Architecture Request + Ditty of First Desire

[madamadore.livejournal.com]

Hello people! 
I am really really looking for poems related in any ways to the broad subject of architecture, and I would love to read your always great suggestions.

I would be eternally thankful. For now for you, Ditty of First Desire. 


Ditty of First Desire
by Federico Garcia Lorca

 In the green morning
I wanted to be a heart.
A heart.

  And in the ripe evening
I wanted to be a nightingale.
A nightingale.

  (Soul,
turn orange-colored.
Soul,
turn the color of love.)

  In the vivid morning
I wanted to be myself.
A heart.

  And at the evening's end
I wanted to be my voice.
A nightingale.

  Soul,
turn orange-colored.
Soul,
turn the color of love.

Comments

[duathir.livejournal.com]

London 1941

Half masonry, half pain; her head
From which the plaster breaks away
Like flesh from the rough bone, is turned
Upon a neck of stones; her eyes
Are lidless windows of smashed glass,
Each star-shaped pupil
Giving upon a vault so vast
How can the head contain it?

The raw smoke
Is inter-wreathing through the jaggedness
Of her sky-broken panes, and mirrored
Fires dance like madmen on the splinters.

All else is stillness save the dancing splinters
And the slow inter-wreathing of the smoke.

Her breasts are crumbling brick where the black ivy
Had clung like a fantastic child of succour
And now hangs draggled with long peels of paper
Repeating still their ghosted leaf and lily.

Grass for her cold skin's hair, the grass of cities
Wilted and swaying on her plaster brow
From winds that stream along the streets of cities:

Across a world of sudden fear and firelight
She towers erect, the great stones at her throat,
Her rusted ribs like railings round her heart;
A figure of dry wounds -of winter wounds-
O mother of wounds; half masonry, half pain.

by Mervyn Peake

[madamadore.livejournal.com]

Perfect, thank you!

[tree]

A Mathematics of Breathing

I.

Think of any of several arched
colonnades to a cathedral,

how the arches
like fountains, say,

or certain limits in calculus,
when put to the graph paper’s crosstrees,

never quite meet any promised heaven,
instead at their vaulted heights

falling down to the abruptly ending
base of the next column,

smaller, the one smaller
past that, at last

dying, what is
called perspective.

This is the way buildings do it.

II.

You have seen them, surely, busy paring
the world down to what it is mostly,

proverb: so many birds in a bush.
Suddenly they take off, and at first

it seems your particular hedge itself
has sighed deeply,

that the birds are what come,
though of course it is just the birds

leaving one space for others.
After they’ve gone, put your ear to the bush,

listen. There are three sides: the leaves’
releasing of something, your ear where it

finds it, and the air in between, to say
equals. There is maybe a fourth side,

not breathing.

III.

In One Thousand and One Nights,
there are only a thousand,

Scheherazade herself is the last one,
for the moment held back,

for a moment all the odds hang even.
The stories she tells she tells mostly

to win another night of watching the prince
drift into a deep sleeping beside her,

the chance to touch one more time
his limbs, going,

gone soft already with dreaming.
When she tells her own story,

Breathe in,
breathe out

is how it starts.


Carl Phillips

[madamadore.livejournal.com]

Beautiful. Thank you so much!

Lorca is wonderful

[mirmusing.livejournal.com]

Thank you for the post. M

Re: Lorca is wonderful

[madamadore.livejournal.com]

Oh you're very welcome! I think so too.