Love of my better days I shall not forget you though the last leaf has not yet fallen and so far we have been spared the wrath of winter We might have lived in a land of lemon trees beside a sea as blue as your beautiful eyes and bathed in the neighbouring sun that brought out such a delicate blush to your golden fleshBut no! The river runs on silently and you and I are nowhere to be seen together Nothing changes Nothing ever lasts forever
John Lyons
Amour de mes meilleurs jours
Amour de mes meilleurs jours, je ne t’oublierai pas, même si la dernière feuille n’est pas encore tombée et que nous avons été jusqu’ici épargnés par la colère de l’hiver. Nous aurions pu vivre dans un pays de citronniers, au bord d’une mer aussi bleue que tes beaux yeux, et nous baigner du soleil voisin qui faisait ressortir une si délicate rougeur sur ta peau dorée. Mais non ! La rivière continue de couler en silence, et toi et moi ne sommes nulle part ensemble. Rien ne change, rien ne dure éternellement.
In the stillness I hear the drizzle falling through the universe The birdsong is subdued I see leaves gently waving in the light breeze Our star has yet to appear through the grey clouds
A train is running in the distance and I think of Emily Dickinson and the silences of Amherst to which she was so attuned We share the same cosmos a common heritage
Out of the window -an inclined skylight- in the distance a tall conifer heaves restlessly in the wind against a grey sky A roof hip attached to the roof ridge of the house opposite at an angle of 135 degrees : weather-worn tiles a little moss growing all due for renewal soon
All things have a life the birds warbling in the bushes the rose garden where the birds sometimes sing : the train Emily heard passing through the mountain pass and through her life : the pebbles pounded to oblivion on Brighton beach All things drifting towards extinction All in good time
Out of the window -an inclined skylight- in the distance I see a tall conifer it heaves restlessly in the wind against a grey sky I see too a roof hip attached to the roof ridge of the house opposite noting an angle of 135 degrees : the tiles are weather-worn a little moss has gathered they are all due for renewal soon
All things have a life the birds warbling in the bushes the rose garden where the birds sometimes sing the train heard passing through the mountain pass by Emily Dickinson who in turn had a life the pebbles pounded to oblivion on Brighton beach all things hurtling towards extinction all in their own good time
Some weeks ago on Platform 3 at Lewisham station a working class man with a working class ferret on a harnessed lead waiting for a train to Charing Cross and when the train arrived the ferret tugged restlessly at the lead eager to be the first to board I wondered what business the ferret had at Charing Cross though it was none of my business though let it be said if anyone is interested that the word for a group of ferrets is a business
Male ferrets are called hobs but all the girls are known as jills and the babes as kits Though ferrets can sleep for anything up to eighteen hours a day you wouldn’t believe it while they’re awake because they’re never still the pests !
Ferrets have been employed to lay wires or as racers in rural fairs but the main use of ferrets has always been hunting : with their long lean bodies and inquisitive nature these mammals are very well equipped for getting down holes or chasing rodents rabbits and moles out of their burrows
And like the rest of us ferrets are composed of one hundred percent dust God bless ’em !
John Lyons
For the inspiration behind the poem’s final stanza, see Emily Dickinson: “This quiet dust was gentlemen and ladies / And lads and girls,” and also the final stanza of “The Color of the Grave is Green”.
Poetry has innumerable registers and as many audiences. Yesterday I wrote a poem for a class I give to an adolescent with special needs. My student faces a number of challenges, but he is very intelligent and is interested in everything. He also has a gift with words. We have been reading the poetry of Emily Dickinson, William Carlos Williams and Stevie Smith, and part of every class involves a short piece of writing, often in the form of poetry. The poem below was written to demonstrate how the simple repetition of a phrase can give form to a poem: each line was also intended to stimulate a response that would lead to a piece of writing by my student. Before settling down to work, however, he spontaneously spoke the line “Why is the sun so beautiful?” and he went on to describe what he felt about the sun. I told him that that first line in particular, with its combined exclamation and question mark, could easily be the first line of a poem by Emily Dickinson, and congratulated him. Poetry as an educational medium can help to unlock the emotions and liberate the powers of expression. It has this effect on school children and on adults alike.Poetry rules, okay!
Some things
Some things are important Some things are not
Some things I remember Some things I forgot
Some things make me happy Some things make me sad
Some things really please me Some things drive me mad
Some things are really boring Some things are really fun
Some things are best in winter Some things really need the sun
Some things are quite alarming Some things are really cool
Some things I do at weekends Some things I do at school
Some things are good for eating Some things are good to drink
Some things are really easy Some things they make you think
Some things are worth the trouble Some things I couldn’t care
Some things I think of trying Some things I wouldn’t dare
The silkworm is the larva or caterpillar of the domesticated silkmoth, Bombyx mori. A silkworm’s preferred food is white mulberry leaves, but it may also eat the leaves of any other mulberry tree. It is entirely dependent on humans for its reproduction and does not occur naturally in the wild.
Sericulture, the practice of breeding silkworms for the production of raw silk, has been underway for at least 5,000 years in China, from where it spread to Korea and Japan, and later to India and the West.
The poem below was inspired by these verses from the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam:
You have formed me of earth and of water, What can I do? Whether I be wool or silk, it is You that have woven me, and what can I do? The good that I do, the evil that I am guilty of, Were alike predestined by you; what can I do?
Here we go round the mulberry
silkworm cocoons
The low branches of morus alba, with its wide spreading crown and scaly orange-brown bark pocked with lenticels to oxygenate and
expel toxic gases, and lush orbicular-shaped leaves with serrate margin: dioecious flowers–the narrow male, one to two inches long, the plumper
female at barely an inch–boys and girls in slender zigzag come out to play. Twigs with silvery white filaments draped with fleshy multiples of drupes,
cylindrical fruit, akin to the blackberry, from June to August maturing. The larva fed on this foliage, its spittle passing through spinneret lips so hardening to tensile-as-steel silk,
each cocoon wound with a single mile-long thread, the oven- baked pupas, soaked in boiling water, whence five strands spun on wooden bobbins, the yarn woven into the cloth of kings. So do not
hasten to consign Emily Dickinson’s breath to dust, nor the intemperate slobber of Walt Whitman’s leaves of grass to the furnace, in all modesty our poetry too is nothing less than solidified saliva.
In the 1960s, encouraged by the American poet and painter Brion Gysin, William Burroughs began to experiment with a cut-up technique of writing. He would take a page from a novel by Graham Greene, for example, and cut it into four columns A, B, C and D. He would then rearrange the columns in an order such as C, A, D, B. and glue them to a sheet of paper so that he was able to read the text across the lines of the page CADB as though the words had been written in that order. What interested him was to see what new images and combinations were created in this new arrangement of words.
In an interview, Burroughs stated: “Any narrative passage or any passage, say, of poetic images is subject to any number of variations, all of which may be interesting and valid in their own right. A page of Rimbaud cut up and rearranged will give you quite new images. Rimbaud images—real Rimbaud images—but new ones.”
Some months ago I tried a variation of this technique. Instead of cutting up pages, I consulted a concordance to the work of the American writer, Herman Melville, author of Moby Dick. I searched for usages of the words, ‘bone’, ‘dust’, ‘love’, ‘dream’ and ‘rose’. The text below is a compilation of those references as they occurred in my research.
Dust on the moth’s wing
She was bone of his bone and his very bones are as whispering galleries He laid her bones upon some treacherous reef with the bones of the drowned Not dust to dust but dust to brine he is dust where he stands he had dead dust for ancestors the penalty we pay for being what we are—fine dust
Did I dream a snow-white skin firmament blue eyes : this beautiful maiden who thinking no harm and rapt in a dream was a dream We dream not ourselves but the dream dreams within us How the firefly illuminates its body for a beacon to love Long he cannot be for love is a fervent flagellant fire love is all in all—all three : red rose bright shore and soft heart are full of love
Loved one love on who fell into the very snares of love Love the living not the dead great love is sad and heaven is love
Dreams dreams golden dreams : noon dreams are day dreams Are all our dreams then in vain? What dream brought you hither Romeo And sweet Juliet what dream is it that ails your heart ? We are but dolls of joy and grief : breathe grow dream die —love not
This earth’s an urn for flowers not for ashes Brush your tears from the lilies and howl in sackcloth and ashes as thoughts of eternity thicken Duration is not of the future but the past : we must build with the calendar of eternities Sad rose of all my days : a song sung on lips of dust
He’s seized the helm eternity was in his eyes Dash of the waves against the bow and deep the breath of dreaming Such perils that lie like a rose among thorns Her delicate white skin tinted with a faint rose hue like her lips like rose pearls that once bruised against my aching skin left love stains
Your rose, my sweet I unfold its petals and disclose a pearl yet the full-blown rose is nearer to withering than the bud : and Emily asked how far is it to hell ?
johnjosephlyons 