Nightingales sang by day

Then broke the spring. The hedges in a day

Burgeoned to green; the drawing of the trees,

Incomparably pencilled line by line,

Thickened to heaviness, and men forgot

The intellectual austerity

Of winter, in the rich warm-blooded rush

Of growth, and mating beasts, and rising sap.

How swift and sudden strode that tardy spring,

Between a sunrise and a sunset come!

The shadow of a swallow crossed the wall;

Nightingales sang by day. The pushing blade

Parted the soil. The morning roofs and oasts

There, down the lane, beside the brook and willows,

Cast their long shadows. Pasture, ankle-wet,

Steamed to the sun. The tulips dyed their green

To red in cottage gardens. Bees astir,

Fussing from flower to flower, made war on time.

Body and blood were princes; the cold mind

Sank with Orion from the midnight sky;

The stars of spring rose visible: The Virgin;

Al Fard the solitary; Regulus

The kingly star, the handle of the Sickle;

And Venus, lonely splendour in the west,

Roamed over the rapt meadows; shone in gold

Beneath the cottage eaves where nesting birds

Obeyed love’s law; shone through the cottage panes

Where youth lay sleeping on the breast of youth,

Where love was life, and not a brief desire;

Shone on the heifer blaring for the bull

Over the hedgerow deep in dewy grass:

And glinted through the dark and open door

Where the proud stallion neighing to his mares

Stamped on the cobbles of the stable floor.

For all were equal in the sight of spring,

Man and his cattle; corn; and greening trees,

Ignorant of the soul’s perplexity,

Ignorant of the wherefore and the end,

Bewildered by no transient ecstasy,

But following the old and natural law,

Nor marred nor blazing with a royal excess;

The law of life and life’s continuance.

taken from the poem ‘The Land’ by Vita Sackville West

Photography Anne Corr.

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For the sake of a life.

                              The Layers   by Stanley Kunitz

 

I am repeating myself because I sent this poem out into the ether earlier in my blogging life.  It bears repeating. I remind myself from time to time about what I want from this one and precious life.  Nowadays the buzz word is mindfulness, but the concept behind mindfulness is as ancient as time. At least as ancient as man’s consciousness began to reflect upon its self-awareness.  Our lives are different to those that were lived by the peoples of ancient civilizations, but in the perspective of the brain evolution, that span of time is just a nano second, so it is worth reflecting upon how humans in the past have reconciled themselves to the parodoxes that appear in all our lives.  You can choose from the philosophers who all have a different take , or the religious men who all have their differing stories they want to share, or you can listen to the poets.  The poets assume nothing of the reader, do not desire any allegiances, demand no tithes.  They write about the human experience because they are stuck in it. And in that attempt to soothe themselves a line of energy transmits from them to the reader. Sometimes it simply vaporises and never arrives anywhere, it just disappears as a coil of smoke will disappear into the air. Other times it sends an electric current through the reader and the reader is changed forever. As all the food that we eat, the sights that we see, the people we meet all impact on the messages our brains control our minds with, so with words.

Barely there

With That Moon Language

Admit something: Everyone you see, you say to them, “Love me.”

Of course you do not do this out loud, otherwise someone would call the cops.

Still though, think about this, this great pull in us to connect. Why not become the one who lives with a full moon in each eye that is always saying, with that sweet moon language, What every other eye in this world is dying to hear?

-Hafiz

Images  Anne Corr

Savour

Enter a caption

My capture of a wonderful morning sky earlier last month.

Oh,and a reminder to attend.

 Against Entropy

The worm drives helically through the wood
And does not know the dust left in the bore
Once made the table integral and good;
And suddenly the crystal hits the floor.
Electrons find their paths in subtle ways,
A massless eddy in a trail of smoke;
The names of lovers, light of other days
Perhaps you will not miss them. That’s the joke.
The universe winds down. That’s how it’s made.
But memory is everything to lose;
Although some of the colors have to fade,
Do not believe you’ll get the chance to choose.
Regret, by definition, comes too late;
Say what you mean. Bear witness. Iterate.

— John M Ford

 

POSSIBILITIES

POSSIBILITIES

I prefer movies.

I prefer cats.

I prefer the oaks along the Warta.

I prefer Dickens to Dostoyevsky.

I prefer myself liking people

to myself loving mankind.

I prefer keeping a needle and thread on hand, just in case.

I prefer the color green.

I prefer not to maintain

that reason is to blame for everything.

I prefer exceptions.

I prefer to leave early.

I prefer talking to doctors about something else.

I prefer the old fine-lined illustrations.

I prefer the absurdity of writing poems

to the absurdity of not writing poems.

I prefer, where love’s concerned, nonspecific anniversaries

that can be celebrated every day.

I prefer moralists

who promise me nothing.

I prefer cunning kindness to the over-trustful kind.

I prefer the earth in civvies.

I prefer conquered to conquering countries.

I prefer having some reservations.

I prefer the hell of chaos to the hell of order.

I prefer Grimms’ fairy tales to the newspapers’ front pages.

I prefer leaves without flowers to flowers without leaves.

I prefer dogs with uncropped tails.

I prefer light eyes, since mine are dark.

I prefer desk drawers.

I prefer many things that I haven’t mentioned here

to many things I’ve also left unsaid.

I prefer zeroes on the loose

to those lined up behind a cipher.

I prefer the time of insects to the time of stars.

I prefer to knock on wood.

I prefer not to ask how much longer and when.

I prefer keeping in mind even the possibility

that existence has its own reason for being.

 

Wislawa Szymborska

 

 

Why have ye no routhe on my child?

Why have ye no routhe on my child?

Have routhe on me ful of mourning;

Tak doun o rode my derworth child,

Or prik me o rode with my derling!

More pine ne may me ben y-don

Than lete me live in sorwe and shame;

As love me bindëth to my sone,

So let us deyen bothe y-same.

A medieval  lament for a lost child sums up my feelings today. ‘Routhe’ means compassion , those lacking in compassion are thus said to be ruthless.

Take a moment

The moon is no door.

To introduce you to somewhere I go to renew my spirit – and I am off there within a few weeks.  It is definitely overdue – I am strung out and my reserves are all run dry.  I surprised myself by having a mini melt down on Friday.  It was a scary reminder of the landscape of breakdown, and I am keeping myself as safe as I can by reminding myself of all the positives in my life.  The greatest being the family relationships I have, but even these are unable sometimes to stave off the harsh reality of living with a fragility of mind that can be threatened by the stresses of everyday life. I know that to want to remain in the land of the living I need to renew my connections with people – the cruel paradox being that the feelings are strong drivers in the opposite direction. I want to run to the hills.

Actually, in the midst of it, I don’t want the hills. I want oblivion.

That’s the scariest part.  I grieve for all those like Sylvia Plath that were unable to access the help modern drugs can give – I know I am frightened to contemplate a reality without mine – perhaps one day.

The Moon and the Yew tree

“This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary.
The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue.
The grasses unload their griefs at my feet as if I were God,
Prickling my ankles and murmuring of their humility.
Fumy spiritious mists inhabit this place
Separated from my house by a row of headstones.
I simply cannot see where there is to get to.

The moon is no door. It is a face in its own right,
White as a knuckle and terribly upset.
It drags the sea after it like a dark crime; it is quiet
With the O-gape of complete despair. I live here.
Twice on Sunday, the bells startle the sky –
Eight great tongues affirming the Resurrection.
At the end, they soberly bong out their names.

The yew tree points up. It has a Gothic shape.
The eyes lift after it and find the moon.
The moon is my mother. She is not sweet like Mary.
Her blue garments unloose small bats and owls.
How I would like to believe in tenderness –
The face of the effigy, gentled by candles,
Bending, on me in particular, its mild eyes.

I have fallen a long way. Clouds are flowering
Blue and mystical over the face of the stars.
Inside the church, the saints will be all blue,
Floating on their delicate feet over cold pews,
Their hands and faces stiff with holiness.
The moon sees nothing of this. She is bald and wild.
And the message of the yew tree is blackness – blackness and silence.”

Sylvia Plath

Contemplations at the onset of Autumn

Sometimes it Happens

 And sometimes it happens that you are friends and then
 You are not friends,
 And friendship has passed.
 And whole days are lost and among them
 A fountain empties itself.

 And sometimes it happens that you are loved and then
 You are not loved,
 And love is past.
 And whole days are lost and among them
 A fountain empties itself into the grass.

 And sometimes you want to speak to her and then
 You do not want to speak,
 Then the opportunity has passed.
 Your dreams flare up, they suddenly vanish.

 And also it happens that there is nowhere to go and then
 There is somewhere to go,
 Then you have bypassed.
 And the years flare up and are gone,
 Quicker than a minute.

 So you have nothing.
 You wonder if these things matter and then
 As soon you begin to wonder if these things matter
 They cease to matter,
 And caring is past.
 And a fountain empties itself into the grass.      Brian Patten

In the end is my beginning

A calendar of images by Anne Corr based on interpretation of poetic text

http://www.redbubble.com/people/anni103/calendars/16136050-in-my-end-is-my-beginning?p=calendar&ref=artist_shop_grid

In an unashamedly brazen attempt to get you all to look at my illustration work I have put together twelve images from my Redbubble page which have all been inspired by poetic works from various poets.  I have a preoccupation with the themes of time and nature , and constantly draw solace and inspiration from art and poetry alike that resonates.  The title of the calendar was taken from T.S. Eliot’s poem East Coker from ‘The Four Quartets’ – a poem that invites speculation and re reading time and time again.

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
There is a time for the evening under starlight,
A time for the evening under lamplight
(The evening with the photograph album).
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.
Old men ought to be explorers
Here or there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.

I hope this is inviting enough for some of you to investigate the other products that have my illustrative work on them and please forgive the self promotion!  At the moment Redbubble are offering a 20% discount with the code THESEDAYS.  Simply quote the code at the checkout stage.