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Last Updated: May 30th, 2008 - 11:49:13 |
“…what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens
simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it.”
— from “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” T. S. Eliot.
“…the stock of such seventeenth-century poets as John Donne and Andrew Marvell went sky-high in the early twentieth century while the stock of the Romantic stalwart Percy Bysshe Shelly plummeted and has never fully recovered.”
— from The Oxford Book of American Poetry, David Lehman, Editor
“A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed
One too like thee: tameless and swift and proud.”
-- Ode to the West Wind, Percy Bysshe Shelley
You have to have suffered,
crossed the water and seen
the slayings, the violations.
You have to have been
at the vanishing point,
under water drowning,
gurgling your last breaths
without gills, cursing the air
you were made for.
You have to have had your belly full,
then emptied through retching,
had your skull ache from rotund imaginings
made mockery of by the daylight’s
cordoned dreams, by nightmares, ensconced
in the face of cohorts brandishing knives.
You have to have known these things
and swallowed guilt whole, felt its oozing
swathe the gums and repulse the tongue,
to know that what is joined is joined,
that in all life grief harvests joy,
that apart from the hard bones eroding
and apart from agony, the soul lingers,
the soul opens up.
From Concerning Violence, Selected & New Poems by Ruth-Miriam Garnett (Onegin Publishing 2007); Onegininfo@aol.com
© Copyright 2006 SeeingBlack.com
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