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Poetry

Bound to Nature

Sauvie copy 2
From Endymion
A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.
Therefore, on every morrow, are we wreathing
A flowery band to bind us to the earth,
Spite of despondence, of the inhuman dearth
Of noble natures, of the gloomy days,
Of all the unhealthy and o’er-darkened ways
Made for our searching: yes, in spite of all,
Some shape of beauty moves away the pall
From our dark spirits. Such the sun, the moon,
Trees old and young, sprouting a shady boon
For simple sheep; and such are daffodils
With the green world they live in; and clear rills
That for themselves a cooling covert make
‘Gainst the hot season; the mid forest brake,
Rich with a sprinkling of fair musk-rose blooms:
And such too is the grandeur of the dooms
We have imagined for the mighty dead;
All lovely tales that we have heard or read:
An endless fountain of immortal drink,
Pouring unto us from the heaven’s brink.
     —John Keats
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2 Comments

Sitting down with Love

· Faith expressed beautifully ·

IMG_2513Love
Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back.
Guiltie of dust and sinne.
But quick-ey’d Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning
If I lack’d anything.
A guest, I answer’d, worthy to be here:
Love said, You shall be he.
I the unkinde, ungrateful? Ah, my deare,
I cannot look on thee.
Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,
Who made the eyes but I?
Truth Lord, but I have marr’d them: let my shame
Go where it doth deserve.
And know you not, sayes Love, who bore the blame?
My deare, then I will serve.
You must sit down, sayes Love, and taste my meat:
So I did sit and eat.

       —George Herbert

I had never read anything of his and asked Laurel who he was: “Love (III) is the most well known poem by George Herbert. He was a seventeenth-century metaphysical poet, a generation after John Donne. T. S. Eliot brought both Donne and Herbert back to prominence. In 1971, while I was visiting England (on $5.00 a day), I made a little pilgrimage from London down to Salisbury, and from there to Herbert’s little stone church in nearby Bemerton. Unlike Donne, Herbert wrote only religious poems, and arranged them beautifully in his book, The Temple. Ralph Vaughn Williams’s Five Mystical Songs is from The Temple. George Herbert has been my favorite poet since my teens.”

Laurel Hicks, you are making my day!

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2 Comments

Thinking about Magic while trying to fall asleep.

· And someone unbeknownst to me captured it perfectly ·

The Mermaid

CLOSED EYELIDS

                There is a winged silence precedes sleep,

                That gathers underneath her cloudy wings

                The tiny fluttering peeping scattered things –

                My thoughts – and stills them into slumberings.

                                                                              Florence S. Small

The Director

The Magician copy

I’ve tried really hard to find out anything about Florence Small, as has Laurel, to no avail.  There was a painter in Victorian England by that name who also published a lovely children’s book, but her middle name is different. So it is a riddle, but one in keeping with the mystery of the images…..

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Synergy


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syn·er·gy
noun
“The interaction or cooperation of two or more organizations, substances, or other agents to produce a combined effect greater than the sum of their separate effects.”
The “other agents” in this case are your’s truly and two remarkably knowledgeable people: Laurel Hicks who is a walking encyclopedia for poetry and Paul Merchant who is a poet and translator of Greek poetry.
I have sent photographs and montages to Laurel, who then picked a fitting poem for each day; she had spontaneously posted a poem for one of my images of birds on FB which gave me the idea. Paul, on the other hand, gave me a volume of poetry by Constantine Cavafy that he recently translated, and I will present one poem here with montages that I created for it, by the end of the week. So stay tuned – this week will be a treat thanks to these two.
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Be like the bird, who
Halting in his flight
On limb too slight
Feels it give way beneath him,
Yet sings
Knowing he hath wings.
—Victor Hugo
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I am not Brave

The pendulum has swung back in current assessments of German resistance to the Hitler regime. Earlier historians condemned an entire people for blindly and passively following fascistic leadership into the abyss, dissecting the authoritarian personality structure of an entire nation, the inbred conformity. Praise went to the very few public exceptions, like the von Stauffenberg plot of July 20th, or the siblings Scholl of the White Rose. More recent debate has explored what it means to live in a totalitarian state, where a method of punishment was taking hostage of kith and kin, and where the ruthless and systematic nature of Nazi surveillance and repression eliminated most possibilities of domestic opposition. With the onset of the war any and all regime criticism was considered treason, punishable by death.

I do not know what I would have done.  All the more reason to remember the brave.

I am not brave

 

The Brave

 

The brave know

They will not rise again

That no flesh will grow around them

On Judgement morning

That they won’t remember anything

That they won’t see anyone ever again

That nothing of theirs is waiting

No salvation

No torture

I

Am not brave.

 

Marie Luise Kaschnitz (translated by Eavan Boland)

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Marie-Luise-Kaschnitz

3 Comments

Our Duty to Witness

Primo Levi’s appeal to all of us – as you’ll see in the poem below – could not be more timely. It is upon us to make sure that history does not to repeat itself.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/09/28/the-art-of-witness

The montage refers to Levi’s book The Periodic Table, photograph taken at KZ Ravensbrück. There is a new exhibit in Berlin right now about the inmates in this women’s camp who were doctors and nurses and forced to work in the infirmaries without means to treat the sick and dying.  https://www.charite.de/fileadmin/user_upload/Ausstellungsflyer_Med_Vers_Rav.pdf

Periodic Table new

Shema

You who live secure
In your warm houses,
Who return at evening to find
Hot food and friendly faces:

Consider whether this is a man,
Who labours in the mud
Who knows no peace
Who fights for a crust of bread
Who dies at a yes or a no.
Consider whether this is a woman,
Without hair or name
With no more strength to remember
Eyes empty and womb cold
As a frog in winter.

Consider that this has been:
I commend these words to you.
Engrave them on your hearts
When you are in your house, when you walk on your way,
When you go to bed, when you rise.
Repeat them to your children.
Or may your house crumble,
Disease render you powerless,
Your offspring avert their faces from you.
Primo Levi
(Translated by Ruth Feldman & Brian Swann)

2 Comments

For the Musicians

Music played a huge role for those trying to survive; it helped to remember, it supported resistance, it allowed lament and it forged solidarity. Many know about the orchestras in the camps, particularly Theresienstadt. But I chose a political song by Ernst Busch today, written while he was a camp inmate, because it became an international symbol for resistance by political prisoners against the Nazis.

https://www.ushmm.org/exhibition/music/detail.php?content=moor

The poem represents for me the epiphany of loss:

My Blue Piano-Lasker-Schueler copyMy Blue Piano

 

I call a blue piano my own

Yet I know not a single note.

 

The dark cellar door has become its home

Since the world turned to rotten bloat.

 

Starlit hands used to play a four-handed tone

– While Luna sang in her boat –

Now the rats’ dance sounds out a clinking moan.

 

The keys are broken, lying prone.

Tears for the blue corpse choke my throat.

 

I beg you, dear angels, permit me to roam

– I ate bread made of bitter oat –

Through the gates, while alive, to the heavenly throne

Though the law disallows such a vote.

 

Else Lasker-Schüler

http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/lasker-schueler-else

2 Comments

The Children’s Keeper

· Elisabeth von Thadden ·

Towards the end of World War II she was beheaded by the Nazis for high treason. Elisabeth von Thadden was seen as part of the resistance to Hitler’s regime, assumed to be connected to those trying to overthrow Hitler. She certainly was a critical thinker, a liberal, a devout protestant who had social contact to some of those involved in the July 20th assassination attempt. She helped where she could, but never considered herself political, just an upright, ethical citizen, a humanitarian. I spent several truly unhappy years in the park where her ashes were laid to rest.

Von Thadden had founded a boarding school for girls in the 1920s which was shut down later by the Nazis for activities endangering the State – there were no Hitler portraits hung in the halls of Wieblingen castle but there were Jewish students. The school reopened after the war under her name, and I was shipped there at age 13. I had no clue about the founder, I just hated an environment which at this time was less about giving girls an education, but rather a prep school for the daughters of the rich, the aristocracy, the divorced, and a few of us  belonging to none of these categories, ultimate outsiders, like myself. Internat is the German word for boarding school and interned I felt.

Lonely years. Years of ruining my stockings and scraping my knees or worse, climbing over glass shard-covered walls surrounding the castle to escape the sense of suffocation (I have the scars to prove it.) Years spent writing “why escape is not a good idea” or other inane essays as punishment when the governesses caught me, as they so often did. But the original founder had a heart for children, a soul to provide shelter for them and protection, a brain to educate girls, so all good. Had she lived, she would have been the first to take in orphans after the war ended.

Read here about her nephew writing an opera about her https://www.theguardian.com/music/2012/nov/21/opera-for-my-resistance-fighter-aunt

Sachs-From afar copy

 

If Someone Comes

 

If someone comes

from afar

with a language

whose sounds are possibly

silenced

by the whinnying of a mare

or

the chirping of

young blackbirds

or

like a shrieking saw

cutting apart any closeness –

 

If someone comes

from afar

with movements of a dog

or

perhaps of a rat

and it is winter

then give him warm clothes

it could also be

that his soles are on fire

(perhaps he straddled

         a meteor)

so do not scold him

for burning holes into your suffering carpet –

 

A foreigner’s arm always

holds his own country

like an orphan

for whom he possibly seeks

but a grave.

 

Nelly Sachs 

https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1966/sachs-bio.html

4 Comments

Railways bring strangers

Today I am thinking of the courage of the Kashariyot, the young women serving the Jewish resistance as couriers. A first and important strategic step of the Nazis was to isolate the ghettos after the occupation of Poland. Couriers were needed for communication among the resistance and it turned out that young women had a much better chance of going undetected. Not only did they not cause attention when wandering the streets or traveling in broad daylight compared to men who were supposed to be at work, but they could not be identified by a check on circumcision. Most importantly, though, in contrast to the boys who had spent their time in religious schools, the girls spoke fluent Polish with undetectable accents, because they had been immersed in the culture and thus could pass. They did not only smuggle messages, in the end they even brought weapons and ammunition to the ghettos.

http://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/education/newsletter/18/couriers.asp#!prettyPhoto

 

5 

Strangers

 

Railways bring strangers.

They disembark and look around:

they are helpless. Anxious fish

swim in their eyes.

They wear strange noses.

They have sad lips.

 

No one has come to fetch them.

They wait for the twilight

which makes no distinction between them

so they can call on their kindred

in the Milky Way,

in the lunar hollows.

 

One plays a harmonica –

off-kilter melodies.

Another musical scale

lives inside the instrument:

an inaudible sequencing

of isolations.

 

Rose Ausländer (translated by Eavan Boland)

6 Comments

Europe, Late

Stefan Lux, a Jewish journalist and poet you have probably never heard about, publicly shot himself at the assembled League of Nations in Geneva in July, 1936. This was his final attempt to rally attention to the Nazi specter. His failure and that of so many others to alert the public and the politicians to the monster in waiting is something we should take to heart. Warnings are ignored at our own peril.

http://www.haaretz.com/jewish/this-day-in-jewish-history/.premium-1.533511

Europe, Late-Pagis copy

Europe, Late

 

Violins float in the sky,

And a straw hat. I beg your pardon,

What year is it?

Thirty-nine and a half, still awfully early,

You can turn off the radio.

I would like to introduce you to:

The sea breeze, the life of the party,

Terribly mischievous,

whirling in a bell-skirt, slapping down

the worried newspapers: tango! tango!

And the park hums to itself:

I kiss your dainty hand, madame,

your hand as soft and elegant

as a white suede glove. You’ll see, madame,

that everything will be all right,

just heavenly – you wait and see.

No it could never happen here,

Don’t worry so – you’ll see it could

 

Dan Pagis (translated by Stephen Mitchell)

http://www.poetryinternationalweb.net/pi/site/poet/item/18703/12/Dan-Pagis

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