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Free association
A.K. Ramanujam ageing childhood conversational culture dark humor death defiance E. E. Cummings Edna St. Vincent Millay family fantasy free verse gender history humorous poems identity imagery loneliness loss love poetry lyric poetry Margaret Atwood marriage mystic mythology nature Ogden Nash Pablo Neruda philosophy poems about poetry poignant politics religion repetend rhyme rhythm social commentary song lyrics sonnet suicide translation unsettling W. H. Auden war
The Landscape
A Version
I dreamt of loving. The dream remains, but love
is no longer those lilacs and roses whose breath
filled the broad woods, where the sail of a flame
lay at the end of each arrow-straight path.
I dreamt of loving. The dream remains, but love
is no longer that storm whose white nerve sparked
the castle towers, or left the mind unrhymed,
or flared an instant, just where the road forked.
It is the star struck under my heel in the night.
It is the word no book on earth defines.
It is the foam on the wave, the cloud in the sky.
As they age, all things grow rigid and bright.
The streets fall nameless, and the knots untie.
Now, with this landscape, I fix; I shine.
– Robert Desnos
Translated from the French by Don Paterson
Tagged: Don Paterson, French, imagery, love poetry, nature, Robert Desnos, translation
The Black Art
A woman who writes feels too much,
those trances and portents!
As if cycles and children and islands
weren’t enough; as if mourners and gossips
and vegetables were never enough.
She thinks she can warn the stars.
A writer is essentially a spy.
Dear love, I am that girl.
– Anne Sexton
Tagged: Anne Sexton, conversational, gender, magic, poems about poetry, social commentary