Beautiful lines
Well, this bloody stupid internet ether just scrooched my nascent post! Let's see, what was I saying....
Oh - there have been a few folks out there who have made note that it is National Poetry Month, which I think should be celebrated continuously, along with any form of "(fill in the blank) History Month," or any sort of one day celebration of parenthood or personage. I have posted a couple of contributions on sites which called for one's favorite poems, lyrics or lines, and I shall put up a couple of selections here.
These are from Anna Swir, a Polish poet who lived from 1909-1984. She was a member of the Resistance, served as a military nurse in a makeshift hospital during the Warsaw Uprising, and once waited an hour expecting to be executed.
Here is one of her poems:
The Soul and the Body on the Beach
The soul on the beach
studies a textbook of philosophy.
The soul asks the body:
Who bound us together?
The body says:
Time to tan the knees.
The soul asks the body:
Is it true
that we do not really exist?
The body says:
I am tanning my knees.
The soul asks the body:
Where will the dying begin,
in you or in me?
The body laughs,
It tanned its knees.
And here's another:
I Do Not Accept
I renounce this fingernail
already worn
by my grandfather.
This head occupied
for two thousand years
by the bloody body of Julius Caesar.
The dead sit on me
like a mountain. The carrion
of barbaric epochs,
of bodies and thoughts decays in me.
Cruel corpses of centuries
ask
that I be as cruel as they.
But I am not going to repeat
their dead words.
I have to give myself
a new birth. I have to
give birth to a new time.
Oh - there have been a few folks out there who have made note that it is National Poetry Month, which I think should be celebrated continuously, along with any form of "(fill in the blank) History Month," or any sort of one day celebration of parenthood or personage. I have posted a couple of contributions on sites which called for one's favorite poems, lyrics or lines, and I shall put up a couple of selections here.
These are from Anna Swir, a Polish poet who lived from 1909-1984. She was a member of the Resistance, served as a military nurse in a makeshift hospital during the Warsaw Uprising, and once waited an hour expecting to be executed.
Here is one of her poems:
The Soul and the Body on the Beach
The soul on the beach
studies a textbook of philosophy.
The soul asks the body:
Who bound us together?
The body says:
Time to tan the knees.
The soul asks the body:
Is it true
that we do not really exist?
The body says:
I am tanning my knees.
The soul asks the body:
Where will the dying begin,
in you or in me?
The body laughs,
It tanned its knees.
And here's another:
I Do Not Accept
I renounce this fingernail
already worn
by my grandfather.
This head occupied
for two thousand years
by the bloody body of Julius Caesar.
The dead sit on me
like a mountain. The carrion
of barbaric epochs,
of bodies and thoughts decays in me.
Cruel corpses of centuries
ask
that I be as cruel as they.
But I am not going to repeat
their dead words.
I have to give myself
a new birth. I have to
give birth to a new time.
posted by isabelita at 11:32 AM
4 Comments:
Isa,
Good poetry is timeless, no?
P.S. posted two J-tree trek pics yesterday. Finally got through the whole batch and my post a pictoral review for the weekend.
It's from a collection of hers, called Talking to My Body, put out by a local publisher, Copper Canoon Press, kathy. She's very distilled, I would call it.
'spike, I'd anjoy seeing all of them! My husband has a link to a batch he took down there, too. We could trade batches. My email's betsio@yahoo.com
Those are great. (BTW: Love your idea of filling the water hazards with catsup on golf courses. Maybe gunpowder in the sand traps?)
Ah, neil, something about the relentless horros of our current situation inspires me to bizarre ideas.
(better gunpowder than underaged girls...)
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