March Theme: Women Painters and Authors – Anna Akhmatova

Anna Akhmatova (23 June 1889, Odesa, Ukraine – 5 March 1966, Moscow, Russia)
Occupation: Poet, translator, memoirist
Nationality: Russian/Soviet
Literary movement: Acmeism

Portrait of Anna Akhmatova by Nathan Altman, 1914

March Elegy by Anna Akhmatova

I have enough treasures from the past
to last me longer than I need, or want.
You know as well as I . . . malevolent memory
won’t let go of half of them:
a modest church, with its gold cupola
slightly askew; a harsh chorus
of crows; the whistle of a train;
a birch tree haggard in a field
as if it had just been sprung from jail;
a secret midnight conclave
of monumental Bible-oaks;
and a tiny rowboat that comes drifting out
of somebody’s dreams, slowly foundering.
Winter has already loitered here,
lightly powdering these fields,
casting an impenetrable haze
that fills the world as far as the horizon.
I used to think that after we are gone
there’s nothing, simply nothing at all.
Then who’s that wandering by the porch
again and calling us by name?
Whose face is pressed against the frosted pane?
What hand out there is waving like a branch?
By way of reply, in that cobwebbed corner
a sunstruck tatter dances in the mirror.

C. P. Cavafy (April 29, 1863 – April 29, 1933)

Walls

by C. P. Cavafy

Without reflection, without mercy, without shame,
they built strong walls and high, and compassed me about.

And now I sit here and consider and despair.

My brain is worn with meditating on my fate:
I had outside so many things to terminate.

Oh! why when they were building did I not beware!

But never a sound of building, never an echo came.
Out of the world, insensibly, they shut me out.

The House with the Cracked Walls by Paul Cezanne, 1892 – 1894

 

The Bridge by Octavio Paz

Between now and now,
between I am and you are,
the word bridge.

Entering it
you enter yourself:
the world connects
and closes like a ring.

From one bank to another,
there is always
a body stretched:
a rainbow.
I’ll sleep beneath its arches.

The Bridge at Courbevoie by Georges Seurat, 1886-1887

Thought for the day – Carl Sandburg

“Poetry is the journal of the sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air. Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable. Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away.”
— Carl Sandburg

Pablo Neruda (July 12, 1904 – September 23, 1973)

Forget About Me

by Pablo Neruda

Among the things the sea throws up,
let us hunt for the most petrified,
violet claws of crabs,
little skulls of dead fish,
smooth syllables of wood,
small countries of mother-of-pearl;
let us look for what the sea undid
insistently, carelessly,
what it broke up and abandoned,
and left behind for us.

Petals crimped up,
cotton from the tidewash,
useless sea-jewels,
and sweet bones of birds
still in the poise of flight.

The sea washed up its tidewrack,
the air played with the sea-things;
when there was sun, it embraced them,
and time lives close to the sea,
counting and touching what exists.

I know all the algae,
the white eyes of the sand,
the tiny merchandise
of the tides in autumn,
and I walk with the plump pelican,
building its soaking nests,
sponges that worship the wind,
shelves of undersea shadow,
but nothing more moving
than the vestiges of shipwrecks—
the smooth abandoned beams
gnawed by the waves
and disdained by death.

Let us look for secret things
somewhere in the world,
on the blue shore of silence
or where the storm has passed,
rampaging like a train.
There the faint signs are left,
coins of time and water,
debris, celestial ash
and the irreplaceable rapture
of sharing in the labor
of solitude and the sand.

― Pablo Neruda, Poems From On The Blue Shore Of Silence

Silence by Arthur Beecher Carles, 1908

 

Sonnet XL by Pablo Neruda

 

Green was the silence, wet was the light
the month of June trembled like a butterfly
and in the south dominion, from the sea and the stones,
Matilde, you traversed the midday.

You were loaded with ferrous flowers,
seaweeds that the south wind torments and forgets,
still white, shrivelled by the devouring salt,
your hands raised the stalks of sand.

I love your pure gifts, your skin of untouched rock,
your nails offered in the sun of your fingers,
your mouth spilt through all the joy,

but, for my house neighboring the abyss,
give me the tormented system of the silence,
the pavillion of the sea forgotten in the sand.

Summer Houses by Paul Klee, 1919

The More Loving One by W. H. Auden

THE MORE LOVING ONE

by W. H. Auden

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.

How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.

Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.

Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.

 

Star Maker by Remedios Varo

Ocean of Earth by Guillaume Apollinaire

Ocean of Earth by Guillaume Apollinaire

       To G. de Chirico

I have built a house in the middle of the Ocean
Its windows are the rivers flowing from my eyes
Octopi are crawling all over where the walls are
Hear their triple hearts beat and their beaks peck against the windowpanes

         House of dampness
House of burning
Season’s fastness
Season singing
The airplanes are laying eggs
Watch out for the dropping of the anchor

Watch out for the shooting black ichor
It would be good if you were to come from the sky
The sky’s honeysuckle is climbing
The earthly octopi are throbbing
And so very many of us have become our own gravediggers
Pale octopi of the chalky waves O octopi with pale beaks
Around the house is this ocean that you know well
And is never still

(Translated by Ron Padgett)

Portrait Of Guillaume Apollinaire by Giorgio de Chirico, 1914, Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France

Still Another Day (AÚN) by Pablo Neruda

XVIII

The days aren’t discarded or collected, they are bees
that burned with sweetness or maddened
the sting: the struggle continues,
the journeys go and come between honey and pain.
No, the net of the years doesn’t unweave: there is no net.
They don’t fall drop by drop from a river: there is no river.
Sleep doesn’t divide life into halves,
or action, or silence, or honor:
life is like a stone, a single motion,
a lonesome bonfire reflected on the leaves,
an arrow, only one, slow or swift, a metal
that climbs or descends burning in your bones.

(trans. William O’Daly) Copper Canyon Press: Port Townsend, 1984.

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XVIII

Los días no se descartan ni se suman, son abejas
que ardieron de dulzura o enfurecieron
el aguijón: el certamen continúa,
van y vienen los viajes desde la miel al dolor.
No, no se deshila la red de los años: no hay red.
No caen gota a gota desde un río: no hay río.
El sueño no divide la vida en dos mitades,
ni la acción, ni el silencio, ni la virtud:
fue como una piedra la vida, un solo movimiento,
una sola fogata que reverbéro en el follaje,
una flecha, una sola, lenta o activa, un metal
que ascendió y descendió quemándose en tus huesos.

Melancholy Of A Beautiful Day by Giorgio de Chirico, 1913

Spleen by Charles Baudelaire

January, irritated with the whole city,
Pours from his urn great waves of gloomy cold
On the pale occupants of the nearby graveyard
And death upon the foggy slums.

My cat seeking a bed on the tiled floor
Shakes his thin, mangy body ceaselessly;
The soul of an old poet wanders in the rain-pipe
With the sad voice of a shivering ghost.

The great bell whines, the smoking log
Accompanies in falsetto the snuffling clock,
While in a deck of cards reeking of filthy scents,

My mortal heritage from some dropsical old woman,
The handsome knave of hearts and the queen of spades
Converse sinisterly of their dead love affair.

Translated by William Aggeler, The Flowers of Evil (Fresno, CA: Academy Library Guild, 1954)

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Pluviôse, irrité contre la ville entière,
De son urne à grands flots verse un froid ténébreux
Aux pâles habitants du voisin cimetière
Et la mortalité sur les faubourgs brumeux.

Mon chat sur le carreau cherchant une litière
Agite sans repos son corps maigre et galeux;
L’âme d’un vieux poète erre dans la gouttière
Avec la triste voix d’un fantôme frileux.

Le bourdon se lamente, et la bûche enfumée
Accompagne en fausset la pendule enrhumée
Cependant qu’en un jeu plein de sales parfums,

Héritage fatal d’une vieille hydropique,
Le beau valet de coeur et la dame de pique
Causent sinistrement de leurs amours défunts.

Painting: Woman And Cat by Tsuguharu Foujita, 1937