A little music
-Humbert Wolfe
Since it is evening, let us invent
Love’s undiscovered continent.
What shall we steer by, having no chart
But the deliberate fraud of the heart?
How shall we find it? Beyond what keys
Of boyhood’s Spanish piracies,
False Eldorados dim with the tears
Of beauty, the last of the buccaneers?
Since it is evening, let us design
What shall be utterly yours and mine.
There will be nothing that ever before
Beckoned the sailor from any shore.
Trees shall be greener by mountains more pale,
Thrushes outsinging the nightingale,
Flowers now butterflies, now in the grass,
Suddenly quiet as painted glass,
And fishes of emerald dive for the moon,
Whose silver is stained by the peacock lagoon.
Since it is evening, and sailing weather,
Let us set out for the dream together;
Set for the land fall, where love and verse
Enfranchise for ever the travellers.
Skopelos and Virgin
-by Skorda
when first you see it
across the water,
rising round and new above the mountain.
Open your mouth and swallow
while youth holds its roundness near,
and you are running fearless in the dark.
Hold it inside, it is still warm
and you will need its light,
there, inside you.
Down the road of time, somewhere
after you’ve aged, traveled,
Explored, discovered.
And the dust around your doorway
has been pounded hard and smooth under your feet.
When you find yourself growing weary and bored,
when your eyes see only ruins,
and your heart is empty.
You may believe, in your exhaustion,
that this is truth, at last.
That the mystery has unraveled,
leaving no wilderness to explore or tame.
All secrets have been shared,
the frontier has dissolved.
Know then, with these thoughts,
you have been swallowed.
The warm belly of the beast
comforts with confining darkness
and lulls with rhythmic sounds
Murmuring to you,
Curl up and sleep,
just go to sleep.
Shake your head,
stretch your legs,
do not sleep now.
Remember what you know.
You swallowed the moon,
you hold it inside you.
Not as a magpie hoarding shiny things,
or wearing the moon for beauty
or bartering the moon for wealth.
You swallowed the moon for this moment.
When you will walk to the water’s edge,
open your mouth, release the moon
and let its light build you a pathway
across the wine dark sea.
©Skorda 2008
Showing posts with label Humbert Wolfe. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Humbert Wolfe. Show all posts
Friday, December 19, 2008
a favorite poem by Humbert Wolfe
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