Dover Beach, by Matthew Arnold

Dover Beach

The sea is calm tonight.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Courtesy of PoetryFoundation

Lenox Avenue, 4.30pm

I walked north up Lenox Avenue, below 125th Street, in the good light.

Lenox Avenue Midnight

The rhythm of life

Is a jazz rhythm,

Honey.

The gods are laughing at us.

The broken heart of love,

The weary, weary heart of pain,-

Overtones,

Undertones,

To the rumble of street cars,

To the swish of rain.

Lenox Avenue,

Honey.

Midnight,

And the gods are laughing at us.

Langston Hughes

Affidavit

In my dreams there are snipers on the bridges

A tall black woman blesses me

A wave approaches Cape Town
from the sea where the road runs beside the sand

I fly low over the long wall of water
my weightlessness no more than conviction
If it falters, I fall

The mountain rises in flowers before me

Adirondack

a woman walking from her mailbox 

on a country road 

near the frayed railway crossing

sees the trees 

beneath bands of paling cloud

the swampwater pooling 

where red osiers light the way

she reads the letter down the years

she looks up

in the emptiness of leftover light

as our train passes on its way south

towards the first, pale season

The endpapers

,

 Photo: Bevan Christie

On my 70th birthday

Cocooned in dressing-gown with tea and book;
The Winter sun’s pale rectangles where once,
Not long ago, bright Summer’s edges keen
Gave clear delineation to the shape of life.
So now the pages, words no longer galvanize:
Where once I lived the battles, loves and deaths
I read; I see them now as from afar:
Things dreamed of, not experienced, not mine.
So my own life, somehow, now seems a pale,
A sad palimpsest, barely legible
Scrawlings, worn thin, of what it might have been:
Loves, victories, pain I might have felt, have lived,
Seen from a distance, like this book: the works
And joys of other heroes, not my own.
Nothing real now. The odd infrequent tear
Shed for some other’s pain. Why not then stop?
The end is surely better now cut off
Than fading out as blank endpapers.
Shut the book.

Bevan Christie

Other Voices Poetry

You'll find mine here.

Other Voices

A couple of months ago I received an email from Sheema Kalbasi, asking me whether Iwould submit some poems to The Other Voices International Project, a cyber anthology of poetry. I was a little sceptical until I started to look through some of their volumes online. I also read Sheema's work, and was quickly persuaded that the project was legit.

I sent 6, and they are there now in Volume 45.

Early April

The emptiness
of the spring light
on the white wall
is the longing
for the first pale season

that gave
to all these years
its memory

the first moment
of sun and flowers
when experience
withered no green leaf
and perspective
touched no season

red grass

                                                             
a swish of redgrass as far as the eye can leak
I crawl through the wire like someone seduced - heart in the throat -
and it sings silklike it sings redgrass singing into the sky
strutting seedpods in rust and tawny
little grasshoppers splutter
and it rustles it lisps in ankledeep shrub
it crackles silk and feeler signals
lightfooted to that side
a redgrasspath a redgrasslightfootpath's halfbody fragrance
at ground level sprouting tiny shoots
breathing I stand human in the first clump erect

I adore Themeda triandra the way other people adore God

 - Antjie Krog, from Down to my Last Skin (Random House, 2000)

Stuff

..."why does a lillium spit out pollin"

...is the question that someone from Limerick, Ireland, asked Google, and how they landed on my blog. There are many lily landing places here.

It was exactly what I needed. A slow walk home, taking pictures of blossoms. The thin letter from the Dept. of Homeland Security heavy in my bag. Within 90 days they say, they will review why my citizenship has not gone through yet. April 4th was the latest day by which I should have heard, after my apparently successful December 4th interview. Another three months. At least it's movement. At least I exist in the numbers.

So many kind people have asked, When will you be a citizen, when will Vince move to New York?

I don't know I don't know I don't know. For a year and a half we have not known. His visa application was denied last year, so now we wait and wait and wait.

I got home, cried, picked up the cat, and listened to him purr.

Thank you Limerick, and I'm not sure my blog answered your question .

Why does a lilium spit out 'pollin'?

A lady lily, late at night, lurching home, weaving, sick to the stomach, spitting out yellow pollen, burping up Guiness fumes and Formosa fragrance, night pollinators stalking her in the shadows...

Five years ago this month I moved to this little apartment.

Then I wrote:

New 

Fat moon rising in April
where jets pass like stars in the new east

My mouthful of red wine
pausing the chaos
of a life tipped

A sore back
A black cat
Potatoes boiling
Books to unpack

My sounding board
a lamp
a table
a terrace
waiting for lilies

April, 2004

Also in my bag, less heavy, Go! magazine's camp cooking booklet with my pictures and recipes. That was nice. And suddenly, hitting me in the solar plexus as I leaned on the pole in the subway car, a full page picture of my husband in the magazine, back turned to the fire at Klein Aus Vista, Namibia, chops and potatoes on the coals, Vincent looking at the sunset.

We've come a long way.

The next room

I have been thinking about people who have died.

I had a memory, teenaged, of hearing Sir Laurence Olivier read this poem to his wife, Joan Plowright, in a documentary about his life. He was very old. I remembered only fragments, and thanks to those words and to Google, I found it.

From a sermon delivered at St Paul’s Cathedral in May 1910 following the death of King Edward VII:

Death is nothing at all. It does not count. I have only slipped away into the next room. Nothing has happened. Everything remains exactly as it was. I am I, and you are you, and the old life that we lived so fondly together is untouched, unchanged. Whatever we were to each other, that we are still. Call me by the old familiar name. Speak of me in the easy way which you always used. Put no difference into your tone. Wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow. Laugh as we always laughed at the little jokes that we enjoyed together. Play, smile, think of me, pray for me. Let my name be ever the household word that it always was. Let it be spoken without an effort, without the ghost of a shadow upon it. Life means all that it ever meant. It is the same as it ever was. There is absolute and unbroken continuity. What is this death but a negligible accident? Why should I be out of mind because I am out of sight? I am but waiting for you, for an interval, somewhere very near, just round the corner. All is well. Nothing is hurt; nothing is lost. One brief moment and all will be as it was before. How we shall laugh at the trouble of parting when we meet again!

Henry Scott Holland, 1847-1918

October light

From my terrace I looked up at the back of the LICH building on my block, seeing its brick glowing as though lit from within, remembering a poem I wrote in 2004, and then, finding the poem, seeing that it had been written in October. So this October light, peculiar to the season.


October 24th

Diverted by the light
the light
raging within brick
over Brooklyn

Sundown in late October

This place facing east
this day’s death
in reflections
of utter red

Thomas Lux

- thank you, Jay...

The Hungry Gap-Time, by Thomas Lux

late August, before the harvest, every one of us worn down
by the plow, the hoe, rake,
and worry over rain.

Chicken Coop confiscated
by the rats and the raptors
with nary a mouse to hunt. The corn's too green and hard,
and the larder's down
to dried apples
and double-corned cod. We lie on our backs
and stare at the blue;
our work is done, our bellies flat.
The mold on the wheat killed hardly a sheaf.
The lambs fatten on the grass, our pigs we set
to forage on their own-they'll be back
when they whiff the first shucked ears
of corn. Albert's counting
bushels in his head
to see if there's enough to ask Harriet's father
for her hand. Harriet's father
is thinking about Harriet's mother's bread
pudding. The boys and girls
splash in the creek,
which is low but cold. Soon, soon
there will be food
again, and from what our hands have done
we shall live another year here
by the river
in the valley
above the fault line
beneath the mountain

"The Hungry Gap-Time," by Thomas Lux from God Particles: Poems. © Houghton Mifflin, 2008.

More lilies in a poem

Today, Rain over New York

You will scream at me from the truck of heaven
Hey Byoodeefoool
Yeah you gorgeous you

With the wispy pony tail and the maniacly thin face
Baseball cap
The teeth so much you and everything long
and thin and strung like wires

Dirty Pablo after days of sweating and planting
other people’s gardens
Screaming always from the window of the truck
Banshee yelping

Daughter a picture far away
Puerto Rico far away

Puerto Rico Babee
She’s byoodeeful too!

And me knowing nothing more and not asking
And not even thinking for years
About Pablo

So

To know
that three weeks ago you killed yourself
Is a sweeping of time and a rushing of too-lateness
And an unimaginable putting together of where you were
And what you did
And why

And how come the police called Nick and not your ex-wife
And how old is your daughter now
And what happened Pablo

Did you know I liked you, ever
Would it have made a difference

Have you rested
Were you tired
Could I have helped
Are you laughing now to see us thinking about you
when we never said or called or thought

Because we are separate and alone in ourselves
and cannot imagine the other life passed

It’s not so bad here Pablo
We’ve all thought of it

It passes

I could have told you that at least
It passes it will pass
And this too shall pass, Pablo

And I had my mother to tell me that
Regardless of knowing, I heard
It will pass

It would have
Whatever it was
Unless you killed someone unless you maimed and destroyed

But if it was your pain your loss your maiming and your heart-death
it would have passed I swear it
Even if you think not thinking that you can never go through it again
the body lasts man
It goes limping on even when the eyes have given up working and the heart is a hollow

But you did it
No talking
Or did you talk
Where were you
In a room
A shaft a track
Was there blood did you drink pills
We know nothing

None of the family phone numbers in your book worked
So they found Nick

And today, after years I found Nick and said
I want to listen to your music and we talked
and he told me about Pablo

Three weeks ago was the Fourth of July
and I was on a roof
with someone new and something beginning
New pain all over again you may laugh
and it is probably true

While somewhere
in this city in these lights
was it night
you let the life out
and went to sleep

Was it that night
of fireworks and people together
Was it because there was no one
Was it the holiday blues hanging over the sullen never leaving pain
Was it a rocket and the smell of gunpowder
as I watched the whole city
and watching felt nothing for a life
creeping beneath the floorboards into the foundations of the place

But you look for meaning, Byoodeeful, where there is none
If anythi’ mean’ t’ anythi'
I wou’ still be here

Your truck streams past devil Pablo
Head hanging like a mad dog’s
in the wind
Teeth spread in smiling and yipping
Yeeeeeeehaw

Damn, Pablo

For you the water
standing on the terrace
For you the white Formosa lilies growing, wet
like the ones I carried in rain last night
through streaming streets
For you the pale green rosebud forming

Pablito.

My country

South Africa. What to say?

From, Country of grief and grace

i)

(but if the old is not guilty
does not confess
then of course the new can also not be guilty
nor be held accountable
if it repeats the old

things may then continue as before
but in a different shade)

Antjie Krog, Down to my Last Skin, 2000

----------------------------------------------------

Hope (dried out)

there is no unity
in this family
the children are bejewelled
by wire
bedecked with petrol-reeking crowns
to light the way
for those who can't find the door

Me, 1985

Pictures from dreams

In the middle of the night last spring I got up to write down the strands of a dream:

that spring
mexican bee pedlars came door to door
with their white hives

their nets now bare
of the skeins of silver fish
their mothers sending them north

The Stuff of Poems

The Gardener

The noble and corrupt
core of me
the waterer
in awe of flowers

if I were tied
deprived of tools and garden
kept on pills
held down to gaze upon myself

would the core hold
confess, redeem
might it just cease

We know this place

There is a dipping
and a rising tide

Light slides from the bricks outside
and four o’clock's
the gangplank
poised above deep black

The tipping of the pliable
a teasing bounce
the embarkation point, noon

A potted boxwood in terracotta
seems to keep the whole afloat
an object anchoring a body
whose last desire is to be cut loose

Cleave my chest open at sunset
And expose the architecture within

Diagnose this

A lusting for and leaning toward
light, of which we are deprived
deprived deprived

Dream

You walked me into
this place of green trees
and breathing

Now I stand the way
I came in

At a loss

Cape summer

My mother is slicing strawberries
and talking to herself
On television Haley Joel Osment’s an angel
and oboe and orchestra come from the kitchen

My mother talks to a cat now
She caught my eyes
as I walked
to the study to find a pencil

I have found myself, too
standing by an olive tree, speaking
to look up and be caught by a German
who heard my hissing

We are the ones
with people in our heads