Long Du Poems

"As other spirits sail on music, mine, oh my love, swim on your perfume." Charles Baudelaire

"Sometimes you find an old bottle from which the soul returns." 
Charles Baudelaire

"Smell is a Word. Perfume is Literature."

"There are...

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Poems about Flight, Flying, and Birds



Flying
by Michael R. Burch

I shall rise
and try the bloody wings of thought
ten thousand times
before I fly...

and then I'll sleep
and waste ten thousand nights
before I dream;

but when at last...
I soar the...

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I melt into the plural sky
its rippling tableaus of tomorrow
underneath open light waves 
see-saws the labyrinth
like Delphi tendrils crossing channels 
all the changing faces played
automatic, embedded in misty consort 
with Hyde-Lees and Yeats 
love-crushed oracles
ghostwriting...

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Sonnets XXV-XXXII

Archaischer Torso Apollos (“Archaic Torso of Apollo”)
by Rainer Maria Rilke
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

We cannot know the beheaded god
nor his eyes' forfeited visions. But still
the figure's trunk glows with the strange vitality
of a...

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Sonnets X-XVI


Archaischer Torso Apollos (“Archaic Torso of Apollo”)
by Rainer Maria Rilke
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

We cannot know the beheaded god
nor his eyes' forfeited visions. But still
the figure's trunk glows with the strange vitality
of a...

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I know you invited the Brothers to side-line along,
but only if we are here to listen;
Don't speak.

Yet I may have credential for qualifying voice.
For I, like some of you,
know what it means to develop cooperative,
too...

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Here he stands, Edwardian vogue, sometimes with his spats, 
sometimes with his brogues below his dungarees. With rounded collar points and tie, and jacket donned below this flying suit, his waste is tied with simple...

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Translation with commentary of an archetypal Wild West Classic : " Summer Wine "

(I'd wage my bottom diamond dime future generations will re-discover and treasure this true American classic like only a few others of...

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 A French ‘Indianist’ Doctor: A Tribute to a Die-hard Humanist
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Translation of Eric Mottram’s Courbet: Elegy 8 by T. Wignesan

Blanches oeuvres ouvertes
résident dans les jours
la surface du banc de travail est noire
les géraniums-lierres
les fougères et les adragans
accumulent leurs oeuvres et jours:
La toile noire de Courbet
un...

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I discovered a poem longing in my heart, it is for you, 
And it is about you, my sweetheart. This poem resembles you.
I wrote it this morning, before the arrival of the auroral shadow.
Her words...

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(Musings of a poet with huge doubts and a fragile faith)

Introduction: Is God A Joke Or Human Vanity?

When close friends die and other’s thoughts are suicidal,
When mankind’s soup du jour is loneliness with anguish	
When mental...

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Chinese Poets: English Translations

These are modern English translations of poems by some of the greatest Chinese poets of all time, including Du Fu, Huang O, Li Bai, Li Ching-jau, Li Qingzhao, Po Chu-I, Tzu Yeh,...

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Translation of Les Moulins de mon Cœur-THE WINDMILLS OF YOUR MIND by T. Wignesan

(For the orignal text in French by Eddy MARNAY : see here below. The English version by Marilyn and Alan BERGMAN differs...

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Translation of Eric Mottram’s Twentythird Legal by T. Wignesan

Le vingt-troisième légal

pendant la guerre le peuple devient obéissent de nouveau
plein du respect (et) de la confiance les enfants naïfs dans la foi
la gouvernance nécessaire  ...

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Translation of Eric Mottram’s TIME SIGHT UNSEEN, Part One by T. Wignesan

"Instead of an item in a school of rhetoric, the poem could have variety of articulations, continuity and discontinuity, sentence and parataxis, and an...

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UNQUOTABLE QUOTES: L (50) - Tongue-Teasers

The « early bird catches the worm » only because the worm has not woken up yet.

« I don’t love you ! I hated your father ! » - must...

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Translation of Eric Mottram’s TIME SIGHT UNSEEN, Part Two by T. Wignesan

"Instead of an item in a school of rhetoric, the poem could have variety of articulations, continuity and discontinuity, sentence and parataxis, and an...

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I don't know what came over me that day - an instant of weakness after years of resistance, I suppose.

My beaming spouse leads me, a dog on a short leash, into the forbidden citadel, the...

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The Rhine Salmon Complaint, Translation of Etiemble’s Complainte d’un salmon du Rhin

						For Yvon Belaval
(A lilting musical poem of varying line length in quatrains with a refrain and much internal
 rhyming; end-rhyme scheme: alternate rhymes in...

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Act 3. A dark, empty stage.

Marat
(standing up)

My eyes went blank. That's how it goes when
you have been doubly knocked flat on your back
in half an hour. He went, he went,
he went, he went, he went,...

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Translation of « On est les oubliés » (They/We are the neglected and forgotten lot)
by the songster-poet Gauvin SERS
(For the last two years, this young unassuming Frenchman, full of verve and disarming airs has been...

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The reading of Villon poems at West Berlin’s Free University, Winter Semester 1957-58
                      ...

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La Charte des Droits de l’Homme pour les Aborigènes - Translation of Oodgeroo Noonuccal's Aboriginal Charter of Rights by T. Wignesan


Nous avons besoin de l’espoir, pas de racisme,
La fraternité, pas d’ostracisme
Du progrès pour les Noirs,...

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