Written by
Anne Kingsmill Finch |
Do you believe, in what you see
do you believe in reality
do you believe in the sun that’s bright
do you believe in the stars in the night
Do you believe in the birds that fly
do you believe in clouds and the sky
do you believe in wind that flows
do you believe in moon that glows
do you believe in light
Do you believe the spoken word
do you believe the things you’ve heard
do you believe in the final answer
do you believe in the swirling dancer
Do you believe in sound and sight
do you believe in moments bright
do you believe in taste and touch
do you believe that much
Do you believe in the soul inside
do you believe in ecstasy and delight
do you believe in glory and god
do you believe in that thought
Do you believe in the sky above
do you believe in love
Do you believe in the heaven and the earth
do you believe in death and birth
do you believe in life
open your eyes with hope within
open the door, let light reach in
if you believe, then you'll win
|
Written by
John Donne |
I have a friend who still believes in heaven.
Not a stupid person, yet with all she knows, she literally talks to God.
She thinks someone listens in heaven.
On earth she's unusually competent.
Brave too, able to face unpleasantness.
We found a caterpillar dying in the dirt, greedy ants crawling over it.
I'm always moved by disaster, always eager to oppose vitality
But timid also, quick to shut my eyes.
Whereas my friend was able to watch, to let events play out
According to nature.
For my sake she intervened
Brushing a few ants off the torn thing, and set it down
Across the road.
My friend says I shut my eyes to God, that nothing else explains
My aversion to reality.
She says I'm like the child who
Buries her head in the pillow
So as not to see, the child who tells herself
That light causes sadness-
My friend is like the mother.
Patient, urging me
To wake up an adult like herself, a courageous person-
In my dreams, my friend reproaches me.
We're walking
On the same road, except it's winter now;
She's telling me that when you love the world you hear celestial music:
Look up, she says.
When I look up, nothing.
Only clouds, snow, a white business in the trees
Like brides leaping to a great height-
Then I'm afraid for her; I see her
Caught in a net deliberately cast over the earth-
In reality, we sit by the side of the road, watching the sun set;
From time to time, the silence pierced by a birdcall.
It's this moment we're trying to explain, the fact
That we're at ease with death, with solitude.
My friend draws a circle in the dirt; inside, the caterpillar doesn't move.
She's always trying to make something whole, something beautiful, an image
Capable of life apart from her.
We're very quiet.
It's peaceful sitting here, not speaking, The composition
Fixed, the road turning suddenly dark, the air
Going cool, here and there the rocks shining and glittering-
It's this stillness we both love.
The love of form is a love of endings.
|
Written by
Robert Desnos |
In the night there are of course the seven wonders
of the world and the greatness tragedy and enchantment.
Forests collide with legendary creatures hiding in thickets.
There is you.
In the night there are the walker's footsteps the murderer's
the town policeman's light from the street lamp and the ragman's lantern
There is you.
In the night trains go past and boats
and the fantasy of countries where it's daytime.
The last breaths
of twilight and the first shivers of dawn.
There is you.
A piano tune, a shout.
A door slams.
A clock.
And not only beings and things and physical sounds.
But also me chasing myself or endlessly going beyond me.
There is you the sacrifice, you that I'm waiting for.
Sometimes at the moment of sleep strange figures are born and disappear.
When I shut my eyes phosphorescent blooms appear and fade
and come to life again like fireworks made of flesh.
I pass through strange lands with creatures for company.
No doubt you are there, my beautiful discreet spy.
And the palpable soul of the vast reaches.
And perfumes of the sky and the stars the song of a rooster
from 2000 years ago and piercing screams in a flaming park and kisses.
Sinister handshakes in a sickly light and axles grinding on paralyzing roads.
No doubt there is you who I do not know, who on the contrary I do know.
But who, here in my dreams, demands to be felt without ever appearing.
You who remain out of reach in reality and in dream.
You who belong to me through my will to possess your illusion
but who brings your face near mine only if my eyes are closed in dream as well as
in reality.
You who in spite of an easy rhetoric where the waves die on the beach
where crows fly into ruined factories, where the wood rots
crackling under a lead sun.
You who are at the depths of my dreams stirring up a mind
full of metamorphoses leaving me your glove
when I kiss your hand.
In the night there are stars and the shadowy motion of the sea,
of rivers, forests, towns, grass and the lungs
of millions and millions of beings.
In the night there are the seven wonders of the world.
In the night there are no guardian angels, but there is sleep.
In the night there is you.
In the daylight too.
|
Written by
Marianne Moore |
Beauty and Beauty's son and rosemary -
Venus and Love, her son, to speak plainly -
born of the sea supposedly,
at Christmas each, in company,
braids a garland of festivity.
Not always rosemary -
since the flight to Egypt, blooming indifferently.
With lancelike leaf, green but silver underneath,
its flowers - white originally -
turned blue.
The herb of memory,
imitating the blue robe of Mary,
is not too legendary
to flower both as symbol and as pungency.
Springing from stones beside the sea,
the height of Christ when he was thirty-three,
it feeds on dew and to the bee
"hath a dumb language"; is in reality
a kind of Christmas tree.
|
Written by
Andre Breton |
Always for the first time
Hardly do I know you by sight
You return at some hour of the night to a house at an angle to my window
A wholly imaginary house
It is there that from one second to the next
In the inviolate darkness
I anticipate once more the fascinating rift occurring
The one and only rift
In the facade and in my heart
The closer I come to you
In reality
The more the key sings at the door of the unknown room
Where you appear alone before me
At first you coalesce entirely with the brightness
The elusive angle of a curtain
It's a field of jasmine I gazed upon at dawn on a road in the vicinity of Grasse
With the diagonal slant of its girls picking
Behind them the dark falling wing of the plants stripped bare
Before them a T-square of dazzling light
The curtain invisibly raised
In a frenzy all the flowers swarm back in
It is you at grips with that too long hour never dim enough until sleep
You as though you could be
The same except that I shall perhaps never meet you
You pretend not to know I am watching you
Marvelously I am no longer sure you know
You idleness brings tears to my eyes
A swarm of interpretations surrounds each of your gestures
It's a honeydew hunt
There are rocking chairs on a deck there are branches that may well scratch you in the
forest
There are in a shop window in the rue Notre-Dame-de-Lorette
Two lovely crossed legs caught in long stockings
Flaring out in the center of a great white clover
There is a silken ladder rolled out over the ivy
There is
By my leaning over the precipice
Of your presence and your absence in hopeless fusion
My finding the secret
Of loving you
Always for the first time
|
Written by
Louise Gluck |
I have a friend who still believes in heaven.
Not a stupid person, yet with all she knows, she literally talks to God.
She thinks someone listens in heaven.
On earth she's unusually competent.
Brave too, able to face unpleasantness.
We found a caterpillar dying in the dirt, greedy ants crawling over it.
I'm always moved by disaster, always eager to oppose vitality
But timid also, quick to shut my eyes.
Whereas my friend was able to watch, to let events play out
According to nature.
For my sake she intervened
Brushing a few ants off the torn thing, and set it down
Across the road.
My friend says I shut my eyes to God, that nothing else explains
My aversion to reality.
She says I'm like the child who
Buries her head in the pillow
So as not to see, the child who tells herself
That light causes sadness-
My friend is like the mother.
Patient, urging me
To wake up an adult like herself, a courageous person-
In my dreams, my friend reproaches me.
We're walking
On the same road, except it's winter now;
She's telling me that when you love the world you hear celestial music:
Look up, she says.
When I look up, nothing.
Only clouds, snow, a white business in the trees
Like brides leaping to a great height-
Then I'm afraid for her; I see her
Caught in a net deliberately cast over the earth-
In reality, we sit by the side of the road, watching the sun set;
From time to time, the silence pierced by a birdcall.
It's this moment we're trying to explain, the fact
That we're at ease with death, with solitude.
My friend draws a circle in the dirt; inside, the caterpillar doesn't move.
She's always trying to make something whole, something beautiful, an image
Capable of life apart from her.
We're very quiet.
It's peaceful sitting here, not speaking, The composition
Fixed, the road turning suddenly dark, the air
Going cool, here and there the rocks shining and glittering-
It's this stillness we both love.
The love of form is a love of endings.
|
Written by
Barry Tebb |
Why is it that in dreams I have visited -
As teacher or pupil - almost every college and school
In our once so green and pleasant land?
Hardly a subject from art to anthropology I have not
In dream seminar or floating spinning classroom
Studied or tried my prentice hand at, or learned
At the sandalled feet of some guru; as this minute
I returned from an easeled art room with the title
Of my weekly essay, ‘Discuss the links between the work
Of any symbolist poet and Monet.
’
O, how slowly I drifted back to consciousness
Probing delightedly the dizzying whitenesses of Mallarm?
Strolling along an avenue of linden trees
Under a Provencal sky of azure
Wet with the scent of jasmine and lavender.
Yet in reality, things could hardly have been more different:
Watching our children grow from their first tottering steps,
Helping to tend them in sickness, learning the basics
Of the healer’s art, taking an old man to a ward,
Listening, listening to how many troubled lives
And to my own, perhaps; seeking to tease a meaning
Or find a thread in the jumbled maze of sorrows
Souls in their turbulence and grief have wandered through.
I even wrote a novel, ‘A Gone World’ I called it,
And helped another with the birth-pangs of her own.
Trying my hand at translation I puzzled the subtle
Metaphors of Reverdy, wandering his midnight landscapes
Of windmills and cross-roads where faith meets fate
And neither will succumb.
I sat in a packed lecture hall while a Lacanian
Misread early Freud through a crooked lens
And for a year turned every seminar to war
To make him see his vision’s fatal flaw.
I poured over cabinets of case histories,
Tried living here and there and met an amah,
Teaching her Auden and Empson.
Her tears mingled
With my own at our last hurried meeting
In a crowded tea room, teaching her Klein.
I sat through many a summer watching the children play,
Feeling a hermit’s contentment in his cave,
Contemplating Plato and envisioning that cave
Of his where shadows move against the wall;
And turn to see or fail to see
The need to turn at all.
|
Written by
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe |
IN His blest name, who was His own creation,
Who from all time makes making his vocation;
The name of Him who makes our faith so bright,
Love, confidence, activity, and might;
In that One's name, who, named though oft He be,
Unknown is ever in Reality:
As far as ear can reach, or eyesight dim,
Thou findest but the known resembling Him;
How high so'er thy fiery spirit hovers,
Its simile and type it straight discovers
Onward thou'rt drawn, with feelings light and gay,
Where'er thou goest, smiling is the way;
No more thou numbrest, reckonest no time,
Each step is infinite, each step sublime.
1816.
WHAT God would outwardly alone control,
And on his finger whirl the mighty Whole?
He loves the inner world to move, to view
Nature in Him, Himself in Nature too,
So that what in Him works, and is, and lives,
The measure of His strength, His spirit gives.
1816.
WITHIN us all a universe doth dwell;
And hence each people's usage laudable,
That ev'ry one the Best that meets his eyes
As God, yea e'en his God, doth recognise;
To Him both earth and heaven surrenders he,
Fears Him, and loves Him too, if that may be.
1816.
|
Written by
Calvin Ziegler |
AM GRISCHTDAAG
Sis Grischtdaag.
Die ganz Welt iwwer
Frei die Leit sich sehr,
Un alles is harrlich, as wann der Daag
Vom Himmel gelosse waer.
Ich hock allee in mei Zimmer
Un denk so iwwer die Zeit -
Wie der Geischt vun Grischt sich immer
Weider un weider ausbreid:
Un wie heit in yeder Famillye
Frehlich un gutes Mut
In die liewi aldi Heemet
Sich widder versammle dutt.
Ach widder deheem! Ach, Yammer! -
Net all! Deel sin yo heit
Zu weit vun uns ab zu kumme -
Fatt in de Ewichkeit.
Net all deheem! Verleicht awwer -
Unich behaap's kann sei -
Im Geischt sin mir all beisamme
Un griesse enanner uff's nei!
So sin mir vereenicht widder -
Loss die Zeit vergeb wiesie will;
Ich drink eich ein Gruss, ihr Brieder!
Verwas sitzt dir all so schtill?
Weit ab - iwwer Barig un Valley,
Un iwwer die Ewichkeit's Brick -
Vun eich Brieder all, wie Geischdeschall
Kummt mir Eier Gruss zerick.
AT CHRISTMAS
It's Christmas.
The whole world over
Everyone's filled with love,
And everything's joyful, as if the day
Was given from above.
I sit alone in my room
Thinking about the times -
How the spirit of Christ always
Wider and wider shines.
And how today all families
With much happiness embrace
As they gather once again
In the dear old home place.
All home again! Oh, not so! -
Not all! Some today in reality
Are far from us below -
Away in eternity!
Not all at home! Perhaps though -
And I insist I knew -
In the spirit we're all together
And greet each other anew.
So we are together again -
May the time go as it will,
I drink to you a toast, brothers!
Why do you all sit so still?
Far away - over valley and ridge,
And over the eternal bridge -
From you brothers, like a spiritual echo
Your greeting returns below.
|
Written by
Ella Wheeler Wilcox |
Every morning, as I walk down
From my dreary lodgings, toward the town,
I see at a window, near the street,
The face of a woman, fair and sweet,
With soft brown eyes and chestnut hair,
And red lips, warm with the kisses left there.
And she stands there as long as she can see
The man who walks just ahead of me.
At night, when I come from my office down town,
There stands a woman with eyes of brown,
Smiling out through the window blind
At the man who is walking just behind.
This fellow and I resemble each other -
At least so I'm told by one and another,
(Though I think I'm the handsomer by far, of the two,)
I don't know him at all, save to 'how d'ye do, '
Or nod when I meet him.
I think he's at work
In a dry-goods store as a salaried clerk.
And I am a lawyer of high renown,
Having a snug bank account and an office down town, -
Yet I feel for that fellow an envious spite,
(it had no other name, so I speak it outright.
)
There were symptoms before; but it's grown I believe,
Alarmingly fast, since one cloudy eve,
When passing the little house close by the street,
I heard the patter of two little feet,
And a figure in pink fluttered down to the gate,
And a sweet voice exclaimed, 'Oh, Will, you are late!
And, darling, I've watched at the window until -
Sir, I beg pardon! I thought it was Will! '
I passed on my way, with such a strange feeling
Down in my heart.
My brain seemed to be reeling;
For, as it happens, my name, too, is Will,
And that voice crying 'darling, ' sent such an odd thrill
Throughout my whole being! 'How nice it would be, '
Thought I, 'If it were in reality me
That she's watched and longed for, instead of that lout! '
(It was envy that made me use that word, no doubt,)
For he's a fine fellow, and handsome! -(ahem!)
But then it's absurd that this rare little gem
Of a woman should stand there and look out for him
Till she brings on a headache, and makes her eyes dim,
While I go to lodgings, dull, dreary and bare,
With no one to welcome me, no one to care
If I'm early of late.
No soft eyes of brown
To watch when I go to, or come from the town.
This bleak, wretched, bachelor life is about
(If I may be allowed the expression) played out.
Somewhere there must be, in the wide world, I think,
Another fair woman who dresses in pink,
And I know of a cottage, for sale, just below,
And it has a French window in front and - heigho!
I wonder how long, at the longest, 'twill be
Before, coming home from the office, I'll see
A nice little woman there, watching for me.
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