the middle of the night
to watch an old movie on cable television --
because he can't sleep. He has done this before.
He will do it again, and sometimes he eats
cookies. My father eating cookies and watching
an old movie again because he can't sleep.
He is eighty-seven years old. He lives alone.
Because my mother died . . . and sometimes he looks
at her absence on the black sofa. My father
turning back to the movie on cable television,
eating another cookie. The movie has a name,
but he doesn't know it. My mother died --
because this is not a movie with a happy
ending. Or any ending. My father returns
to bed and goes to sleep. Or does not,
and then later sleeps. The television reflects
the lamp he leaves on . . . . the black sofa.
Reflects an old mirror behind the sofa --

the second coming -w.b. yeats

[drowningbabies.livejournal.com]

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all convictions, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?