Tag Archives: poetry

Portents of Doom

 

or Truth veiled in Mystery…?

(Perhaps they are the same.)

 

Canto de esperanza

Rubén Darío  (1867-1916)

Un gran vuelo de cuervos mancha el azul celeste.
Un soplo milenario trae amagos de peste.
Se asesinan los hombres en el extremo Este.

¿Ha nacido el apocalíptico Anticristo?
Se han sabido presagios y prodigios se han visto
y parece inminente el retorno de Cristo.

La tierra está preñada de dolor tan profundo
que el soñador imperial, meditabundo,
sufre con las angustias del corazón del mundo.

Verdugos de ideales afligieron la tierra:
en un pozo de sombra la humanidad se encierra
con los rudos molosos del odio y de la guerra.

¡Oh, Señor Jesucristo! ¿Por qué tardas, qué esperas
para tender tu mano de la luz sobre las fieras
y hacer brillar al sol tus divinas banderas?

Surge de pronto y vierte la esencia de la vida
sobre tanta alma loca, triste o emperdernida
que, amante de tinieblas, tu dulce aurora olvida.

Vén, Señor, para hacer la gloria de ti mismo.
Vén con temblor de estrellas y horror de cataclismo,
vén a traer amor y paz sobre el abismo.

Y tu caballo blanco, que miró el visionario,
pase. Y suene el divino clarín extraordinario.
Mi corazón será brasa de tu incensario.


Song of Hope

Translated by Salomón de la Selva
Vultures a-wing have sullied the glory of the sky;
The winds bear on their pinions the horror of Death’s cry;
Assassinating one another, men rage and fall and die.
Has Antichrist arisen whom John at Patmos saw?
Portents are seen and marvels that fill the world with awe,
And Christ’s return seems pressing, come to fulfill the Law.
The ancient Earth is pregnant with so profound a smart,
The royal dreamer, musing, silent and sad apart,
Grieves with the heavy anguish that rends the world’s great heart.
Slaughterers of ideals with the violence of fate
Have cast man in the darkness of labyrinths intricate
To be the prey and carnage of hounds of war and hate.
Lord Christ! for what art waiting to come in all Thy might
And stretch Thy hands of radiance over these wolves of night,
And spread on high Thy banners and lave the world with light?
Swiftly arise and pour Life’s essence lavishly
On souls that crazed with hunger, or sad, or maddened be,
Who tread the paths of blindness forgetting the dawn and Thee.
Come Lord, to make Thy glory, with lightnings on Thy Brow!
With trembling stars around Thee and cataclysmal woe,
And bring Thy gifts of justice and peace and love below!
Let the dread horse John visioned devouring stars, pass by;
And angels sound the clarion of Judgment from on high.
My heart shall be an ember and in thy censer lie.

Have a nice day.
And don’t forget to read lots of POETRY !:

IMAGE CREDIT: Mirella Ricciardi @ onefinethread.blogspot.com

All Hallow Seven

Today some reflections on All Hallows Even AKA Halloween AKA Reformation Day along with poetry by Siouxsie and the Banshees.

I also present to you my brand-new global graphics® line of festive Mark-of-the-Beast  skulls for the season. (They may be purchased as a set or separately for 30 shekels each).

October 31st is a night to celebrate —to celebrate Absolute Truth. It is a night to clearly grasp the sinister magnitude of the predicament fallen humanity is in. We are a species terrorized by  death every day – not only on the last night of October. Yet, since we are conditioned to fear and repress the reality of mortality in our sick culture, it gathers subliminal intensity only to surface in a collective psychosis and hypoglycemic spending orgy every Halloween. Consumer marketing strategies enhance and augment, in a  soulless way, this national delirium. Our vulgar seasonal spectacle is now made in China.

I have noted, in my few years of this earthly pilgrimage, a distressing degeneration of Halloween from what it was in my childhood. I recall less commercial pressure to consume – whether nutritionally worthless [pre-diabetic even] sugary treats  or morbid costumes and plastic props with murderous connotations. Halloween was less of an unrepentant death-trip then, it was less graphically gruesome.  I remember my mother helping me turn my childish costume fantasies into reality:  I was a robot, I was a bat, I was the Mummy ( I wear my memories like a shroud…) trailing Egyptian linen many autumn moons past. There was more child-friendly fantasy when I was growing up. The culture had not yet begun to harden into a crassly consumerist rigor mortis yet – or maybe I didn’t notice that part of it so much. Am I  just idealizing a vanished past? Possibly, yes… but the push to turn Halloween into a cannibalistic slasher-film is a real phenomenon and also a discernible symptom.

Strange that it is most pronounced in the decadent industrialized Western Democracies where the majority live quite comfortably.  Poorer nations that live in closer proximity to death seem to glamorize it far less,  it seems to me.

I for one am disgusted with the spectacle of Halloween in the USA. But I hold a grudging respect for what looks like a passing victory for death and the grave every year on the last gasp of October. How do I personally war against the dumbing- down/bloodying-up of Halloween here in the Land of the supposedly Free? Like all other grouchy sensible old men, I rail to my family about how it used to be. I give out treats that won’t worsen the pre-diabetic tendencies of the nation’s children. I compliment all the Princesses, Animals, Witches, Robots, Fairies, Superheros and Star Wars defenders on their costumes. I ignore the obnoxious older kids who look like Freddy Kruger or worse.  I sometimes slip a gospel tract into the child’s bag. (Yeah, that was me – go ahead, get mad…)

Which brings me to Reformation Day:

In honor of my three patron saints, St. Martin Luther, St. John Calvin and  St. John Knox (all recently canonized by His Holiness Pope Ratzinger), I want to proclaim the ongoing triumph of the Reformation. October 31, “Reformation Day“, is a national day of celebration in Germany, Slovenia, Chile, and Scandinavia – and it should be here in the US of A as well.  It is a day to thank God for the liberation of His Word from hieratic pomp and empty ritual.  It is a night to clothe yourself in liberty and consider the fall of nations along with the fall of the leaves.  It is a night to see the light of unstoppable Truth glowing in the eyes of every Jack-O-Lantern you behold. It is a night to comprehend the shining of Christ’s victory in the face of the marshaled powers of the grave. The wages of sin is death (the bitter) but the gift of God is eternal life (the sweet).

Halloween by Siouxsie and the Banshees:

The night is still, and the frost it bites my face
I wear my silence like a mask and murmur like a ghost…

“Trick or Treat – Trick or Treat”
The bitter and the sweet

The carefree days are distant now
I wear my memories like a shroud
I try to speak but words collapse, echoing, echoing….

“Trick or Treat – Trick or Treat”
The bitter and the sweet

I wander though your sadness
Gazing at you with scorpion eyes
Halloween……Halloween

A sweet reminder in the ice-blue nursery
Of a childish murder – of hidden luster, and she cries:

“Trick or Treat – Trick or Treat”
The bitter and the sweet

I wander through your sadness
Gazing at you with scorpion eyes
Halloween, Halloween

Poetic Sepulchres

The Sleeper remains a quintessential Halloween poem for me.
It is a beautiful proto-Symbolist work that must have inspired Baudelaire and others.

But as a counterbalance to all the sepulchral solemnity, I  include lines by another American poet, James Russel Lowell, making fun of Poe’s versification:

“There comes Poe, with his raven, like Barnaby Rudge,
Three-fifths of him genius and two-fifths sheer fudge,
Who talks like a book of iambs and pentameters,
In a way to make people of common-sense damn meters,
Who has written some things quite the best of their kind,
But the heart somehow seems all squeezed out by the mind…”

A Fable For Critics, Part VI:  Poe and Longfellow

 


The Sleeper

  Edgar Allen Poe  (1809-1849)

At midnight, in the month of June,
I stand beneath the mystic moon.
An opiate vapor, dewy, dim,
Exhales from out her golden rim,
And, softly dripping, drop by drop,
Upon the quiet mountain top,
Steals drowsily and musically
Into the universal valley.
The rosemary nods upon the grave;
The lily lolls upon the wave;
Wrapping the fog about its breast,
The ruin molders into rest;
Looking like Lethe, see! the lake
A conscious slumber seems to take,
And would not, for the world, awake.
All Beauty sleeps!- and lo! where lies
Irene, with her Destinies!

O, lady bright! can it be right-
This window open to the night?
The wanton airs, from the tree-top,
Laughingly through the lattice drop-
The bodiless airs, a wizard rout,
Flit through thy chamber in and out,
And wave the curtain canopy
So fitfully- so fearfully-
Above the closed and fringed lid
‘Neath which thy slumb’ring soul lies hid,
That, o’er the floor and down the wall,
Like ghosts the shadows rise and fall!
Oh, lady dear, hast thou no fear?
Why and what art thou dreaming here?
Sure thou art come O’er far-off seas,
A wonder to these garden trees!
Strange is thy pallor! strange thy dress,
Strange, above all, thy length of tress,
And this all solemn silentness!

The lady sleeps! Oh, may her sleep,
Which is enduring, so be deep!
Heaven have her in its sacred keep!
This chamber changed for one more holy,
This bed for one more melancholy,
I pray to God that she may lie
For ever with unopened eye,
While the pale sheeted ghosts go by!

My love, she sleeps! Oh, may her sleep
As it is lasting, so be deep!
Soft may the worms about her creep!
Far in the forest, dim and old,
For her may some tall vault unfold-
Some vault that oft has flung its black
And winged panels fluttering back,
Triumphant, o’er the crested palls,
Of her grand family funerals-

Some sepulchre, remote, alone,
Against whose portal she hath thrown,
In childhood, many an idle stone-
Some tomb from out whose sounding door
She ne’er shall force an echo more,
Thrilling to think, poor child of sin!
It was the dead who groaned within.

IMAGE CREDITS: photo.net
paris-in-photos.com

1780 Watts of Illumination

<<<Give ‘em Watts, Boys!>>>


Isaac Watts wrote great poetry.

And once, in a VERY avant-garde conceptual art piece, his poetry propelled actual musket-balls from American guns against invading British troops.

(Chris Burden,  Joseph Beuys and Christo got nothing on old Isaac…)

Pastor James Caldwell called it very well indeed at the Battle of Springfield, New Jersey on June 23, 1780:

When James Caldwell joined the battle in Springfield, the Americans were giving the British a sound beating, when suddenly one of the patriot companies ran out of paper wadding. Now wadding was just as important as powder and musket balls to the soldier. Instantly, James called for the company to retreat back to the local Presbyterian Church where he ran in and grabbed all the Isaac Watts hymnals. He rushed back outside and began slinging them to the soldiers with the admonition to “fill the British with doctrine from the hymnals” and, “Give ’em Watts, Boys!” “Put Watts Into ’em, Boys!”

[http://www.puritanboard.com]

Others, it would appear, have heard of this incident as I had –  but thought it happened at Bunker Hill.

Without further ado, I give you Watts today:


Helpless               Isaac Watts  (1674 – 1748)

How helpless guilty nature lies,
Unconscious of its load!
The heart, unchanged can never rise
To happiness and God.

The will perverse, the passions blind,
In paths of ruin stray;
Reason, debased, can never find
The safe, the narrow way.

Can aught, beneath a power divine,
The stubborn will subdue?
Tis Thine, almighty Saviour, Thine,
To form the heart anew.

O change these wretched hearts of ours,
And give them life divine!
Then shall our passions and our powers,
Almighty Lord, be Thine!

Image from:  http://www.puritanboard.com