Off The Shelf Archives~August

Most of us active in the world of internet poetry have probably heard by now that the celebrated Irish poet and 1995 Nobel Laureate, Seamus Heaney, passed on Friday, August 30, 2013, at the age of 74.

Mr. Heaney has appeared on my Off The Shelf page previously, but I have chosen another one of his poems to remember him by for this next month, Personal Helicon.

This link to the NYTimes gives a full obituary and biography for those interested.


You can find his poem here, in the Off The Shelf archives.

~*~

As always, here is a last look at the previous Off the Shelf selection, some songs from The Tempest, by William Shakespeare:

Some Songs

from The Tempest, by William Shakespeare

Our Revels Now Are Ended 

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and

Are melted into air, into thin air:

And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,

The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,

The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve

And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,

Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff

As dreams are made on, and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep.
( ~Prospero)


Ariel's Songs

Come unto these yellow sands,

   And then take hands:

Curtsied when you have, and kissed

   The wild waves whist,

Foot it featly here and there;

And, sweet sprites, the burden bear.

   Hark, hark!

      Bow, wow

   The watch-dogs bark,

      Bow, wow,

   Hark, hark! I hear

The strain of strutting Chanticleer

Cry, Cock-a-diddle-dow.

Full fathom five thy father lies;

   Of his bones are coral made;

Those are pearls that were his eyes:

   Nothing of him that doth fade,

But doth suffer a sea-change

Into something rich and strange:

Sea nymphs hourly ring his knell.

                      Ding-dong!

   Hark! now I hear them,

                    Ding-dong, bell!


Where the bee sucks, there suck I,

In a cowslip's bell I lie,

There I couch when owls do cry,

On the bat's back I do fly

After summer merrily
Merrily, merrily, shall I live now
Under the blossom that hangs on the bough.

Image: Miranda, by John William Waterhouse
Public Domain, via wikipaintings.org

The Rest

The Rest

There's been too much burn,

greasy gossip

on minty tongues,

steel-bar troths

of drifting down.

You bent, picked me up.

No one does that;

not since I sat bawling

over falling

 blocks

(and then 

only to shake me 

till I stopped)

Carried eyelid to eye

like this

somehow a person

might finally believe

the rest.

~August 2013

 

55 wooden alphabet blocks for      the g-man

Image: Eyelid to Eye, © joyannjones 2013

Gulls

Gulls

From the remembered

master singer sea,

seven songs came curling

waved up because I believed,

more cryptic than the

real calypso of crickets

under the redpepper moon that climbs

my cloud-fancy sky;

seven songs from seven sea birds,

thrusting their celebratory bitchery

at me, ruffling rapidly in the air

just past the precipice, cawing

the broken bang of dead souls

dropping.

These birds I only imagined out

from a sodden souffle

of raw ingredients best not examined.

aren't much, really; a simple glare
over water, minimally assembled for

day after day of diving, flying, gorging

on whatever  floats or falls. Useless to leverage that

extra torment into their gut-grinding
croaks, or into the monstrous surf, or even
the slide-cracking bite of the sideways crabs.

The house of the heart must be quieted, opened up,

cleaned with delicate scavenger pincers, no
recalcitrant strands left clinging, its chambers

made hollow as empty carriages

passing in fog in a book,
until seven songs and more

ride the pandemonium wind,

the drumbeat of gull wings forgotten.

~August 2013

posted for     real toads

Challenge: Get Listed--of Catnip and Moons

The enterprising and original Timothy Schaefer provides today's word list, which was abnormally enticing to my backwards muse, so here is the result. For the exact words see the above link. I've used most of them, I think. Timo blogs at Catnip, and has recently put together a book of his unique prose and poetry called Darwin's Moon, which I gratefully own and heartily recommend.

Image: The Rookery, by Jamie Wyeth, 1977

This image may be protected by copyright. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

via wikipaintings.org

Brown Light

Brown Light

Brown

sugar

light, crunching

in a kiss

filling this lantern night, is

what the deer and I wear to dance.

You

had

a plan

of sea blue

for all my nights, indigo 

dark, where drowning was dancing without any moon

but
brown
sugar light
made a sweeter
shine, made me a dancer
a fiddler, fawn's flower, a flyer, a dream.

~August 2013

A string of  Fibonaccis for   real toads

covering both

 Margaret's 'Stillness, Silence, Solitude' Challenge and the Weekend Mini-Challenge on the terribly addictive Fibonacci form

Image: Ralph Albert Blakelock (1847-1919)  "Solitude" (detail)  

Singing The Cuttlefish

by southoz, on flick'r

Singing The Cuttlefish

I.

From the green seagrass

I learned to sway light,

tattoo canticles of blue

to move standing still

so life stands still with me,

primeval, mud-

 knowing but suddenly

 unable to fear.

Who really sees

in the short sharpened time

between hatch,

heat and shred
to seabed

except the ones

who long for me to

glow?

55 psychedelic cephalopods for    the g-man

II.

Powder

me

with darkness

ink  my skin

with ripples, camouflage cuttlefish shadow

stripes to flicker me frightening, wrong; fatality focused.

Shine the lost light to find me here

exposed on the lavarock naked

waiting for what

will never

stay

away.

~August 2013

A Fibonnaci poem, posted early for this weekend's mini-challenge at
 real toads

Optional Viewing Accompaniment

You can read  more about Sepia apama, the giant cuttlefish, here at wikipedia