“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
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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
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
Jacques Prévert (4 February 1900 – 11 April 1977)
Song In The Blood
by Jacques Prévert
There are great puddles of blood on the world
Where is it all going? all this spilled blood?
Is it the earth that drinks it and gets drunk?
Funny kind of drunkography then, so wise, so monotonous, no,
The earth doesn’t get drunk
The earth doesn’t turn askew
It pushes its little car regularly, it’s four seasons, rain, snow, hail, fair weather,
Never is it drunk
It’s with difficulty it permits itself from time to time
An unhappy little volcano
It turns, the earth,
It turns with its trees, its gardens, its houses
It turns with its great pools of blood
And all living things turn with it and bleed
It doesn’t give a damn the earth
It turns and all living things set up a howl,
It doesn’t give a damn,
It turns
It doesn’t stop turning
And the blood doesn’t stop running
Where’s it going all this spilled blood?
Murder’s blood, war’s blood, misery’s blood,
And the blood of men tortured in prisons,
And the blood of children calmly tortured by their papa and their mama
And the blood of men whose heads bleed in padded cells
And the roofers blood when the roofer slips and falls from the roof
And the blood that comes and flows in great gushes with the newborn
The mother cries,
The baby cries,
The blood flows
The earth turns
The earth doesn’t stop turning,
The blood doesn’t stop flowing
Where’s it going all this spilled blood?
Blood of the blackjacked,
Of the humiliated,
Of suicides
Of firing squad victims
Of the condemned
And the blood of those that die just like that by accident
In the street a living being goes by with all his blood inside
Suddenly there he is, dead
And all his blood outside
And other living beings make the blood disappear
They carry the body away
But it’s stubborn the blood
And there where the dead one was,
Much later, all black,
A little blood still stretches
Coagulated blood,
Life’s rust, body’s rust
Blood curdled like milk,
Like milk when it turns,
When it turns like the earth,
Like the earth it turns with its milk,
With its cows,
With its living,
With its dead,
The earth that turns with its trees,
With it’s living beings, its houses
The earth that turns with marriages,
Burials,
Shells,
Regiments,
The earth that turns and turns and turns
With its great streams of blood.
Painting: The voice of blood (La Voix du sang) by Rene Magritte, 1948
Art, Literature & Life 