Edwin Muir, 'The Horses'

[duathir.livejournal.com]

The Horses

Barely a twelvemonth after
The seven days war that put the world to sleep,
Late in the evening the strange horses came.
By then we had made our covenant with silence,
But in the first few days it was so still
We listened to our breathing and were afraid.
On the second day
The radios failed; we turned the knobs, no answer.
On the third day a warship passed us, headed north,
Dead bodies piled on the deck. On the sixth day
A plane plunged over us into the sea. Thereafter
Nothing. The radios dumb;
And still they stand in corners of our kitchens,
And stand, perhaps, turned on, in a million rooms
All over the world. But now if they should speak,
If on a sudden they should speak again,
If on the stroke of noon a voice should speak,
We would not listen, we would not let it bring
That old bad world that swallowed its children quick
At one great gulp. We would not have it again.
Sometimes we think of the nations lying asleep,
Curled blindly in impenetrable sorrow,
And then the thought confounds us with its strangeness.

( The tractors lie about our fields... )

.

Adam Zagajewski, 'Try To Praise The Mutilated World'

[duathir.livejournal.com]

Try To Praise The Mutilated World

Try to praise the mutilated world.
Remember June's long days,
and wild strawberries, drops of wine, the dew.
The nettles that methodically overgrow
the abandoned homesteads of exiles.
You must praise the mutilated world.
You watched the stylish yachts and ships;
one of them had a long trip ahead of it,
while salty oblivion awaited others.
You've seen the refugees heading nowhere,
you've heard the executioners sing joyfully.
You should praise the mutilated world.
Remember the moments when we were together
in a white room and the curtain fluttered.
Return in thought to the concert where music flared.
You gathered acorns in the park in autumn
and leaves eddied over the earth's scars.
Praise the mutilated world
and the grey feather a thrush lost,
and the gentle light that strays and vanishes
and returns.

by Adam Zagajewski

.

The Waffle Iron - by Barrett Warner

[mirmusing.livejournal.com]

In four years of marriage
we never made a waffle
and now we're fighting about the waffle iron.
She wants to beat me over the head with it.
Then pictures come off walls,
post cards, drawings, photographs.
Everything is pushed neatly off the mantle,
but a small Amish lantern
I gave her a while ago.
I don't even try to argue
about how we're dividing the music.
That night I make about a hundred waffles,
keeping them warm in the oven
until there's no more room.
Then I open all the boxes
and cram the waffles inside,
taking out wads of newspaper.
I light the Amish lamp,
rocking slowly in the chair
that she's taking tomorrow,
scan the old headlines for something
I may have missed months ago,
a scratched album on the turntable,
its music whispering and hoarse.
I gently tap my foot to the memory.

'We Have Been Here Before' by Morris Bishop

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

We Have Been Here Before
Morris Bishop (1893-1973)

I think I remember this moorland,
The tower on the top of the tor;
I feel in the distance another existence:
I think I have been here before.

And I think you were sitting beside me,
In a fold in the face of the fell,
For Time at its work'll go round in a circle,
And what is befalling, befell.

"I have been here before!" I asserted,
In a nook on a neck of the Nile.
I once in a crisis was punished by Isis,
And you smiled. I remember your smile.

I had the same sense of persistence
On the site of the seat of the Sioux;
I heard in the teepee the sound of a sleepy
Pleistocene grunt. It was you.

The past made a promise, before it
Began to begin to begone.
This limited gamut brings you again. Damn it,
How long has this got to go on?