A poem a seed planted in the dust of your dreams a space and a possibility fenced with words that leap over boundaries that simply will not be contained
Silently she held me in those blue engaging eyes my tight-lipped love In this wide universe there will be other frosts other days and other nights but no other us
The mind too is a place of cultivation where the rose and the rhododendron may flourish What beauty in those names the lily and the marigold gardenia and wild cherry
Winter will pass Sparrows will refresh the nest new voices to enrich the dawn chorus : in truth beauty much more than a backdrop to love is its essence
Star-feathers f-f-f-f-falling softly softly a light litter dusting the streets of London coffee and indecision life catching its breath left dangling in the moment the unrepentant pulse of life that lives through us and in and around us the flotsam fluff of icy condensation teach yourself to be simple the simpler the better make the music poetry to my ears
today is anyone’s guess shall I go shall I eat a peach shall I take a stroll on Whitstable beach it’s all hard-core Hamlet down to the shore street snow is cheap insulation but a reality check all the same perhaps too nature’s make-up blush that masks the blemish blinkers us to a multitude of sins and the birds curiously sensibly silent on the subject
the eye enthralled by her shape a lover’s kiss I want no other
what now – we ask and for how long ? a blanket of urban snow – paws – pause – a peripatetic time for reflection time to watch our step “I’ll watch mine if you’ll watch yours” _____________________
discarded lines :
what angel wakes me in the dead hours ? small talk apparently of no consequence go back to sleep
a thin dusting of snow on her heart – the snow long gone her heart too – this wintry drizzle will soon fizzle out roll on summer
The ripple of words tipped into the silence spoken out of emotion feelings directly expressed one person facing another devoid of affectation pure breath
A cold clear morning sun burning up the frost at a loss as to what to regret basking in the warmth of her enduring love and all that has happened within the memory of a rose and the song of a nightingale
Deep in the forest the beckoning body beacons advertising their love bioluminescent beetles that hunger for a mate their bellies packed with light-bearing enzymes : through the air they drift selling sex their soft cold lamps switching on and off on and off on and off as they cruise the shadows of the unmarked boulevards
Chiaroscuro— bright glow in the darkness of Caravaggio’s studio the gleam in his eye the canvas awash with the powder of dried firefly to prepare a sensual photosensitive surface for a Baroque baptism of light
First published in 1914, Tender Buttons, by the American writer, Gertrude Stein, is a collection of poems written in a style which some critics have described as verbal Cubism. Stein’s close friendship with Pablo Picasso, detailed magnificently in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), undoubtedly exerted a great influence on the experimental style of composition in which everyday objects are described in ways that detach them from their familiar context so that the reader has to reassemble the parts in order to derive the sense. Plainly, it is a modernist work that demands some effort on the part of the reader, and this explains why it is one of the great unread classics. This is a pity because the work contains some of Stein’s very best writing and with the correct approach it can bring a good deal of pleasure. Each poem has to be read slowly and with a relaxed, meditative voice so as to handle each fragment of syntax with care, to examine it closely and allow the unconscious to assist in the process of assembly. There are many beautiful observations within the poems but they have to be teased out by a sympathetic reader, one who genuinely enjoys the true power of poetry and is attuned to its often unconventional rhythms and syntax. The theme of the work is, of course, explicit in the title, which celebrates the tenderness of homely relationships, including the people who occupy the home and the ordinary, everyday objects that surround them and which they use.
Tender Buttons
A reading for Gertrude: a table means necessary places cutlery on the starched white linen and a glass of any height a looking glass a lamp and a cake a tin lined with crumbs a precocious blue but not so sad after all green can be lean but nothing tendered nothing gained A table means also and also perhaps full of possibilities a commitment and a compromise : the light was gracious one might say forgiving so that they all looked their best A table is geometry and dynamics and sometimes crosstalk and sometimes silence it has moods and expectations and some things are certain and some things are not A wet-weather window opens us to the elements and chance as we know is a very fine thing
Picasso once ate and drank and smoked at her table and loved in her all that there was to love and more and Alice once sewed a button on his shirt : : that was a tender thing to do don’t you think ?
Showtime Winter simplifications pared back to the essentials the bare bones of nature a softly blue wedgwood sky frost crackles underfoot the tops of trees swaying catching a rhythm dancing to the notional tune of unseen gusts birds cavorting in the crisp circus air nothing still nothing quite silent nothing quite pointless hope not quite abandoned
Machinations out of sight life under marching orders rest and recuperation almost over the muster of forces ready to burst forth onto the boards crocus and daffodil messaging the way for the country rose for the urban petunias feisty energies raring to go longing to display their concupiscent colours a bluebell and a cowslip here and there Irrepressible remorseless life from single cell to the distant galaxies picks itself up dusts itself down gets on with the show
Who but me knows the precise thrill that rises out of the deeplyness of your beauty — a beauty steeped in the tenderness of your gesture a beauty beyond definition that tears language apart that reduces poetry to a meaningless rubble of senseless sentiment It is not that the fabric of your skin is softer than any silk though it is that too nor that your smile floods whatever space you occupy with a savage starlust of almost unbearable brilliance
No The memory of fields of lavender of orchards overburdened with the fragrance of competing blooms the wild perfumes that rose up from a land soothed by the summer breeze vineyards swept by the wayward dusts of Provence and on the Mediterranean shore the fine pilgrim sand that shifts so slowly in time Those were restless days and months and years now long gone a remnant glimmer that with undimmed youth I hold in my eye a beauty that knows no repose matched by a sweet desire that will never die
John Lyons
*The above poem was inspired by the following line,”Who out of deeplyness rose to undeath”, taken from a poem by e.e. cummings, published in 1931 in a collection entitled W [ViVa]. To read the whole of the poem by cummings click here http://plagiarist.com/poetry/3713/.
Savage rain through the night lashing the windows punishing the land seeping into the murky fabric of my unconscious – the land of nod that other country where the brain toils overtime labours double-time Brave Hector is in the dust Helen too my friends and the walls of my Troy are endlessly burning
We all live double lives and each feeds off the other back and forth we travel day and night Forsaken mariners we plough an empty ocean and hanker for guiding stars and for a glimpse of El Dorado
Blind ambition : when I grow up I want to be me or perhaps more simply I want to be
Wind through the hedges the garden a war zone plants and pots topsy-turvy but the nests barely disturbed : come spring there will be eggs a beautiful egg-shell blue I’ve seen them hatch before my eyes bright beaks eager to guzzle down what they can get of life dejection unknown certainly no lethargy build their strength and take to the wing
But for us an eternity and the marriage between heaven and hell hands on the plough but hands that go down with the dust Sparrows that envy the butterfly
James Ferrier Pryde, The Slum, (oil on canvas) 1916
James Ferrier Pryde (1866-1941) was a Scottish artist and sometime actor. His principal occupation was the design of theatrical sets and posters. In 1930 he designed the sets for Paul Robeson’s Othelloat the Savoy Theatre
However, Pryde is best remembered for a series of highly personal paintings of architectural subjects. During the First World War, these became increasingly sombre, dwelling on the theme of ruin and decay. ‘The Slum’, completed in February 1916, is one of the most monumental of these studies and evokes the grim tenement buildings of the Edinburgh of Pryde’s childhood.
What I admire in this portrait is the deep sense of irony which Prude infuses into his subject. The setting may well be Edinburgh but the gaunt building has echoes of Canaletto’s Venice, albeit the backstreets close to the Rialto. Notice the classical clothing of the figures featured in the painting. Pryde’s painting telescopes history in order to underline the degree of decadence, as if to say ‘this is how far we have come in the journey down to the pit of human indignity’. A once proud nation has been reduced to its knees, every detail is ragged and torn and misery drips from the buildings. The billowing shadows in the background are perhaps from the War raging somewhere off in the distance, but in the midst of the carnage on the battlefield we are not to forget the urban carnage of slum housing and what was in effect a war on the poor and dispossessed. The social and political climate that led to Easter 1916, I would suggest, is an unwritten part of the larger context, and Pryde, through his art, reaffirms the importance of artists as the antennae of their generation.
This magnificent canvas can be viewed at the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology in Oxford.
Dandelion dust – whatever passing through Peckham Rye bound for Victoria a flock of low-lying clouds racing eastwards as I travel west sunlight breaking through here and there in the gaps hear the sound of gulls ducking and diving
overhead
In the streets off Northcote Road scores of wounded Christmas trees lying disowned on their sides on the pavement how the mighty are fallen a forest cut down in its prime the ground littered with needles and decorations
fifty-per cent off
It all went so quickly barely a week and barely remembered and into the New Year the new life that awaits us if we want it
Dandelion dust caught in the wind blown to the four corners gets in your eye Life is relentless stopping for nothing a rollercoaster – breakneck speed and either you’re on or you’re off though there are little lay-bys quiet moments of reflection a little love and kindness but don’t get caught out it’s all over before you know it so make the most dandelion dust
johnjosephlyons 