Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Typed Words


Embrace who you are, even if it is age.

From March 25, 2008:

The flow of the personal journal,
The meditating prayer,
The praise we give to God,
Hoping He is there.

Friendless times disappearing,
A new change up on the rise;
Syllables of Spring are waking,
And awaking my sibilant eyes.

Doubtness and Darkness departing,
Clarity taking the helm;
Godless is gone and my heart sings,
Charity breeding a calm.

Remember the cycles, for there are many

Penetrating winds of blow,
An ice cap on my chest;
Profundities too bleak to seize,
A million wished I’d have pleased
A heart well wounded throughout time
A lonely forest for the mind
A jealous guard protects the mine
And reach out on a precipice
For something more divine than this
A Voice is calling for your bliss
Not offered in the Void’s abyss
But treading gently on the moss
The ferns and cresses yield the dross
The burden weighted by the cross
That I insist to carry.

Weighted down I fear to tread
With reverence near your heavy head
For pickled brains need old adults
Whose life-tick barely yields a pulse
For duty stands to watch the wings
And silence anyone who sings
But sung I have
And sing I may
And sing will I beyond today
Not chained by food, grades, money or a Norm
So indefinable in this stimuli storm.

I am content to bake alone;
Simmer, incubate;
Find my prime and percolate;
Rise above and look beyond, --
This migrant stop is but a pond.
Move on!

Jump in the river!
And if you fall out,
Jump back in!
It just might wash away my sin
And bring me, baptized, cleansed anew
To where I should and what to do.
There is no life in stagnance
There is no joy in mud
There is no preacher worth his fluff
Whose “Sermon says” says it’s enough.

I want sunbeams Heavenward,
I want life beyond our sky;
And if my dream is trampled here,
Resurrect us both before I die.

Breathe some room in openness,
Give sway to open paths.


From 3-30-2008:

The flow of passion brings a curse,
Defamatory in name;
A bronzéd heart so cauterized,
By dancing near the flame.

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

I want fire in my bones
And fire in my belly

Saturday, April 05, 2008

Some Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins

He lived from 1844-1889. He dared to break rules when writing. He used his words like clay, like paint. He worked them until they became some new form. He preferred his poetry to be read aloud:




“God’s Grandeur”

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.




“Pied Beauty”

Glory be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.




“The Windhover”

To Christ our Lord

I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.