"Hymn to the Sun" by Akhenaten

[bennmorland.livejournal.com]

Hymn to the Sun

Pharaoh Amenhotep (later Akhenaten) (1379 or 1362—1350 or 1333 BC: b. & d. Egypt)

Translated from the Ancient Egyptian by John L. Foster

Transcribed from Arts and Culture: An Introduction to the Humanities (ed. J. R. Benton & R. Di Yanni) (2005)

 

I

When in splendor you first took your throne

high in the precinct of heaven,

O living God,

life truly began!

 

( Read more... )

You're All Over the Floor - Joseph Kerschbaum

[ann-septimus.livejournal.com]

someone else posted some Kerschbaum yesterday; I was intrigued and so I found more of his stuff. This charmed me.

You're All Over the Floor

Every corner of this house
has the deposits you’ve left
behind. You are woven into my couch. You clog
the drain in my bathroom sink.
Flakes of your skin and hair
wander around in the stale sunlight
like lost tourists. I inhale your exhaust.
The dust I’m leaving behind
will intertwine with your dust.
Our bodies will dance without us being in the room.
When the dancing settles down we will hide in corners,
under tables, like children hiding from
strangers. Eventually, we will be
discovered. We will be swept up and forgotten –
then we will be one
like we always should have been.

~Joseph Kerschbaum

The Spirit of the Staircase by Lavinia Greenlaw

[tastyfusionfare.livejournal.com]

In our game of flight, half-way down
was as near mid-air as it got: a point
of no return we'd fling ourselves at
over and over, riding pillows or trays.
We were quick to smooth the edge
of every step, grinding the carpet to glass
on which we'd lose our grip.
The new stairs were our toy,
the descent to an odd extension,
four new rooms at flood level
in a sunken garden - a wing
dislocated from a hive. Young bees
with soft stripes and borderless nights,
we'd so far been squared away
in a twin-set of bunkbeds, so tight-knit,
my brother and I once woke up finishing
a conversation begun in a dream.
It had been the simplest exchange,
one I'd give much to return to:
the greetings of shadows unsuprised
at having met beneath the trees
and happy to set off again, alone,
back into the dark.

from Minsk, 2003

(no subject)

[peoplevsme.livejournal.com]

The Man on the Dump
by Wallace Stevens

Day creeps down. The moon is creeping up.
The sun is a corbeil of flowers the moon Blanche
Places there, a bouquet. Ho-ho…The dump is full
Of images. Days pass like papers from a press.
The bouquets come here in the papers. So the sun,
And so the moon, both come, and the janitor’s poems
Of every day, the wrapper on the can of pears,
The cat in the paper-bag, the corset, the box
From Esthonia: the tiger chest, for tea.

( The freshness of night has been fresh a long time. )

Having the Flu with Nothing Else to Do, Charles Bukowski

[7000years.livejournal.com]

I read a book about John Dos Passos and according to
the book once radical-communist
John ended up in the Hollywood Hills living off investments
and reading the
Wall Street Journal

this seems to happen all too often.

what hardly ever happens is
a man going from being a young conservative to becoming an
old wild-ass radical

however:
young conservatives always seem to become old
conservatives.
it's a kind of lifelong mental vapor-lock.

but when a young radical ends up an
old radical
the critics
and the conservatives
treat him as if he escaped from a mental
institution.

such is our politics and you can have it
all.

keep it.

sail it up your ass.

ars poetica (cocoons) by Dana Levin

[peccare.livejournal.com]

Six monarch butterfly cocoons

clinging to the back of your throat—



you could feel their gold wings trembling.



You were alarmed. You felt infested.

In the downstairs bathroom of the family home,

gagging to spit them out—

and a voice saying Don’t, don’t—

John Clare - "I Am"

[atomise.livejournal.com]

I am - yet what I am, none cares or knows:
My friends forsake me like a memory lost:
I am the self-consumer of my woes -
They rise and vanish in oblivion's host
Like shadows in love-frenzied stifled throes -
And yet I am and live - like vapours tossed

Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life or joys
But the vast shipwreck of my life's esteems:
Even the dearest that I love the best
Are strange - nay, rather, stranger than the rest.

I long for scenes where man hath never trod,
A place where woman never smiled or wept,
There to abide with my Creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept,
Untroubling and untroubled where I lie,
The grass below - above, the vaulted sky.

Mother Night, Jim Harrison

[moireach.livejournal.com]

Mother Night
Jim Harrison

When you wake at three AM you don't think
of your age or sex and rarely your name
or the plot of your life which has never
broken itself down into logical pieces.
At three AM you have the gift of incomprehension
wherein the galaxies make more sense
than your job or the government. Jesus at the well
with Mary Magdalene is much more vivid
than your car. You can clearly see the bear
climb to heaven on a golden rope in the children's
story no one ever wrote. Your childhood horse
named June still stomps the ground for an apple.
What is morning and what if it doesn't arrive?
One morning Mother dropped an egg and asked
me if God was the same species as we are?
Smear of light at five AM. Sound of Webber's
sheep flock and sandhill cranes across the road,
burble of irrigation ditch beneath my window.
She said, "Only lunatics save newspapers
and magazines," fried me two eggs, then said,
"If you want to understand mortality look at birds."
Blue moon, two full moons this month,
which I conclude are two full moons. In what
direction do the dead fly off the earth?
Rising sun. A thousand blackbirds pronounce day.

"Prayer before Birth" by Louis MacNeice

[bennmorland.livejournal.com]

Prayer before Birth

Frederick Louis MacNeice (1907/11/12—1963/11/03: b. Belfast, Co. Antrim, Ireland; d. Hertfordshire, England)

Louis MacNeice, transcribed from Touched with Fire (ed. Jack Hydes) (1985)

 

I am not yet born; O hear me.

Let not the bloodsucking bat or the rat or the stoat or

the club-footed ghoul come near me.

 

 

( I am not yet born; provide me )

 

Logic In The House of Sawed-Off Telescopes

[opheliablue.livejournal.com]

Logic In The House of Sawed-Off Telescopes - Jeffrey McDaniel

I want to sniff the glue that holds families together.
I was a good boy once.
I listened with three ears.
When I didn't get what I wanted, I never cried.
I banged my head over and over on the kitchen floor.
I sat on a man's lap.
I took his words like candy.
I want to break something now.

( I am the purple lips of a child throwing snowballs at a taxi.. )