Versed versus verse:

A TASTE OF RUMI

These spiritual window-shoppers,
who idly ask, ‘How much is that’
Oh, I’m just looking.
They handle a hundred items and put
them down,
shadows with no capital.

What is spent is love and two
eyes wet with weeping.
But these walk into a shop,
and their whole lives pass sud-denly in
that moment,
in that shop.
***
When someone mentions the
gracefulness
of the nightsky, climb up on the roof
and dance and say,
Like this.

If anyone wants to know what
‘spirit’ is,
or what ‘God’s fragrance’ means,
lean your head toward him or her.
Keep your face there close.
Like this.
***
We are as the flute, and the music
in us is from thee;
we are as the mountain and the echo
in us is from thee.

We are as pieces of chess engaged in
victory and defeat:
our victory and defeat is from thee,
O thou whose qualities are comely!

Who are we, O Thou soul of
our souls,
that we should remain in being
beside thee?
***
Make yourself free from self at
one stroke!
Like a sword be without trace
of soft iron;
Like a steel mirror, scour off all
rust with contrition.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Death

Come thou, thou last one, whom I recognize,
unbearable pain throughout this body's fabric:
as I in my spirit burned, see, I now burn in thee:
the wood that long resisted the advancing flames
which thou kept flaring, I now am nourishinig
and burn in thee.

My gentle and mild being through thy ruthless fury
has turned into a raging hell that is not from here.
Quite pure, quite free of future planning, I mounted
the tangled funeral pyre built for my suffering,
so sure of nothing more to buy for future needs,
while in my heart the stored reserves kept silent.

Is it still I, who there past all recognition burn?
Memories I do not seize and bring inside.
O life! O living! O to be outside!
And I in flames. And no one here who knows me.

Gacela of the Dark Death
by Federico García Lorca
Translated by Robert Bly


I want to sleep the sleep of the apples,
I want to get far away from the busyness of the cemeteries.
I want to sleep the sleep of that child
who longed to cut his heart open far out at sea.

I don't want them to tell me again how the corpse keeps all its blood,
how the decaying mouth goes on begging for water.
I'd rather not hear about the torture sessions the grass arranges for
nor about how the moon does all its work before dawn
with its snakelike nose.

I want to sleep for half a second,
a second, a minute, a century,
but I want everyone to know that I am still alive,
that I have a golden manger inside my lips,
that I am the little friend of the west wind,
that I am the elephantine shadow of my own tears.

When it's dawn just throw some sort of cloth over me
because I know dawn will toss fistfuls of ants at me,
and pour a little hard water over my shoes
so that the scorpion claws of the dawn will slip off.

Because I want to sleep the sleep of the apples,
and learn a mournful song that will clean all earth away from me,
because I want to live with that shadowy child
who longed to cut his heart open far out at sea.


William Carlos Williams

Transitional

First he said:

It is the woman in us

That makes us write--

Let us acknowledge it--

Man would be silent.

We are not men

Therefore we can speak

And be conscious

(of the two sides)

Unbent by the sensual

As befits accuracy.

I then said:

Dare you make this

Your propaganda?

And he answered:

Am I not I--here?

The Beat Page

The Moon Versus Us Ever Sleeping Together Again - Richard Brautigan

I sit here, an arch-villain of romance,
thinking about you. Gee, I'm sorry
I made you unhappy, but there was nothing
I could do about it because I have to be free.
Perhaps everything would have been different
if you had stayed at the table or asked me
to go out with you to look at the moon,
instead of getting up and leaving me alone with
her.


Jefferson Airplane - Lather

Lather was thirty years old today,
They took away all of his toys.
His mother sent newspaper clippings to him,
About his old friends who'd stopped being boys.
There was Harwitz E. Green, just turned thirty-three,
His leather chair waits at the bank.
And Seargent Dow Jones, twenty-seven years old,
Commanding his very own tank.
But Lather still finds it a nice thing to do,
To lie about nude in the sand,
Drawing pictures of mountains that look like bumps,
And thrashing the air with his hands.

But wait, oh Lather's productive you know,
He produces the finest of sound,
Putting drumsticks on either side of his nose,
Snorting the best licks in town,
But that's all over...

Lather was thirty years old today,
And Lather came foam from his tongue.
He looked at me eyes wide and plainly said,
Is it true that I'm no longer young?
And the children call him famous,
what the old men call insane,
And sometimes he's so nameless,
That he hardly knows which game to play...
Which words to say...
And I should have told him, "No, you're not old."
And I should have let him go on...smiling...babywide.

The Family by Ed Saunders
Denny's Wizard