Down down down
Down down down. Circling circling circling. Circled, finally. Circled, lastly. Further down, digging in, digging down. In trench, entrench. Down down down. Circling circling circling. Spiralled, spirals. A final spiral.…
Tag: poetry
Pentecost: The Dove Descending Breaks the Air
From Little Gidding, TS Eliot: The dove descending breaks the air With flames of incandescent terror Of which the tongues declare The one discharge from sin and error. The only…
Denise Levertov, “Conversion of Brother Lawrence”
I particularly love the lines “your way was not to exalt nor avoid the Adamic legacy, you simply made it irrelevant” – which neatly summarises Brother Lawrence’s way of deceptive…
“Thinking about the immortality of the crab”
Via the Wikipedia page devoted to Miguel de Unamono, I came across this wonderfully evocative Spanish idiom: Thinking about the immortality of the crab (Spanish: Pensar en la inmortalidad del cangrejo) is…
I Taught Myself To Live Simply – Anna Akhmatova
I taught myself to live simply and wisely, to look at the sky and pray to God, and to wander long before evening to tire my superfluous worries. When the…
Elegy For Jane (My Student, thrown by a horse) – Theodore Roethke
Text taken from here. Elegy for Jane (My student, thrown by a horse) I remember the neckcurls, limp and damp as tendrils; And her quick look, a sidelong pickerel smile;…
Poetry is Beauty’s Voice
Originally posted on Signs of Life:
“Words and measures do not give life; they merely symbolize it” (Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity 48). For any kind of beauty there…
T.S. Eliot: Ash Wednesday
Originally posted on The Broken Towers:
Today is Ash Wednesday and although I did not want to provide a reading of a long poem for some time, I thought not…
Séamus Sweeney 