[New-Poetry] Poetic image: two tears

[Anny Ballardini]

Two exceptional poems
of the first the last stanza and the same name is a poetic line
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: JforJames at aol.com 
  To: new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu 
  Sent: Sunday, February 04, 2007 11:37 PM
  Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Poetic image: two tears


  Typo alert:
  "On the morning they left..."
  here corrected...
    Leavetaking

    On the morning they left
    we said goodbye
    filled with sadness
    for the absence of come

    Inside the palanquins
    on the camels’ backs
    I saw their faces beautiful as moons
    behind veils of gold cloth.

    Beneath the veils
    tears crept like scorpions
    over the fragrant roses
    of their cheeks.

    Ibn  Khafāja (1058-1138)

    Poems of Arab Adalusia, City Lights, 1989,
    translated by Cola Franzen

    --

    In the Lake District

    In those days, in a place where dentists thrive
    (their daughters order fancy clothes from London;
    their painted forceps hold aloft on signboards
    a common and abstracted Wisdom Tooth),
    there I—whose mouth held ruins more abject
    than any Parthenon—a spy, a spearhead 
    from some fifth column of a rotting culture
    (my cover was a lit. professorship),
    was living at a college near the most
    renowned of the fresh-water lakes; the function
    to which I’d been appointed was to wear out
    the patience of the ingenuous local youth.

    Whatever I wrote then was incomplete:
    my lines expired in strings of dots. Collapsing,
    I dropped, still fully dressed, upon my bed.
    At night I stared up at the darkened ceiling
    until I saw a shooting star, which then,
    conforming to the laws of self-combustion,
    would flash—before I'd even made a wish—
    across my cheek and down onto my pillow.

    --Joseph Brodsky, "In the Lake District," 
    (translated by Geo. L. Kline),
    A Part of Speech, FSG, 1980



------------------------------------------------------------------------------


  _______________________________________________
  New-Poetry mailing list
  New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
  http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20070204/b318299a/attachment.html