Poetry | poemimage

Category: Poetry

Morning Morning by Tuli Kupferberg

z11

Morning morning
Feel so lonesome in the morning
Morning morning
Morning brings me grief

xx9

Sunshine and the sunshine
Sunshine laughs upon my face
& the glory of the growing
Puts me in my rotting place

xx2a

Evening evening
Feel so lonesome in the evening
Evening evening
Evening brings me grief

xx5

Moon shine moon shine
Moon shine drugs the hills with grace
& the secret of the shining
Seeks to break my simple face

xx6

Nighttime nighttime
Kills the blood upon my cheek
Nighttime nighttime
Does not bring me to relief

xx8

Starshine and the starshine
Feel so loving in the starshine
Starshine starshine
Darling kiss me as I weep

xx2

Morning Morning written by Tuli Kuferberg & recorded by The Fugs on their album The Fugs.

xx3a

The Fugs (1966) is the second album from The Fugs.

xx7

http://www.thefugs.com/history2.html

xx6b

The link above will take you to the song.

xx8

I make no claim whatsoever to these lyrics, whose copyright, I assume, remains with the author & Fugs founding member, the late Tuli Kupferberg. I simply wish to share these beautiful words & music.

xx2

Lyrics found at Lyrics.com as submitted by jinny.

z11

8 Comments

A Divining Rod of Ancient Silver Divining Twin Streams

blake jomon

A divining rod of ancient silver divining the outlines of the future

Chejesus

A divining rod of ancient silver divining channels between flowers

A divining rod of ancient silver divining the stone wheel of memory

film and granite

A divining rod of ancient silver divining the wind upon the fields

klee summer

A divining rod of ancient silver divining the moons beneath the city

giotto and russian pilot

A divining rod of ancient silver divining the roots of wisdom fruit

centre 2

A divining rod of ancient silver divining sea and Self, an ongoing dialogue between sea and Self

moon turin

A divining rod of ancient silver divining social collapse

fish street

A divining rod of ancient silver divining twin streams:

Pottery: the Jomon (縄文) Period (Japan, c. 12,000-300 BCE) and William Blake (1794) England.

Religious calendar art showing Jesus with children and the iconographic image of Cuban revolutionary Che Guevera.

Many years ago I did a printmaking project in an elementary school. One of the students made a print of (what I thought was) a Central or South American religious deity. I was intrigued with the clay pots or possibly drums. Then I realized I was looking at it upside down. How odd such a cartoon, reversed, depicts an altogether different creature. Nothing about the ‘accidental’ image reflected the student’s cultural heritage.

Photographic still from the B movie ‘Plan 9 from Outer Space.’ And the Pietà, Michelangelo’s great work, in St. Peter’s Basilica.

Angelus Novus by Swiss-German artist Paul Klee & the exquisite Donna Summer modelling a gown.

A painting by Giotto and a photograph of the parachuting Russian pilot whose jet was shot down by Turkey. Photographed before being shot, as he floated to earth, by terrorists allied with Turkey.

Digital configuration of Blake’s art + Jomon pottery.

Neil Armstrong Apollo 11 spacesuit & the Shroud of Turin.

Goldfish and residential street in Toronto.

12 Comments

February 12, 2016

Sugar by Sheila Stewart

slightly blur

1.
Dust rises off the hot low veldt. Vast sugarcane estates: the only irrigated
land. Wide lush green fields sprout a million tiny sprinklers. The cane is
ready, burnt to make it easier to cut. Flame sweeps the fields, fierce as a
forest fire. The air black soot, a flurry of ash falls miles away, drifts in
doorways, a line of soot runs across the table in our classroom Monday
morning, mirroring the crack in the roof’s peak.

a35

2.
How I love a dusting of sugar over a slab of chocolate cake, a script of
raspberry sauce.

aaaa

3.
Give me brown sugar, white sugar, cubes and icing sugar, caster sugar,
sugar daddy, sugar mummy, sugar baby, sugar bear, sugar-beet, sugar
bowl, sugared and sugary, sugar plum fairy, Shake Sugaree.

avery

4.
Long, open cane trucks, chains along the sides, drive past the auto-
wreck’s Jesus is Coming, into the refugee settlement, collect workers
early in the morning, return them dirty, tired at day’s end. The cane cutters
earn a little more, dressed in layers for protection, sooty as chimney
sweeps. Our students tell us, Cane can cut you. Snake can get you in the
cane.

spoon sum

5.
Monthly rations: maize, beans, salt, sometimes dried fish, and a little
sugar.

suncube

6.
One more lump of sugar, please.

kandinsky

7.
Simon learned English fast: homeland, refugee, truck. Hot and cold. Love
and hate. Past, present, future. Simon cut cane. He told us of his last trip
on the back of a cane truck. Returning to the settlement one black night,
the truck broke down at the side of the road. People got out, lay down and slept, waiting for another truck. Simon watched a lorry full of oranges
crash into the cane truck, knocking it over onto the sleeping workers,
pinning the dead and injured to the ground. The sugary smell of oranges
but none to eat. The truck carried on, cutting through the night taking the oranges safely to Durban.

intersect

Sheila Stewart has two poetry collections, The Shape of a Throat (Signature Editions) and A Hat to Stop a Train (Wolsak and Wynn). She co-edited The Art of Poetic Inquiry (Backalong Books). Sheila’s poetry has been recognized by such awards as the gritLIT Contest, the Pottersfield Portfolio Short Poem Contest, and the Scarborough Arts Council Windows on Words Award. She teaches in Equity Studies, Women and Gender Studies, and the Writing Centre at New College, University of Toronto. ‘Sugar’ is from The Shape of a Throat.

bowl

21 Comments

January 21, 2016

A Small Experimental Drawing (and the law of intended consequences)

experimental

After visiting the JMW Turner exhibition for a second time at the Art Gallery of Ontario and wading through the busloads of students and groups of seniors from retirement/nursing homes I realized how fortunate I had been on Friday night when the place was half deserted. Possibly half full.

Detail 1

Again I am reminded of Turner’s grey. Vanishing yet insistent. Drawing the eye. Drawing the eye into. Possibly even halfway in.

detail 6

Sometimes one is drawn by the air of an unexplored territory. Or summoned by insistent mystery. Summoned halfway into a vanishing mystery.

detail 44

I focus on the brilliant whites in Turner’s work, and escape the crush, wandering into a drawing exhibition pulled from the print & drawing vaults.

detail 15

Three of the works refresh anew my dilemma. I think of the Judge’s black robes.

detail 8

I join a raiding party. The Captain’s name is Font. His horse is called Halfway.

detail 48

The raiding party does not solve my crisis. Nevertheless I raise the end of a burnt stick from the fire.

detail 7

Marking the edge of the law. My declaration marking the edge of the law.

detail 4

There is no natural boundary to the embedded law of intended consequence.

ink amber 4

Another edge must roll it back to where it came from. Or swallow it. Leaving its bones along the trail.

ink amber detail 3

The edge of the sun!

The ambers, and whites, and Naples Yellow in Turner’s sky, radiating with silent resolution.

amber ink sun 100

Let me tell you a story about Naples Yellow.

ink amber 9

I visited an artist one night many years ago.

There are many stories to tell about that night but I will tell you this one.

When I was leaving, at the bottom of the stairs, the artist began talking about Naples Yellow.

And did not stop.

ink amber

The artists, the art periods, the art movements involved with Naples Yellow.

The secret uses of Naples Yellow, The powers of Naples Yellow, the magic of Naples Yellow.

ink amber 8

Perhaps Naples Yellow can solve my dilemma.

amber ink sun 100

17 Comments

December 10, 2015

Lost by Chris Pannell

Every street was Italian

the inks on my map blotched and ran

the motorways rose and fell like roller coasters

singing choruses from I Pagliacci.

German and English signs

had been broken and tossed aside.

Gargoyles on buildings dressed in suits

money managers amok

commandeered red double-deck buses from

their streetcar tracks.

efg
I was driving a taxi full of hit-men

who were expecting me to get them quickly to

their destination

and to avoid the carabinieri.

Chris Pannell’s latest poetry book is A Nervous City (Wolsak and Wynn, 2013). This title recently won the Kerry Schooley Book Award from the Hamilton Arts Council. In 2010, his book Drive won the Acorn-Plantos People’s Poetry Prize and the Arts Hamilton Poetry Book of the Year.

From 1993 to 2005 he ran the new writing workshop and published two anthologies of work by that group.

He has a book of poetry forthcoming in 2016 called How We Came to Pass. He is a former board member of the gritLIT Writers Festival and a former DARTS bus driver. He hosts and helps organize the monthly Hamilton reading series Lit Live.

pqrs

16 Comments

September 3, 2015

Mémoire by Arthur Rimbaud

Clear water, like the salt of childhood tears:
The white of women’s bodies opened in the sun,
And truth, beyond walls or the silk oriflammes, won
Out with the valour of a maid pure in her years.

The frolic of angels in their moving blaze of gold,
Imponderable arms sparkling with the coolness of the grass,
And the blues of Heaven taking up their beds to pass
Under the canopy of shade into the arch and hill’s fold.

The stones, under the water, extend as in a clear broth,
And depths, freckled in prepared beds of pale gold,
And frocks of girls, loosely faded, as green as mould,
And willows, and hopping birds, unfettered, woven in the day’s cloth.

Round as the eyelid, with the warmth of a gold Louis,
Blooms the marsh marigold, fresh in its wedding vows.
The mirror at prompt noon, jealous of the day’s drouse
Tarnishes into a sphere, heat-flecked and dear to us.

III

Too upright is Madam in the meadow’s rippled glass.
The sons of toil are in the cotton-fields falling as a white cloud.
In her fingers she twirls her parasol, tramples it, too proud
To watch her children reading in the flowered grass

Their books in red morocco. Of what they think or dream —
As on all paths a thousand angels flare upon the day —
Of hopes lost in high mountains, she cannot follow; her way
Is overcast and cold, as is the shadowed stream.

Regret of arms satiated and celibate,
Sainted, straight white beds on moonlit April nights,
And the tear-wet joy falling on abandoned river sites,
And the rotting evenings in August that these germinate.

Under walls let her weep now: the winds possess
Only the high poplars, their motions tremulously sown.
Underneath in lead, unglinting, weighed with stone,
An old dredger labours, the small boat motionless.

Flotsam, plaything of these waters that nothing hinders,
A boat beholden to stillness, and with arms too short,
And flowers blue or yellow, not then ever sought,
And breath now spread upon a water dull as cinders.

And for all that there are willows, powder, the plume of blood
That would drag out roses from reedbeds of time’s jaws,
The boat stays here, unmoving, and the chain draws
On the eye, water-heavy and deep in the unbanked mud.

Translation C. John Holcombe

http://www.textetc.com/workshop/wt-rimbaud-1.html

Original photo credit: Massimo Sestini

14 Comments

August 8, 2015

If You Decide

We need to learn an almost extinct language I will study with you.

We need to live among the people whose language is almost lost I will join you and also learn traditional survival skills.

To leave me for the shaman I will drive a stake through his medicine box, realize my grave error instantly, and escape, although barely.

To beckon and summon, seducing me with whispers that reach into my blood, I will return.

I must stand trial for my crimes against love and magic, I will escape, again.

If you decide to hypnotize me while I sleep I will seal my heart against your vibrations and embrace the crazed dream of modernity. Because I am a fool. Weary of surviving on roots. Even the root of you. Even the root of me.

If you decide I must seal my heart against the sounds you once made I will throw the window open a final time, upon your murmur coursing & drenched in starlight, intersected by a highway carrying the disappeared.

If you decide to remain quiet I will train my ear to hear the sunlight falling.

If you decide it is my duty to dig out the wooden stake I will return in the dead of night speaking an extinct language.

Photo credit: Renee Perle, a Romanian Jewish girl who moved to Paris, is famous as the first muse of the famous French photographer Jacques Henri Lartigue (1894-1986), who is considered one of the leading photographers of the 20th century.

http://www.romanianculture.org/personalities/Renee_Perle.htm

10 Comments

December 4, 2014

Gestures Simply Slip Out and On by Heather Cadsby

Turtles are very old, have no teeth.

Not lost, never had. Not fearful

of first-person singular.

No turtle turmoil. A reptilian gaze

is fixed on us as you

adjust the focus.

This is our assignment. A singular adventure

to create a life list for ourselves.

Something outside ourselves. Before

we do ourselves in. Copulation

requires an hour underwater.

Aye aye aye.

But the good part is a start.

So get your picture.

We’ll call this one painted

and turn the page

as if that’s all we need

to know it all.

Heather Cadsby is the author of four books of poetry. The most recent book, Could be, was published by Brick Books in 2009. Her poems have appeared in such journals as The Antigonish Review, The New Quarterly, PRISM international and The Best Canadian Poetry in English (2008).

11 Comments

November 14, 2014

Double Vision

The left hand and the right hand begin working,

peanuts

Working to create double vision,

new fire h

Perceptualizing the miracle, painting the town red.

einstein einstein

Shrouded within a shimmering portal, same as before,

& Beneath the reflection a mirrored dream of innocence.

In the innocence of mirrored images a mechanism round as a marble

Rises and falls. Shattering above twin, holy worlds. Same as before.

strawberries final

Within this terrible possibility perhaps lies the intrigue,

simone b

An intrigue beyond failure,

Beyond the post-modern landscape any failure is a reassurance.

The reassurance of a terrible possibility.

Mystery centres wrestle with the impending implosion,

Endeavoring round the clock using the latest technology,

Such as sound in the centre of trees,

Processing data, round as a marble,

Rising like a feather in the breeze,

Until night with the force of an atomic blast

Arrives, inspiring the melancholy of the absurd, forever.

The images above were taken from the internet. I do not own the copyright and have recomposed them for purposes of non-commercial parody or commentary under fair use provisions. The personalities are Ho Chi Minh, Einstein’s brain, young John Lennon, actress and inventor Hedy Lamarr, author Simon de Beauvoir, and Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s 16th Century painting Tower of Babel. Film stills are from The Keystone Cops. The mirror is Egyptian, from the 18th Century, held by the Brooklyn Museum. The computer scientist ‘unknown.’

8 Comments

November 5, 2014

, Autumn Morning

Poema 20

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

Write, for example, “The night is starry

and the stars are blue and shiver in the distance.”

The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.

Through nights like this one I held her in my arms.

I kissed her again and again under the endless sky.

She loved me, sometimes I loved her too.

How could one not have loved her great still eyes.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her.

To hear the immense night, still more immense without her.

And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.

What does it matter that my love could not keep her.

The night is starry and she is not with me.

This is all. In the distance someone is singing. In the distance.

My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

My sight tries to find her as though to bring her closer.

My heart looks for her, and she is not with me.

The same night whitening the same trees.

We, of that time, are no longer the same.

I no longer love her, that’s certain, but how I loved her.

My voice tried to find the wind to touch her hearing.

Another’s. She will be another’s. As she was before my kisses.

Her voice, her bright body. Her infinite eyes.

I no longer love her, that’s certain, but maybe I love her.

Love is so short, forgetting is so long.

Because through nights like this one I held her in my arms

my soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer

and these the last verses that I write for her.

Pablo Neruda

16 Comments

poemimage

Category: Poetry

March 4, 2016

Morning Morning by Tuli Kupferberg

February 16, 2016

A Divining Rod of Ancient Silver Divining Twin Streams

February 12, 2016

Sugar by Sheila Stewart

January 21, 2016

A Small Experimental Drawing (and the law of intended consequences)

December 10, 2015

Lost by Chris Pannell

September 3, 2015

Mémoire by Arthur Rimbaud

August 8, 2015

If You Decide

December 4, 2014

Gestures Simply Slip Out and On by Heather Cadsby

November 14, 2014

Double Vision

November 5, 2014

, Autumn Morning