- Tegan and Sankara
- May 4, 2009
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The Diameter of the Bomb, Yehuda Amichai
quote:The diameter of the bomb was thirty centimeters
and the diameter of its effective range about seven meters,
with four dead and eleven wounded.
And around these, in a larger circle
of pain and time, two hospitals are scattered
and one graveyard. But the young woman
who was buried in the city she came from,
at a distance of more than a hundred kilometers,
enlarges the circle considerably,
and the solitary man mourning her death
at the distant shores of a country far across the sea
includes the entire world in the circle.
And I won’t even mention the crying of orphans
that reaches up to the throne of God and
beyond, making
a circle with no end and no God.
War Song of the Embattled Finns, Jon Stallworthy
quote:Snow inexhaustibly
falling on snow! Those whom
we fight are so many,
Finland so small,
where shall we ever find room
to bury them all?
I don't know why the war theme or the two opposing sides. But I like them for the punch-to-the-gut feeling. They both border on the edge of being trite and mawkish but every word lands and the humour is nice and dark. I also like this "translation" of Basho's frog haiku by bpNichol:
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Nov 16, 2013 14:50
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May 11, 2024 22:58
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- Tegan and Sankara
- May 4, 2009
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McGongall is great, but I always enjoy Edward Edwin Foot for my bad poetry. He was a man who wanted to write poetry despite hating the concept of interpretation, and so went to great lengths to remove any ambiguity from his poems.
The Homeward-Bound Passenger Ship posted:
The captain scans the ruffled zone,1
And heeds the wind's increasing scope;
He knows full well, and reckons on
His seamanship, but God's his hope...
Look2, look ye down the plumbless deep,
See, if ye can, their lifeless forms!--
Here laid, poor things! across a steep,
An infant in its mother's arms.
1. A figurative expression, intended by the Author to signify the horizon.
2. Imagine.
quote:
Altho' we1 mourn for one now gone,
And he--that grey-hair'd Palmerston,2
We will give God the praise,--
For he, beyond the age of man,3
Eleven years had over-ran
Within two equal days.
1. The nation.
2. The Right Honourable Henry John Temple, Viscount Palmerston, K.G., G.C.B., etc. (the then Premier of the British Government), died at "Brockett Hall," Herts, at a quarter to eleven o' clock in the forenoon of Wednesday, 18th October, 1865, aged eighty-one years (all but two days), having been born on the 20th October 1784. The above lines were written on the occasion of his death.
3. Scriptural limitation
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Nov 16, 2013 16:08
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Nov 16, 2013 14:50
