Friday, August 10, 2007
Risk
In sharing with you poems like the one below by Gabriel Garcia Lorca, I run the risk of exposing just how measly are my poems that i want to also share with you, and I run the even greater risk of seeming arrogant and egomaniacal by daring to put my poems side by side with the worlds' greats. So consider this a...what...? a disclaimer: I know my poetry toddles along, while the major artists are in full stride and sprint...but, that being said: I must share all....I want to....
This one of Lorca's really got to me this morning..It's called DAWN (from a collection of all poets' writing about NYC):
Dawn in New York has
four columns of mire
and a hurricane of black pigeons
splashing in the putrid waters.
Dawn in New York groans
on enormous fire escapes
searching between the angles
for spikenards of drafted anguish.
Dawn arrives and no one receives it in his mouth
because morning and hope are impossible there:
sometimes the furious swarming coins
penetrate like drills and devour abandoned children.
Those who go out early know in their bones
there will be no paradise or loves that bloom and die:
they know they will be mired in numbers and laws,
in mindless games, in fruitless labors.
The light is buried under chains and noises
in an impudent challenge of rootless science.
And crowds stagger sleeplessly through the boroughs
As if they had just escaped a shipwreck of blood.
That's pretty much been my experience of this city lately. Glad to be going Upstate after my 11:00 student.....Also, I had just finished typing into a computer file my poem about a Connecticut dawn, at Old Lyme, so my mind was on the subject of dawns....maybe I'll share that one with you too....tomorrow...right now, here comes my 11:00......
This one of Lorca's really got to me this morning..It's called DAWN (from a collection of all poets' writing about NYC):
Dawn in New York has
four columns of mire
and a hurricane of black pigeons
splashing in the putrid waters.
Dawn in New York groans
on enormous fire escapes
searching between the angles
for spikenards of drafted anguish.
Dawn arrives and no one receives it in his mouth
because morning and hope are impossible there:
sometimes the furious swarming coins
penetrate like drills and devour abandoned children.
Those who go out early know in their bones
there will be no paradise or loves that bloom and die:
they know they will be mired in numbers and laws,
in mindless games, in fruitless labors.
The light is buried under chains and noises
in an impudent challenge of rootless science.
And crowds stagger sleeplessly through the boroughs
As if they had just escaped a shipwreck of blood.
That's pretty much been my experience of this city lately. Glad to be going Upstate after my 11:00 student.....Also, I had just finished typing into a computer file my poem about a Connecticut dawn, at Old Lyme, so my mind was on the subject of dawns....maybe I'll share that one with you too....tomorrow...right now, here comes my 11:00......
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