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Reality is a sound
Reality is a sound, you have to tune in to it not just keep yelling. (Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse) Brilliant! Tagged: Anne Carson, poetry, reality, spirituality
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Distance
And another Anne Carson gem, again from Autobiography of Red. Distance, she says, … extends from a spaceless within to the edge of what can be loved. Tagged: Anne Carson, distance, poetry
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Enter Herakles
Somehow Geryon made it to adolescence. Thus opens the next chapter in Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red, which is entitled ‘Change’. First though, still a twelve-year old, Geryon meets Herakles:...
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Under the seams runs the pain
eryon struggles on in Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red, grieving for the devastating loss of a lover. But we also learn about other aspects of his life. Like Carson herself (there are strong...
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The roof
A wonderful description of life in Lima: Ancash’s mother had the roof divided into living, sleeping and horticultural areas. Beside the water tank was where guests slept. Next to that was ‘Ancash’s...
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Aftershocks can go on for years
The inevitable happens …. Geryon meets Herakles again, with predictable consequences: The effort it took to pull himself away from Herakles’ eyes could have been measured on the scale devised by...
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Secret places inside this violent world
Time for some more of Rumi’s poetry, again in the translation of Coleman Barks, from Bridge to the Soul: Journeys into the Music and Silence of the Heart. I am sure I have said this before, but Rumi...
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A poor life
A poor life is this, if full of care we have no time to stand or stare. W. H. Davies, ‘Leisure’, as quoted by Clare Bryden in Third Way, June 2013. Tagged: care, poetry, Third Way, time, W. H. Davies
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Not So Afraid – a poem about friendship, among other things
The sparrows are spinning warmth into the winter world. Their delicate, clear chirps bring with them a crisp joy, making me not so afraid of the howling wind. So, too, the friends of my heart. Joyce...
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A box full of darkness
The Uses of Sorrow (In my sleep I dreamed this poem) Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this, too, was a gift. Mary Oliver, Thirst Tagged:...
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A stable-place sufficed
Our God, Heaven cannot hold him Nor earth sustain; Heaven and earth shall flee away When he comes to reign: In the bleak mid-winter A stable-place sufficed The Lord God Almighty Jesus Christ. From...
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Where to put one’s gratitude
Zadie Smith’s On Beauty did never quite engage me in the way that I had expected, but here are what for me were the book’s three highlights: … poetry is the first mark of the truly civilized. And so it...
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The sky got crowded and complained
If you think that the Truth can be known From words, If you think that the Sun and the Ocean Can pass through that tiny opening Called the mouth, O someone should start laughing! Someone should start...
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A cozy, empty hut in the forest
We Keep Each Other Happy Like two lovers who have become lost In a winter blizzard And find a cozy, empty hut In the forest, I now huddle everywhere With the friend. God and I have built an immense...
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This is the birth day of life and of love and wings
i thank You God for most this amazing day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything which is natural which is infinite which is yes (i who have died am...
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You own nothing
Here’s what I think is an utterly brilliant poem by Margaret Atwood. It’s from Eating Fire: Selected Poetry 1965-1995, but I came across it in Janet Morley’s The Heart’s Time: A Poem a Day for Lent and...
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The marks of the beast
The marks offered them sure and peaceful sleep, a way to acquire prestige and a thousand unnecessary things. To continue along this path, they had to harden themselves against the Lamb and against His...
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A source of life and service
In her poem ‘The Lord’s Prayer from Guatemala’ (1979), also published in Threatened with Resurrection/Amenazado de resurrección, Julia Esquivel envisages that: churches abandon their structures of...
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An extra-ness in the air
… there was an extra-ness in the air, as if a gate had been left open in the usual life, as if something might get in or get out. From Seamus Heaney’s book District and Circle Tagged: life, poetry,...
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Hate has no world
Hate has no world. The people of hate must try to possess the world of love, for it is the only world; it is Heaven and Earth. But as lonely, eager hate possesses it, it disappears; it never did exist,...
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