Léopold Sédar Senghor – Elegy Of Midnight

 

Summer, splendid Summer, nourishing the Poet on the milk of your light
I who grew up like the wheat of spring, which made me drunk
From green water, from the green steaming in the gold of Time
Ah! no longer can I tolerate the midnight light.
The splendor of such honors resembles a Sahara,
An immense void, with neither erg nor rocky plateau,
With no grass, no twinkling eye, no beating heart.
Twenty-four hours a day like this, and my eyes are wide open
Like Father Cloarec’s, crucified on a boulder by the Joal pagans
Who worshipped snakes. In my eyes the Portuguese lighthouse
Turns round and round, twenty-four hours a day,
A precise and restless mechanism, until the end of time.

I jumped out of bed, a leopard about to be snared,
A sudden gust of Simoom filling my throat with sand.
Ah! if I could just collapse in the dung and blood, in the void.
I turn around among my books watchilng me with their deep eyes
Six thousand lamps burning twenty-four hours a day.
I stand up lucid, strangely lucid. And I am handsome,
Like the one-hundred-runner, like the rutting black stallion
From Mauritania. I carry in my blood a river of seeds
That can fertilize all the plains of Byzantium
And the hills, the austere hills.
I am the Lover and the locomotive with a well-oiled piston.

Her sweet strawberry lips, her thick stone body,
Her secret softness ripe for the catch, her body
A deep field open to the black sower.
The Spirit germinates under the groin, in the matrix of desire
The sex is one antenna mong many where flashing messages are exchanged.
Love music no longer can cool me down, nor the holy rhythm of poetry.
Against this despair, Lord, I need all my strength
—A soft dagger in the heart as deep as remorse.
I am not sure of dying. If that was Hell: the lack of sleep
This desert of the Poet, this pain of living, this dying
From not being able to die, the agony of shadows, this passion
For death and light like moths on hurricane lamps at night,
In the horrible rotting of virgin forests.

Lord of light and shadows,
You, Lord of the Cosmos, let me rest in Joal-of-the-Shades,
Let me be born again in the Childhood Kingdom full of dreams,
Let me be the shepherd of my shepherdess on the Dyilôr tanns
Where dead men flower, let me burst out applauding
When Téning-Ndyaré and Tyagoum-Ndyaré enter the circle
And let me dance like the Athlete to the drum of this year’s Dead.
This is only a prayer. You known my peasant’s patience.
Peace will come, the Angel of dawn will come, the singing of birds
Never heard before will come, the light of dawn will come.
I will sleep at dawn, my pink doll in my arms,
My green- and gold-eyed doll with a voice so marvelous,
It is the very tongue of poetry.

—Translated from the French by Melvin Dixon

(from Nocturnes, 1961)

Joseph Ceravolo – Street Wise Romantic

The streets are empty and still,
between the red time,
then start again.
Trucks bouncing by,
cars to work, work.
The farms are disappearing as I noticed
years ago along this old route.
Now the farms lie beneath
hotels, office complexes whose beauty
is beyond the senses
in some economic realm fortified
by the delusions of power and inequity.
But the farms are lying beneath
and large poisonous plants
fusing the electrical circuits beneath.
No there’s no death to evil,
it rises again, now in war, now in bucks
now in land, now in power,
it rises up forever until the end,
when the light may intercede and remain.
Seek refuge from the fantasy
into one other fantasy.
We see violence done on subways on streets
but we don’t see violence done
in a new class system or economic twist.
Does it murder just as well?
Nothing can be done.
It will go on and on
until the intercessions of the sun.
Everything else has failed, and will,
but the innocence of youth
and the momentum of dawn.

 

 

Winning Bukowski Tweet #1: wine by Chris Lawrence

Thank you so much Bukowski On Wry and all your readers , all the best

iron hearted sloth

convulsions in the temple
vomiting the shadow of my soul,
i had nothing more to give the moon,
after breaking holy vows
in the woodland with the sky
watched by a thousand ancients
needing voyeurism in their bones,
as a pathway to love,
bleak sonnets pass my lips
knelt in this loneliness,
in my ear
her voice crawled dusky
cloth to my senses,
as i wished to suspend myself
from a high bough
and linger in highest isolation,
that perfume creeps out of
your robe wrapped tight
my stillness dispels
endurance is not a beauty
lowering myself to your lips
sour kisses known to be daring,
i became a louse burrowing,
my sloth tendencies gone,
robe discarded
burnt confection of passion
hazed and forlorn
no more regurgitation
my eyes flared in their sockets
loins raw and slimed,
forgetting would be easier
as i click on the television

 

http://www.dVersePoets.com

burning crooked roses

coyotes yip !

as i walk through baby cyclones

up the stairs to the sky

as she remained

on sweating rocking horse

deeply sea pearl glint in eye,

oh is there anything else other

than immortality,

reward and wisdom,

have i become the dog

that runs through muddy rivers

to wash the gasoline of brutality off,

i will never see an algae

covered stone coffin,

horse keeps rocking

travelling this

unremarkable earth machine,

stairs behind me

as are leaking babies

and crushed beercans,

no cloud castle

old vagrants song rings softly,

weeping in whitman’s embrace

i have left human shape

finger shadows reach

as frozen spider would,

my once and fevered love

rides on

gardens in a candlelit room

i take a hammer

and a nail

to my brother and sister eye,

one gazing south

to shared sand of desert and sea,

other north

through motorcycle lens

to fields of open pleasure,

my visceral concern

is not getting lost between both,

naked to contradiction

my form is seen

bare paleness of a wanting moon

sand still tasted between teeth,

without movement and sound

to the board of memory

each eye nailed

swiftly

so there is no gelatinous collapse

blinking obscura of pain,

i now want

flesh cold

still pale

not written upon by her lips,

hammer has fallen

indenting ground

taking root

Andrew Wyeth Man and the Moon