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  • Lost & Found

Condolence

24/7/2017

 

I almost forgot, foolish me, I almost forgot, forgot
That where I am from we see the rain
Before the rain even starts to rain

No wonder, why you’ve been buggering me
Cause this walk, it’s a previous journey
And no wonder why the road seems so long
Cause I had done it all before
And I won

- Benjamin Clementine

The little black fish

21/7/2017

 
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Sonnet XI

7/7/2017

 
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I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair.
Silent and starving, I prowl through the streets.
Bread does not nourish me, dawn disrupts me, all day
I hunt for the liquid measure of your steps.

I hunger for your sleek laugh,
your hands the color of a savage harvest,
hunger for the pale stones of your fingernails,
I want to eat your skin like a whole almond.

I want to eat the sunbeam flaring in your lovely body,
the sovereign nose of your arrogant face,
I want to eat the fleeting shade of your lashes,

and I pace around hungry, sniffing the twilight,
hunting for you, for your hot heart,
Like a puma in the barrens of Quitratue.

― Pablo Neruda

Poem without an image

19/5/2017

 
Just now it has come
to me again: the sudden

knowledge of everything
that remains to be done
though I worked my ass off
this week, doing things, doing
things. What is my style?

is a question I have never

asked until now, in the waiting
room at my dentist’s,
when this article in O Magazine

encouraged me so cunningly
to do so. Maybe it is not
my job to surprise you, not
anymore, says the spirit.
O.K., I say. O.K. But still,
I want one more crisp
image, just one, though I know
I don’t deserve it, I want it

to appear the way money once

or twice in my life has appeared
in my line of vision on
the street: some bill, nearly
alive, green god, its skin
giving off evergreen light,
unaccounted for and then
immediately mine, no
questions asked.

- Carrie Fountain


Wolves

24/4/2017

 
 I like the lines you use on me
they crackle a little, like magic.

I cannot pull my mind off you
even though
I do not trust your hands.

‘I’ll admit it, I’m drawn to the wolves’

- Yrsa Daley-Ward

Postscript

21/4/2017

 
And some time make the time to drive out west
Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
In September or October, when the wind
And the light are working off each other
So that the ocean on one side is wild
With foam and glitter, and inland among stones
The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit
By the earthed lightning of a flock of swans,
Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,
Their fully grown headstrong-looking heads
Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.
Useless to think you'll park and capture it
More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.

- Seamus Heaney

  

14/4/2017

 
Come again, please, come again,
Whoever you are.
Religious, infidel, heretic or pagan.
Even if you promised a hundred times
And a hundred times you broke your promise,
This door is not the door
Of hopelessness and frustration.
This door is open for everybody.
Come, come as you are.

-Rumi


Translations

14/4/2017

 
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You show me the poems of some woman
my age, or younger
translated from your language

Certain words occur: enemy, oven, sorrow
enough to let me know
she's a woman of my time

obsessed

with Love, our subject:
we've trained it like ivy to our walls
baked it like bread in our ovens
worn it like lead on our ankles
watched it through binoculars as if
it were a helicopter
bringing food to our famine
or the satellite
of a hostile power

I begin to see that woman
doing things: stirring rice
ironing a skirt
typing a manuscript till dawn

trying to make a call
from a phonebooth

The phone rings endlessly
in a man's bedroom
she hears him telling someone else
Never mind. She'll get tired.
hears him telling her story to her sister

who becomes her enemy
and will in her own way
light her own way to sorrow

ignorant of the fact this way of grief
is shared, unnecessary
and political

Adrienne Rich - December 25, 1972

'These Yet To Be United States'

2/3/2017

 
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Tremors of your network
cause kings to disappear.
Your open mouth in anger
makes nations bow in fear.

Your bombs can change the seasons,
obliterate the spring.
What more do you long for ?
Why are you suffering ?

You control the human lives
in Rome and Timbuktu.
Lonely nomads wandering
owe Telstar to you.

Seas shift at your bidding,
your mushrooms fill the sky.
Why are you unhappy ?
Why do your children cry ?

They kneel alone in terror
with dread in every glance.
Their rights are threatened daily
by a grim inheritance.

You dwell in whitened castles
with deep and poisoned moats
and cannot hear the curses
which fill your children's throats.

- Maya Angelou

Windows

24/2/2017

 
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“so I wait for you like a lonely house
till you will see me again and live in me.
Till then my windows ache.”

― Pablo Neruda

Postcard

12/12/2016

 
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I’m thinking of you. What else can I say?
The palm trees on the reverse
are a delusion; so is the pink sand.
What we have are the usual
fractured coke bottles and the smell
of backed-up drains, too sweet,
like a mango on the verge
of rot, which we have also.
The air clear sweat, mosquitos
& their tracks; birds, blue & elusive.
Time comes in waves here, a sickness, one
day after the other rolling on;
I move up, its called
awake, then down into the uneasy
nights but never
forward. The roosters crow
for hours before dawn, and a prodded
child howls & howls
on the pocked road to school.
In the hold with the baggage
there are two prisoners,
their heads shaved by bayonets, & ten crates
of queasy chicks. Each spring
there’s a race of cripples, from the store
to the church. This is the sort of junk
I carry with me; and a clipping
about democracy from the local paper.
Outside the window
they’re building the damn hotel,
nail by nail, someone’s
crumbling dream. A universe that includes you
can’t be all bad, but
does it? At this distance
you’re a mirage, a glossy image
fixed in the posture
of the last time i saw you.
Turn you over, there’s the place
for the address. Wish you were
here. Love comes
in waves like the ocean, a sickness which goes on
& on, a hollow cave
in the head, filling and pounding, a kicked ear.

- Margaret Atwood

The night will always win

5/12/2016

 

I don’t know how many souls I have

29/11/2016

 
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Não sei quantas almas tenho.
Cada momento mudei.
Continuamente me estranho.
Nunca me vi nem achei.
De tanto ser, só tenho alma.
Quem tem alma não tem calma.
Quem vê é só o que vê.
Quem sente não é quem é.

Atento ao que sou e vejo,
Torno-me eles e não eu.
Cada meu sonho ou desejo,
É do que nasce, e não meu.
Sou minha própria paisagem,
Assisto à minha passagem,
Diverso, móbil e só.
Não sei sentir-me onde estou.

Por isso, alheio, vou lendo
Como páginas, meu ser.
O que segue não prevendo,
O que passou a esquecer.
Noto à margem do que li
O que julguei que senti.
Releio e digo, «Fui eu?»
Deus sabe, porque o escreveu.

- Fernando Pessoa
I don’t know how many souls I have.
I’ve changed at every moment.
I always feel like a stranger.
I’ve never seen or found myself.
From being so much, I have only soul.
A man who has soul has no calm.
A man who sees is just what he sees.
A man who feels is not who he is.

Attentive to what I am and see,
I become them and stop being I.
Each of my dreams and each desire
Belongs to whoever had it, not me.
I am my own landscape,
I watch myself journey -
Various, mobile, and alone.
Here where I am I can’t feel myself.

That’s why I read, as a stranger,
My being as if it were pages.
Not knowing what will come
And forgetting what has passed,
I note in the margin of my reading
What I thought I felt.
Rereading, I wonder: “Was that me?”
God knows, because he wrote it.

The bell jar

21/11/2016

 
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“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”

― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

Had we nothing to prove

15/11/2016

 
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Had we nothing to prove
we might have leaned all night at that window,
merely beside each other,
watching Peel Street, wrought-iron gates
and weather vanes, black lace of trees
between cautious Victorian silhouettes;
but there were obligations, the formalities
of passion; so we sealed the shutters
and were expedient in the brevity of night;
reading with empty sockets moonlight in dull hair,
softness to chafed thighs;
both of us anxious and shaking the night,
with all my arm, she with fingers and gentle;
no hope for silver leaves in the morning.
And always a glance for the brightening windows,
a suspension of breath for the hearing of birds
and incantations to the sun
which stirs in dust behind stone horizons.

- Leonard Cohen

The poetry of silence

14/11/2016

 
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Vilhelm Hammershøi

Alexandra leaving

11/11/2016

 

The God abandons Antony

11/11/2016

 
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When suddenly, at midnight, you hear
an invisible procession going by
with exquisite music, voices,
don’t mourn your luck that’s failing now,
work gone wrong, your plans
all proving deceptive—don’t mourn them uselessly.
As one long prepared, and graced with courage,
say goodbye to her, the Alexandria that is leaving.
Above all, don’t fool yourself, don’t say
it was a dream, your ears deceived you:
don’t degrade yourself with empty hopes like these.
As one long prepared, and graced with courage,
as is right for you who proved worthy of this kind of city,
go firmly to the window
and listen with deep emotion, but not
with the whining, the pleas of a coward;
listen—your final delectation—to the voices,
to the exquisite music of that strange procession,
and say goodbye to her, to the Alexandria you are losing.

- CP Cavafy

We don’t know how to say goodbye

8/11/2016

 
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We don’t know how to say goodbye.
We wander all over, shoulder to shoulder.
It is already starting to get dark,
You’re thoughtful, and I remain quiet.

Let’s go inside a church, and watch
A baptism, a wedding, a funeral.
Why can’t we live like that?
Let’s leave, not looking at each other.

Or, let us sit in the cemetery,
Quiet in the trampled snow.
And watch you trace with a stick,
Places where we will always be together.

- Anna Akhmatova

Dez chamamentos ao amigo

1/11/2016

 
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VII
Essa lua enlutada, esse desassossego
A convulsão de dentro, ilharga
Dentro da solidão, corpo morrendo
Tudo isso te devo. E eram tão vastas
As coisas planejadas, navios,
Muralhas de marfim, palavras largas
Consentimento sempre. E seria dezembro.
Um cavalo de jade sob as águas
Dupla transparência, fio suspenso
Todas essas coisas nas pontas dos teus dedos
E tudo se desfez no pórtico do tempo
Em lívido silêncio. Um sol que não vejo

Também isso te devo.


- Hilda Hilst
VII
This mournfulness, this restlessness
the inner convulsions, an endless island,
solitude within, body dying --
all this I owe to you. And they were vast,
these plans — ships
great walls of ivory, fine words,
promises, promises. And it would be December,
a jade horse above the water,
doubly transparent, a line in mid-air --
All these things at the tips of your fingers
All this undone by the trapdoor of time
in perfect silence. A sun I can't see --

this too I owe to you.

Song

21/10/2016

 
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You’re wondering if I’m lonely:
OK then, yes, I’m lonely
as a plane rides lonely and level
on its radio beam, aiming
across the Rockies
for the blue-strung aisles
of an airfield on the ocean.

You want to ask, am I lonely?
Well, of course, lonely
as a woman driving across country
day after day, leaving behind
mile after mile
little towns she might have stopped
and lived and died in, lonely

If I’m lonely
it must be the loneliness
of waking first, of breathing
dawns’ first cold breath on the city
of being the one awake
in a house wrapped in sleep

If I’m lonely
it’s with the rowboat ice-fast on the shore
in the last red light of the year
that knows what it is, that knows it’s neither
ice nor mud nor winter light
but wood, with a gift for burning

- Adrienne Rich

reminder

18/10/2016

 
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even if you are a small forest surviving off of
moon alone.
your light is extraordinary.
 
- reminder
 
 
Nayyirah Waheed

Oceans

14/10/2016

 
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I have a feeling that my boat
has struck, down there in the depths,
against a great thing.
                   And nothing
happens! Nothing… Silence… Waves…

     —Nothing happens? Or has everything happened,
and are we standing now, quietly, in the new life?

Juan Ramón Jiménez
Translated by Robert Bly

Sunlight

11/10/2016

 
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“Maybe I am not very human - all I ever wanted to do was to paint sunlight on the side of a house.” - Edward Hopper

If There Is Something to Desire, 9, 17, 18

10/10/2016

 
9
I broke your heart.
Now barefoot I tread
on shards.

17
Why is the word yes so brief?
It should be
the longest,
the hardest,
so that you could not decide in an instant to say it,
so that upon reflection you could stop
in the middle of saying it.

18
—Sing me The Song of Songs.
—Don’t know the words.
—Then sing the notes.
—Don’t know the notes.
—Then simply hum.
—Forgot the tune.
—Then press my ear
to your ear
and sing what you hear.

Vera Pavlova
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