The Greeks are blinding Polyphemus

                              THE GREEKS ARE BLINDING POLYPHEMUS

                                                          by György Rába

Because he is one-eyed

because his dinner his choice morsel are different
because his footpath is not known
because he shepherds it though he is a born blacksmith
because he has not heard cormorants for days
because he perks an ear to the song of the present
because he won't build he camps out in his cave
because he builds his cave adorns it with curtains of bay leaf
shines new -- bends dress and cover
they lift a red-hot pole
like the plug hole on a ship's rib
they poke ream out his eye
because his hovel is a home of death 

But news lives in him too
every seeing eye gleams alike like a sun
and in everyone there dwells a death
same as someone rowing with bare hands
he'll flex his cliff-ripping muscle
you can see the present's body
and let it trill as sweetly as it might
the future lets drop flakes of enamel

Many a seafarer will yet sail here
being taken aback will never be over
how long will you be listening
to the dialogue of because and but
lord of eternal waters

trans., Emery George

Great bales of cotton rise up from the ground

SCENES FROM A DOCUMENTARY HISTORY OF MISSISSIPPI

by Natasha Trethewey

1. King Cotton, 1907

From every corner of the photograph, flags wave down

the main street in Vicksburg. Stacked to form an arch,

the great bales of cotton rise up from the ground

like a giant swell, a wave of history flooding the town.

When Roosevelt arrives -- a parade -- the band will march,

and from every street corner, flags wave down.

Words on a banner, Cotton, America's King, have the sound

of progress. The is two years before the South's countermarch --

the great bolls of cotton, risen up from the ground,

infested with boll weevils -- a plague, biblical, all around.

Now, negro children ride the bales, clothes stiff with starch.

From up high, in the photograph, they wave flags down

for the President who will walk through the arch, bound

for the future, his back to us. The children, on their perch --

those great bales of cotton rising up from the ground --

Stare out at us. Cotton surrounds them, a swell, a great mound

bearing them up, back toward us. From the arch,

from every corner of the photograph, flags wave down,

and great bales of cotton rise up from the ground.

2. Glyph, Aberdeen 1913

The child's head droops as if in sleep.

Stripped to the waist, in profile, he's balanced

on the man's lap.  The man, gaunt in his overalls,

cradles the child's thin arm -- the sharp elbow, white

signature of skin an bone -- pulls it forward

to show the deformity -- the humped back, curve

of spine -- punctuating the routine hardships 

of their lives: how the child must follow him

into the fields, haunting the long hours

slumped beside a sack, his body asking

how much cotton? or in the kitchen, leaning,

into the icebox, how much food? or

kneeling beside him at the church house,

why, Lord, why? They pose as if to say

Look, this is the outline of suffering:

the child shouldering it -- a mound

like dirt heaped on a grave.

3. Flood

They have arrived on the back

of the swollen river, the barge

dividing it, their few belongings 

clustered about their feet. Above them

the National Guard hunkers

on the levee; rifles tight in their fists,

they block the path to high ground.

One group of black refugees,

the caption tells us, was ordered

to sing their passage onto land,

like a chorus of prayer -- their tongues

the tongues of dark bells. Here,

the camera finds them still. Posed

as if for a school-day portrait,

children lace fingers in their laps.

One boy gestures allegiance, right hand

over the heart's charged beating.

The great river all around, the barge

invisible beneath their feet, they fix

on what's before them: the opening

in the sight of a rifle; the camera's lens;

the muddy cleft between barge and dry land --

all of it aperture, the captured moment's 

chasm in time.  Here, in the angled light

of 1927, they are refugees from history:

the barge has brought them this far;

they are waiting to disembark.

4. You are late

The sun is high and the child's shadow,

almost fully beneath her, touches the sole

of her bare foot on concrete. Even though

it must be hot, she takes the step; her goal

to read is the subject of this shot -- a book

in her hand, the library closed, the door

just out of reach.  Stepping up, she must look

at the two signs, read them slowly once more.

The first one, in pale letters, barely shows

against the white background.  Though she will read

Greenwood Public Library for Negroes,

the other, bold letters on slate, will lead

her away, out of the frame, a finger 

pointing left.  I want to caller, say wait.

But this is history: she can't linger.

She'll read the sign that I read: You Are Late.

You both smile, you both know

from A TIME FOR EVERYTHING

                                                     by Karl O. Knausgaard

. . . . . .

            Did she suddenly begin to cry out?

          Yes, suddenly she began to cry out. They must have thought they were so far away from people that they needn't exercise any restraint. Appalled and ashamed, Cain turned away, finished as fast as he could buttoned his fly, and tried to think about something else as he walked back, but the picture of them stayed with him, all the time he could see her flapping breasts and her swelling rump, his quick thrusts, and he thought almost with fury that that wasn't how it ought to be, not like that. It should be as it was in the dance below, where the different worlds barely touched one another, and the one glimpsed just enough of the other to want to learn more about it. The boys' world happy and arrogant or silent and determined, the girls' shy or impish, sensitive or strapping, with secretive minds and a laughter you could let yourself be completely filled with, and then dream about: their faces then! These sudden flashes of a girl's lovely features that come while working or before going to sleep, the lightness you're suffused with, the happiness that doesn't stop there, at the frontiers of the face, but goes on spreading, and at last envelopes everything there is. A pair of worn clogs standing on the doorstep, the rain that begins to fall on them, this is her, both the shoes and the rain are her, and you hurry over, pick up the shoes with sudden tenderness, put them in the hall, and run out into the rain, face turned up to the sky, for she is falling on you, and on the grass and the trees, and on the river and the hills. The green caterpillar crawling over the stone wall that isn't even aware of your finger, but crawls up it, makes you happy because it reminds you that she exists, just as smoke from a chimney that's whipped by the wind and dissolves in the gray air reminds you that she exists, and the brown water in the ruts of a cart track when the sun shines on it, and the green grass beside it, and the squirrel that each day hops along the same branches of the same trees at the same time of day, this, too, reminds you she exists, as it runs across the road with its bushy tail in the air, climbs a tree on the other side, and is gone. Everything reminds you of her, everything makes you happy, and the only thing you really want is to see her again. Perhaps she'll come walking along the road at dusk? Perhaps you'll push your plate aside, walk into the hall, put on your boots, and go out to meet her there? If so, it will be with a trembling heart. And perhaps the sun will shine on the pine barren on the other side of the river, while the sky above the meadow is gray and the air filled with soft rain, and perhaps she'll stop when she catches sign of you, because maybe she feels the same, maybe she's been thinking of you during these days and weeks, too. So it won't really matter if you haven't anything to say to each other, because you'll both be feeling the same and wanting the same: silently you'll walk side by side down the road, the grass making your shoes wet, she glancing at you now and then, you glancing at her now and then, you both smile, you both know, this is you.

          It should be like this and only like this, thought Cain, and halted at the top of the meadow.

. . . . . .

For Jasus sake are'nt they getting it for nothing

LISDOONVARNA

by Christy Moore

How's it goin' there everybody,
From Cork, New York, Dundalk, Gortahork and Glenamaddy.
Here we are in the County Clare
It's a long, long way from here to there.
There's the Burren and the Cliffs of Moher,
the Tulla and the Kilfenora,
Miko Russell, Doctor Bill,
Willy Clancy, Noel Hill.
Flutes and fiddles everywhere.
If it's music you want,
You should go to Clare.

CHORUS
Oh, Lisdoonvarna
Lisdoon, Lisdoon, Lisdoon, Lisdoonvarna!


Everybody needs a break,
Climb a mountain or jump in a lake.
Some head off to exotic places,
Others go to the Galway Races.
Mattie goes to the South of France,
Jim to the dogs, Peter to the dance.
A cousin of mine goes potholing,
A cousin of heres loves Joe Dolan.
Summer comes around each year,
We go there and they come here.
Some jet off to ... Frijiliana,
But I always go to Lisdoonvarna.

CHORUS

I always leave on a Thursday night,
With me tent and me groundsheet rolled up tight.
I like to hit Lisdoon,
In around Friday afternoon.
This gives me time to get me tent up and my gear together,
I don't need to worry about the weather.
Ramble in for a pint of stout,
you'd never know who'd be hangin' about!
There's a Dutchman playing a mandolin,
And a German looking for Liam Óg O'Floinn.
And there's Adam, Bono and Garrett Fitzgerald,
Gettin' their photos taken for the Sunday World.
Finbarr, Charlie and Jim Hand,
And they drinkin' pints to bate the band.
( why would'nt they for Jasus sake are'nt they getting it for nothing)

CHORUS

The multitudes, they flocked in throngs
To hear the music and the songs.
Motorbikes and Hi-ace vans,
With bottles - barrels - flagons - cans.
Mighty craic. Loads of frolics,
Pioneers and alcoholics,
PLAC, SPUC and the FCA,
Free Nicky Kelly and the IRA.
Hairy chests and milk-white thighs,
mickey dodgers in disguise.
Mc Graths, O'Briens, Pippins, Coxs,
Massage parlours in horse boxes.
There's amhráns, bodhráns, amadáns,
Arab sheiks, Hindu Sikhs, Jesus freaks,
RTE are makin' tapes, takin' breaks and throwin' shapes.
This is heaven, this is hell.
Who cares? Who can tell?
(Anyone for the last few Choc Ices, now?)

CHORUS

A 747 for Jackson Browne,
They had to build a special runway just to get him down.
Before the Chieftains could start to play,
Seven creamy pints came out on a tray.
Shergar was ridden by Lord Lucan,
Seán Cannon did the backstage cookin'.
Clannad were playin' "Harry's Game",
Christy was singin' "Nancy Spain".
Mary O'Hara and Brush Shields,
Together singin' "The Four Green Fields".
Van the Man and Emmy Lou,
Moving Hearts and Planxty too!

CHORUS

Everybody needs a break,
Climb a mountain or jump in a lake.
Sean Doherty goes to the Rose of Tralee,
Oliver J. Flanagan goes swimming in the Holy Sea.
But I like the music and the open air,
So every Summer I go to Clare.
Coz Woodstock, Knock nor the Feast of Cana,
Can hold a match to Lisdoonvarna.

CHORUS

Link at:     http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vRYW55rFC24

With affectionate regard for County Clare, home of my ancestors,
and my descendants, and for the Clancy Festival  and Music School
carrying on this week at Miltown Malbay.
.

Sown with immigrant grasses

               by Amy Clampitt

Nothing Stays Put

                           IN MEMORY OF FATHER FLYE, 1884-1085

The strange and wonderful are too much with us.

The protea of the antipodes —a great,

globed, blazing honeybee of a bloom —

for sale in the supermarket! We are in

our decadence, we are not entitled.

What have we done to deserve

all the produce of the tropics —

this fiery trove, the largess of it

heaped up like cannonballs, these pineapples, bossed

and crested, standing like troops at attention,

these tiers, these balconies of green, festoons

grown sumptuous wiht stoop labor?

The exotic is everywhere, it comes to us

before there is a yen or need for it. The green-

groces, uptown and down, are from South Korea.

Orchids, opulence by the pailful, just slightly

fatigued by the plane trip from Hawaii, are

disposed on the sidewalks; alstroemerias, freesias

fattened a bit in translation from overseas; gladioli

likewise estranged from their piercing ancestral crimson;

as well as, less altered from the original blue cornflower

of the roadsides and railway embankments of Europe, these

bachelor's buttons. But it isn't the railway embankments

their featherweight wheels of cobalt remind me of, it's

a row of them among prim colonnades of cosmos,

snapdragon, nasturtium, bloodsilk red poppies,

in my grandmother's garden: a prarie childhood,

the grassland shorn, overlaid with a grid,

unsealed, furrowed, harrowed and sown with immigrant grasses,

their massive corduroy, their wavering feltings embroidered

here and there by the scarlet shoulder patch of cannas

on a courthouse lawn, by a love knot, a cross stitch

of living matter, sown and tended by women,

nurturers everywhere of the strange and wonderful,

beneath whose hands what had been alien begins,

as it alters, to grow as though it were indigenous.

But at this remove what I think of as

strange and wonderful, strolling the side streets of Manhattan

on an April afternoon, seeing hybrid pear trees in blossom,

a tossing, vertiginous colonnade of foam, up above —

is the white petalfall, the warm snowdrift

of the indigenous wild plum of my childhood.

Nothing stays put. The world is a wheel.

All that we know, that we'remade of, is motion.

Voices out of stone out of sleep

by George Seferis

GYMNOPAIDIA

Santorini is geologically composed of pumice stone and china clay; in her bay, islands have appeared and disappeared. this island was once the center of a very ancient religion. the lyrical dances, with a strict and heavy rhythm, performed here were called: Gymnopaidia.

GUIDE TO GREECE

I. SANTORINI

Stoop if you can to the dark sea forgetting

the sound of a flute on naked feet

that trod on your sleep in the other, the sunken life.

Write if you can on your last shell

the day the name the place

and fling it into the sea so it sinks.

We found ourselves naked on the pumice stones

watching the rising islands

watching the red islands sink

into their sleep, into our sleep.

Here we found ourselves naked holding

the scales that tipped toward

injustice.

Instep of power unshadowed will considered love

projects that ripen in the midday sun,

course of fate with the slap of a young hand

on the shoulder;

in the land that was scattered, that can't resist,

in the land that was once our land

the islands -- rust and ash -- are sinking.

Altars destroyed

and friends forgotten

leaves of the palm tree in mud.

Let your hands go traveling if you can

here on time's curve with the ship that touched the horizon.

When the dice struck the flagstone

when the lance struck the breast-plate

when the eye recognized the stranger

and love dried

in punctured souls;

when looking around you see

feet harvested everywhere

dead hands everywhere

darkened eyes everywhere;

when it is no longer left for you to choose

the death you wanted as your own

hearing a cry

even the wolf's cry,

your due;

let your hands go traveling if you can

free yourself from unfaithful time

and sink,

sinks whoever raises the great stones.

II. MYCENAE

Give me your hands, give me your hands, give me your hands

I have seen in the night

the sharp peak of the mountain

seen the plain beyond flooded

with the light of an invisible moon,

seen, turning my head,

black stones huddled

and my life taut as a chord

beginning and end

the final moment:

my hands.

Sinks whoever raises the great stones;

I've raised these stones as long as I was able

I've loved these stones as long as I was able

these stones, my fate.

Wounded by my own soil

tortured by my own shirt

condemned by my own gods,

these stones.

I know that they don't know, but I

who've followed so many times

the path from killer to victim

from victim to punishment

from punishment to the next murder,

groping

the inexhaustible purple

that night of the return

when the Furies began whistling

in the meager grass --

I've seen snakes crossed with vipers

knotted over the evil generation

our fate.

Voices out of stone out of sleep

deeper here where the world darkens

memory of toil rooted in the rhythm

beaten on the earth with feet

forgotten.

Bodies sunk into the foundations

of another time, naked. Eyes

fixed fixed on a point

that you can't make out much as you want to:

the soul

that struggles to become your own soul.

Not even the silence is now yours

here where the millstones have stopped turning.

                                                                              October 1935

From George Seferis, Collected Poems, 1924-1955.  (1967) Trans. Edmund Keeley & Philip Sherrard.  

DW amendments.

So unimaginably different

From Autumn Journal

                           by Louis MacNeice

 

Now we are back to normal, now the mind is
Back to the even tenor of the usual day,
Skidding no longer across the uneasy camber
Of the nightmare way.
We are safe, though others have crashed the railings
Over the river ravine; their wheel-tracks carve the bank
But after the event all we can do is argue
And count the widening ripples where they sank.
October comes with rain whipping round the ankles
In waves of white at night
And filling the raw clay trenches (the parks of London
Are a nasty sight).
In a week I return to work, lecturing, coaching,
As impresario of the Ancient Greeks
Who wore the chiton and lived on fish and olives
And talked philosophy or smut in cliques;
Who believed in youth and did not gloze the unpleasant
Consequences of age;
What is life, one said, or what is pleasant
Once you have turned the page
Of love? The days grow worse, the dice are loaded
Against the living man who pays in tears for breath;
Never to be born was the best, call no man happy
This side death.
Conscious - long before Engels - of necessity
And therein free
They plotted out their life with truism and humour
Between the jealous heaven and the callous sea.
And Pindar sang the garland of wild olive
And Alcibiades lived from hand to mouth
Double-crossing Athens, Persia, Sparta,
And many died in the city of plague, and many of drouth
In Sicilian quarries, and many by the spear and arrow
And many more who told their lies too late
Caught in the eternal factions and reactions
Of the city state.
And free speech shivered on the pikes of Macedonia
And later on the swords of Rome
And Athens became a mere university city,
And the goddess born of the foam
Became the kept hetaera, heroine of Menander,
And the philosopher narrowed his focus, confined
His efforts to putting his own soul in order
And keeping a quiet mind.
And for a thousand years they went on talking,
Making such apt remarks,
A race no longer of heroes but of professors
And crooked business men and secretaries and clerks
Who turned out dapper little elegiac verses
On the ironies of fate, the transience of all
Affections, carefully shunning the over-statement
But working the dying fall.
The Glory that was Greece: put it in a syllabus, grade it
Page by page
To train the mind or even to point a moral
For the present age:
Models of logic and lucidity, dignity, sanity,
The golden mean between opposing ills
Though there were exceptions of course but only exceptions -
The bloody Bacchanals on the Thracian hills.
So the humanist in his room with Jacobean panels
Chewing his pipe and looking on a lazy quad
Chops the Ancient World to turn a sermon
To the greater glory of God.
But I can do nothing so useful or so simple;
These dead are dead
And when I think I should remember the paragons of Hellas
I think instead
Of the crooks, the adventurers, the opportunists,
The careless athletes and the fancy boys,
The hair-splitters, the pedants, the hard-boiled sceptics
And the Agora, and the noise
Of the demagogues and the quacks; and the women pouring
Libations over graves
And the trimmers at Delphi and the dummies at Sparta, and lastly
I think of the slaves.
And how anyone can imagine oneself among them
I do not know;
It was all so unimaginably different
And all so long ago.