Written by
Li Po |
I take my wine jug out among the flowers
to drink alone, without friends.
I raise my cup to entice the moon.
That, and my shadow, makes us three.
But the moon doesn't drink,
and my shadow silently follows.
I will travel with moon and shadow,
happy to the end of spring.
When I sing, the moon dances.
When I dance, my shadow dances, too.
We share life's joys when sober.
Drunk, each goes a separate way.
Constant friends, although we wander,
we'll meet again in the Milky Way.
|
Written by
Langston Hughes |
When I was home de
Sunshine seemed like gold.
When I was home de
Sunshine seemed like gold.
Since I come up North de
Whole damn world's turned cold.
I was a good boy,
Never done no wrong.
Yes, I was a good boy,
Never done no wrong,
But this world is weary
An' de road is hard an' long.
I fell in love with
A gal I thought was kind.
Fell in love with
A gal I thought was kind.
She made me lose ma money
An' almost lose ma mind.
Weary, weary,
Weary early in de morn.
Weary, weary,
Early, early in de morn.
I's so weary
I wish I'd never been born.
|
Written by
John Ashbery |
Far from the Rappahannock, the silent
Danube moves along toward the sea.
The brown and green Nile rolls slowly
Like the Niagara's welling descent.
Tractors stood on the green banks of the Loire
Near where it joined the Cher.
The St.
Lawrence prods among black stones
And mud.
But the Arno is all stones.
Wind ruffles the Hudson's
Surface.
The Irawaddy is overflowing.
But the yellowish, gray Tiber
Is contained within steep banks.
The Isar
Flows too fast to swim in, the Jordan's water
Courses over the flat land.
The Allegheny and its boats
Were dark blue.
The Moskowa is
Gray boats.
The Amstel flows slowly.
Leaves fall into the Connecticut as it passes
Underneath.
The Liffey is full of sewage,
Like the Seine, but unlike
The brownish-yellow Dordogne.
Mountains hem in the Colorado
And the Oder is very deep, almost
As deep as the Congo is wide.
The plain banks of the Neva are
Gray.
The dark Saône flows silently.
And the Volga is long and wide
As it flows across the brownish land.
The Ebro
Is blue, and slow.
The Shannon flows
Swiftly between its banks.
The Mississippi
Is one of the world's longest rivers, like the Amazon.
It has the Missouri for a tributary.
The Harlem flows amid factories
And buildings.
The Nelson is in Canada,
Flowing.
Through hard banks the Dubawnt
Forces its way.
People walk near the Trent.
The landscape around the Mohawk stretches away;
The Rubicon is merely a brook.
In winter the Main
Surges; the Rhine sings its eternal song.
The Rhône slogs along through whitish banks
And the Rio Grande spins tales of the past.
The Loir bursts its frozen shackles
But the Moldau's wet mud ensnares it.
The East catches the light.
Near the Escaut the noise of factories echoes
And the sinuous Humboldt gurgles wildly.
The Po too flows, and the many-colored
Thames.
Into the Atlantic Ocean
Pours the Garonne.
Few ships navigate
On the Housatonic, but quite a few can be seen
On the Elbe.
For centuries
The Afton has flowed.
If the Rio *****
Could abandon its song, and the Magdalena
The jungle flowers, the Tagus
Would still flow serenely, and the Ohio
Abrade its slate banks.
The tan Euphrates would
Sidle silently across the world.
The Yukon
Was choked with ice, but the Susquehanna still pushed
Bravely along.
The Dee caught the day's last flares
Like the Pilcomayo's carrion rose.
The Peace offered eternal fragrance
Perhaps, but the Mackenzie churned livid mud
Like tan chalk-marks.
Near where
The Brahmaputra slapped swollen dikes
And the Pechora? The São Francisco
Skulks amid gray, rubbery nettles.
The Liard's
Reflexes are slow, and the Arkansas erodes
Anthracite hummocks.
The Paraná stinks.
The Ottawa is light emerald green
Among grays.
Better that the Indus fade
In steaming sands! Let the Brazos
Freeze solid! And the Wabash turn to a leaden
Cinder of ice! The Marañón is too tepid, we must
Find a way to freeze it hard.
The Ural
Is freezing slowly in the blasts.
The black Yonne
Congeals nicely.
And the Petit-Morin
Curls up on the solid earth.
The Inn
Does not remember better times, and the Merrimack's
Galvanized.
The Ganges is liquid snow by now;
The Vyatka's ice-gray.
The once-molten Tennessee s
Curdled.
The Japurá is a pack of ice.
Gelid
The Columbia's gray loam banks.
The Don's merely
A giant icicle.
The Niger freezes, slowly.
The interminable Lena plods on
But the Purus' mercurial waters are icy, grim
With cold.
The Loing is choked with fragments of ice.
The Weser is frozen, like liquid air.
And so is the Kama.
And the beige, thickly flowing
Tocantins.
The rivers bask in the cold.
The stern Uruguay chafes its banks,
A mass of ice.
The Hooghly is solid
Ice.
The Adour is silent, motionless.
The lovely Tigris is nothing but scratchy ice
Like the Yellowstone, with its osier-clustered banks.
The Mekong is beginning to thaw out a little
And the Donets gurgles beneath the
Huge blocks of ice.
The Manzanares gushes free.
The Illinois darts through the sunny air again.
But the Dnieper is still ice-bound.
Somewhere
The Salado propels irs floes, but the Roosevelt's
Frozen.
The Oka is frozen solider
Than the Somme.
The Minho slumbers
In winter, nor does the Snake
Remember August.
Hilarious, the Canadian
Is solid ice.
The Madeira slavers
Across the thawing fields, and the Plata laughs.
The Dvina soaks up the snow.
The Sava's
Temperature is above freezing.
The Avon
Carols noiselessly.
The Drôme presses
Grass banks; the Adige's frozen
Surface is like gray pebbles.
Birds circle the Ticino.
In winter
The Var was dark blue, unfrozen.
The
Thwaite, cold, is choked with sandy ice;
The Ardèche glistens feebly through the freezing rain.
|
Written by
Li Po |
When I was a boy I called the moon a
white plate of jade, sometimes it looked
like a great mirror hanging in the sky,
first came the two legs of the fairy
and the cassia tree, but for whom the rabbit
kept on pounding medical herbs, I
just could not guess.
Now the moon is being
swallowed by the toad and the light
flickers out leaving darkness all around;
I hear that when nine of the burning suns out
of the ten were ordered to be shot down by
the Emperor Yao, all has since been quiet
and peaceful both for heaven and man,
but this eating up of the moon is for me
a truly ugly scene filling me with forebodings
wondering what will come out of it.
|
Written by
Li Po |
Since yesterday had throw me and bolt,
Today has hurt my heart even more.
The autumn wildgeese have a long wing for escort
As I face them from this villa, drinking my wine.
The bones of great writers are your brushes, in the school of heaven,
And I am Lesser Hsieh growing up by your side.
We both are exalted to distant thought,
Aspiring to the sky and the bright moon.
But since water still flows, though we cut it with our swords,
And sorrow return,though we drown them with wine,
Since the world can in no way answer our craving,
I will loosen my hair tomorrow and take to a fishing-boat.
|
Written by
Li Po |
Far up river in Szechuan,
waters rise as spring winds roar.
How can I dare to meet her now,
to brave the dangerous gorge?
The grass grows green in the valley below
where silk worms silently spin.
Her hands work threads that never end,
dawn to dusk when the cuckoo sings.
|
Written by
Li Po |
There was wine in a cup of gold
and a girl of fifteen from Wu,
her eyebrows painted dark
and with slippers of red brocade.
If her conversation was poor,
how beautifully she could sing!
Together we dined and drank
until she settled in my arms.
Behind her curtains
embroidered with lotuses,
how could I refuse
the temptation of her advances?
|
Written by
Barry Tebb |
for Ken Kesey and his merry pranksters in a bus called ‘Further.
.
.
’
Dear _______ and here’s where the problem begins
For who shall I address this letter to?
Friends are few and very special, muses in the main
I must confess, the first I lost just fifty years ago.
Perhaps the best.
I searched for years and wrote en route
‘Bridge Over the Aire’ after that vision and that voice
“I am here.
I am waiting”.
I followed every lead
Margaret Gardiner last heard of in the Falmouth’s
Of Leeds 9, early fifties.
Barry Tebb your friend from then
Would love to hear from you.
”
The sole reply
A mis-directed estimate for papering a bungalow
In Penge.
I nearly came unhinged as weeks
Ran into months of silence.
Was it.
I wondered.
A voice from the beyond?
The vision was given
Complete with backcloth of resplendent stars
The bridge’s grey transmuted to a sheen of pearl
The chipped steps became transparent stairs to heaven
Our worn clothes, like Cinders’ at the ball, cloaks and gowns
Of infinite splendour but only for the night, remember!
I passed the muse’s diadem to Sheila Pritchard,
My genius-child-poet of whom Redgrove said
“Of course, you are in love” and wrote for her
‘My Perfect Rose!’
Last year a poet saw it
In the British Council Reading Room in distant Kazakstan
And sent his poems to me on paper diaphanous
As angels’ wings and delicate as ash
And tinted with a splash of lemon
And a dash of mignonette.
I last saw Sheila circa nineteen sixty seven
Expelled from grammar school wearing a poncho
Hand-made from an army blanket
Working a stall in Kirkgate Market.
Brenda Williams, po?te maudit if ever,
By then installed as muse number three
Grew sadly jealous for the only time
In thirty-seven years: muse number two
Passed into the blue
There is another muse, who makes me chronologically confused.
Barbara, who overlaps both two and three
And still is there, somewhere in Leeds.
Who does remember me and who, almost alone.
Inspired my six novellas: we write and
Talk sometimes and in a crisis she is there for me,
Muse number four, though absent for a month in Indonesia.
Remains.
I doubt if there will be a fifth.
There is a poet, too, who is a friend and writes to me
From Hampstead, from a caf? in South End Green.
His cursive script on rose pink paper symptomatic
Of his gift for eloquent prose and poetry sublime
His elegy on David Gascoyne’s death quite takes my breath
And the title of his novel ‘Lipstick Boys’ I'll envy always,
There are some few I talk and write to
And occasionally meet.
David Lambert, poet and teacher
Of creative writing, doing it ‘my way’ in the nineties,
UEA found his services superfluous to their needs.
? ? you may **** like hell,
But I abhor your jealous narcissistic smell
And as for your much vaunted pc prose
I’d rather stick my prick inside the thorniest rose.
Jeanne Conn of ‘Connections’ your letters
are even longer than my own and Maggie Allen
Sent me the only Valentine I’ve had in sixty years
These two do know my longings and my fears,
Dear Simon Jenner, Eratica’s erratic editor, your speech
So like the staccato of a bren, yet loaded
With a lifetime’s hard-won ken of poetry’s obscurest corners.
I salute David Wright, that ‘difficult deaf son’
Of the sixties, acknowledged my own youthful spasm of enthusiasm
But Simon you must share the honour with Jimmy Keery,
Of whom I will admit I’m somewhat leery,
His critical acuity so absolute and steely.
I ask you all to stay with me
Through time into infinity
Not even death can undo
The love I have for you.
|
Written by
Li Po |
You ask me why I dwell in the green mountain;
I smile and make no reply for my heart is free of care.
As the peach-blossom flows down stream and is gone into the unknown,
I have a world apart that is not among men.
|
Written by
Li Po |
A jade cup was broken because old age came
too soon to give fulfilment to hopes; after drinking
three cups of wine I wiped my sword and
started to dance under an autumn moon first
singing in a high voice then unable to halt
tears coming; I remember the day when first
I was summoned to court and I was feasted splendidly
writing poems in praise of the Emperor, making
jokes with officials around several times changing
my horse, taking the best from the
imperial stables; with my whip studded with
jade and coral presented to me by the Emperor,
my life was free and easy, people calling me
the "Banished Immortal.
" Hsi Shih was good
at smiling as well as frowning, useless
for ordinary girls to try and imitate her.
Surely it was only her loveliness the king adored,
but unfortunately jealousy within the palace
led to her death.
|