the untold stories
plunging their roots
into the bone of
my heart
poisonous and hungry
the unwritten sisters and
daughters of mine
agitating their dark foliage
in me
listen to me you
to whose feet my untold
stories
my unwritten
bodies of despair command
me to kneel
they put a rope around
my neck
they take my
mouth
they want revenge
they tear me
down
in search of
hear me out you
to whose feet I don't
to whose feet my untold
stories
my unwritten
bodies of despair command
me to kneel
they put a rope around
my neck
they take my
mouth
they want revenge
they tear me
down
in search of
hear me out you
to whose feet I don't
You are converting me towards this dark art though i think it is beyond me how you can do this. i got the answer however........ you really are a true artist.
ReplyDeletethis is perhaps one of your best pics ever, esp. in the secret women category.
so, well done!
oh kubla, I am overwhelmed.
ReplyDeletex much as i like all the words even if i;m not totally certain what's going on (but that's kind of what i like!) i bet it'd sound better in german
ReplyDelete:-)
ReplyDeletefirst of all, it would sound better in romanian! actually I shouldn't write something like this (which might be called poetry?) in English, I know it, but nobody here understands romanian :-) and I would write much better in german (ok, have to admit, not too modest of me in this case, but it is just that I feel more 'at home' in german, and also in the poeticity of german). as much as I like French, I wouldn't use it for poetry, I'm sorry James :-)
glad you like it, swiss.
Kubla,
ReplyDeleteI am willing to bet...
I don't want to sound too primitive but I'd take the photo over the words any day. Not art or poetry or philosophy: just the picture.
anonymous, hi - this picture over these words or generally speaking?
ReplyDeletewhat are you willing to bet? :-)
Do you mean what am I willing to bet or what am I willing to bet?
ReplyDeleteI am willing to bet that this is a picture of you. I will bet you $3.50. Is that a deal? Shake? Done? Good.
This picture and these words. How can one speak "generally"?
deal? such a dreamer :-)
ReplyDeleteis it so important whose face it is? maybe it's me, maybe not...
but thank you for your sincerity, that you don't like my words so much :-)
the photo's great - but, speaking of deals, I'll take the words then please, because those words speak a thousand pictures...
ReplyDelete(a haunting, forceful imagery )
French as a language for poetry? Its poeticity?
ReplyDeleteWhat a conflicted topic this is for me. What a vexation. A line of French is hateful and thin, when compared with a rich, chewy mouthful of German or English (probably with Romanian, too, and I am, btw, getting closer to being able to read Romanian). It is, in one way, the challenge of working with such thin material that pulls at one, like making origami figures with crepe paper. Also there is the feeling that it is really only the Academie Francaise that is hateful and thin, that real French has its deeps and textures that one wants to get at, somehow.
Here are some subjective (easily contradicted) propositions:
1. French seems more intimate. A good language for whispering.
2. French is one of those paradoxical masks that give one permission to be one’s real self by denying that the self is real.
3. The best French poems aspire to the condition of translation. (How do you know if your lover is a narcissist? When he is making love to you, he fantasizes that he is masturbating.) How do you know if a poem is French? When she was writing it, the poet fantasized that she was translating.
Not long ago, I read this, about the Kurdish poet Bejan Matur, who writes in Turkish: “[Matur] says writing in Turkish may even benefit her poetry, because poetry, she feels, requires a ‘dead language’. Living languages create the impression of being able to describe life. But poetry is the translation of an experience from before language and outside language; it creates something which language cannot comprehend. Matur speaks from a loneliness one encounters when thinking in poetic time, outside modern experience; it intones a lament for what is lost, to the rhythm of a lost language.”
Sometimes I disagree with Bejan Matur. Other times I feel just as is described above, and then I want to write in French.
This would be certainly a different matter for anyone who lives in French….
Of course I need to add that I like the photograph and the poem very much.
ReplyDeleteI don't think it matters whether or not the photograph is an image of you, at least not in the sense that Anonymous seems to intend. It is an image of you, in the same way that the roses were images of you.... Sorry, if you wanted to be absent. The hour has grown too late for absence...
I like the concord of words and images (and if the poem would be better in Romanian, it might be too much to bear). The idea that images alone are somehow more pure is a bit of romantic misdirection, isn't it?
strangely haunting words. Untold stories. I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about the poems I haven't written or nearly wrote or lost.
ReplyDeleteThe Lost Poems
I have come back to Mull
for the poems that were lost here;
overboard from the Lochinvar,
buried in landslips,
left in telephone boxes,
torn to pieces and
somersaulting in the wind.
I am in sore need of them now,
for they were born of bright agonies
before they slipped away:
death, love, betrayal.
All these years
they have been dancing on the shore
perfect as little fawns.
I will set foot in Mull tonight
and they will be waiting for me
by the tree-line at twilight,
wearing the faces I had,
dark, fine and hard.
hey hey! sorry to have been away for too long. India came up. I am overwhelmed by your productivity in my absence... really you were born for this... this dark brooding conversation between photograph and poetry...
ReplyDeleteI like this one most of all... seems like you still obsessed with your evil alternate selves...;-). neways there is rich imagery in the text, and the picture, and the picture heightens, rather than merely satisfies, the black mystery...
Hi again.
ReplyDeleteAfter this photo, any new photo would be superfluous! and in the light of such knowledge, "what forgiveness?"
cheers
I love the way you do this...I mean the words, they shower you from every where...what was the shot about?
ReplyDelete