*******************************************************
FERNANDO PESSOA
XVIII. (from 35 Sonnets)
Indefinite space, which, by co-substance night,
In one black mystery two void mysteries blends;
The stray stars, whose innumerable light
Repeats one mystery till conjecture ends;
The stream of time, known by birth-bursting bubbles;
The gulf of silence, empty even of nought;
Thought’s high-walled maze, which the outed owner troubles
Because the string’s lost and the plan forgot:
When I think on this and that here I stand,
The thinker of these thoughts, emptily wise,
Holding up to my thinking my thing-hand
And looking at it with thought-alien eyes,
The prayer of my wonder looketh past
The universal darkness lone and vast.
__________
TPB's notes: find the entire sonnets here: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/19978/19978-pdf.pdf
ETHERIDGE KNIGHT
Feeling Fucked Up
Lord she’s gone done left me done packed / up and split
and I with no way to make her
come back and everywhere the world is bare
bright bone white crystal sand glistens
dope death dead dying and jiving drove
her away made her take her laughter and her smiles
and her softness and her midnight sighs—
Fuck Coltrane and music and clouds drifting in the sky
fuck the sea and trees and the sky and birds
and alligators and all the animals that roam the earth
fuck marx and mao fuck fidel and nkrumah and
democracy and communism fuck smack and pot
and red ripe tomatoes fuck joseph fuck mary fuck
god jesus and all the disciples fuck fanon nixon
and malcolm fuck the revolution fuck freedom fuck
the whole muthafucking thing
all i want now is my woman back
so my soul can sing
__________
TPB's notes: Etheridge Knight began writing poetry while an inmate at the Indiana State Prison. When Knight entered prison, he was already an accomplished reciter of "toasts"—long, memorized, narrative poems, often in rhymed couplets, in which "sexual exploits, drug activities, and violent aggressive conflicts involving a cast of familiar folk, street slang, drug and other specialized argot, and often obscenities" are related and/or used in the 'toast'. Toast-reciting at Indiana State Prison not only refined Knight's expertise in this traditional Afro-American art form but also gave him a sense of identity and an understanding of the possibilities of poetry. Through 'toast', he began to believe that poetry could simultaneously show him who he was and connect him with other people.
Knight had his 'prison break', so to speak, when Dudley Randall, the founder of Broadside Press, became interested in his work and began to visit Knight regularly in prison, giving Knight hope beyond prison toast. - culled from https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/48752#about
No comments:
Post a Comment