The Woman Who Could Not Live With Her Faulty Heart - Margaret Atwood

[soulquake.livejournal.com]

The Woman Who Could Not Live With Her Faulty Heart

I do not mean the symbol
of love, a candy shape
to decorate cakes with,
the heart that is supposed
to belong or break;

I mean this lump of muscle
that contracts like a flayed biceps,
purple-blue, with its skin of suet,
its skin of gristle, this isolate,
this caved hermit, unshelled
turtle, this one lungful of blood,
no happy plateful.

All hearts float in their own
deep oceans of no light,
wetblack and glimmering,
their four mouths gulping like fish.
Hearts are said to pound:
this is to be expected, the heart's
regular struggle against being drowned.

But most hearts say, I want, I want,
I want, I want. My heart
is more duplicitous,
though to twin as I once thought.
It says, I want, I don't want, I
want, and then a pause.
It forces me to listen,

and at night it is the infra-red
third eye that remains open
while the other two are sleeping
but refuses to say what it has seen.

It is a constant pestering
in my ears, a caught moth, limping drum,
a child's fist beating
itself against the bedsprings:
I want, I don't want.
How can one live with such a heart?

Long ago I gave up singing
to it, it will never be satisfied or lulled.
One night I will say to it:
Heart, be still,
and it will.

-Margaret Atwood

(no subject)

[atlashrugged.livejournal.com]

I Wonder How Many People in This City
Leonard Cohen

I wonder how many people in this city
live in furnished rooms.
Late at night when I look out at the buildings
I swear I see a face in every window
looking back at me,
and when I turn away
I wonder how many go back to their desks
and write this down.

Monologue of a Mother

[darlingmalivi.livejournal.com]

~ D. H. Lawrence

This is the last of all, this is the last!
I must hold my hands, and turn my face to the fire,  
I must watch my dead days fusing together in dross,  
Shape after shape, and scene after scene from my past
Fusing to one dead mass in the sinking fire
Where the ash on the dying coals grows swiftly, like heavy moss.
 
Strange he is, my son, whom I have awaited like a lover,
Strange to me like a captive in a foreign country, haunting
The confines and gazing out on the land where the wind is free;
White and gaunt, with wistful eyes that hover
Always on the distance, as if his soul were chaunting  
The monotonous weird of departure away from me.  
 
Like a strange white bird blown out of the frozen seas,
Like a bird from the far north blown with a broken wing
Into our sooty garden, he drags and beats
From place to place perpetually, seeking release  
From me, from the hand of my love which creeps up, needing
His happiness, whilst he in displeasure retreats.  
 
I must look away from him, for my faded eyes  
Like a cringing dog at his heels offend him now,
Like a toothless hound pursuing him with my will,
Till he chafes at my crouching persistence, and a sharp spark flies
In my soul from under the sudden frown of his brow,
As he blenches and turns away, and my heart stands still.
 
This is the last, it will not be any more.
All my life I have borne the burden of myself,  
All the long years of sitting in my husband’s house,  
Never have I said to myself as he closed the door:  
“Now I am caught!—You are hopelessly lost, O Self,  
You are frightened with joy, my heart, like a frightened mouse.”
 
Three times have I offered myself, three times rejected.  
It will not be any more. No more, my son, my son!  
Never to know the glad freedom of obedience, since long ago
The angel of childhood kissed me and went. I expected
Another would take me,—and now, my son, O my son,
I must sit awhile and wait, and never know  
The loss of myself, till death comes, who cannot fail.  
 
Death, in whose service is nothing of gladness, takes me:
For the lips and the eyes of God are behind a veil.  
And the thought of the lipless voice of the Father shakes me
With fear, and fills my eyes with the tears of desire,  
And my heart rebels with anguish as night draws nigher.

Her Praise - William Butler Yeats

[shadowfax994.livejournal.com]

Her Praise
by William Butler Yeats

SHE is foremost of those that I would hear praised.
I have gone about the house, gone up and down
As a man does who has published a new book,
Or a young girl dressed out in her new gown,
And though I have turned the talk by hook or crook
Until her praise should be the uppermost theme,
A woman spoke of some new tale she had read,
A man confusedly in a half dream
As though some other name ran in his head.
She is foremost of those that I would hear praised.
I will talk no more of books or the long war
But walk by the dry thorn until I have found
Some beggar sheltering from the wind, and there
Manage the talk until her name come round.
If there be rags enough he will know her name
And be well pleased remembering it, for in the old days,
Though she had young men's praise and old men's blame,
Among the poor both old and young gave her praise.