poem

Day 624

Day's pictures

Day 624-1

Warning by

PURE at heart we wander now:
Comrade on the quest divine,
Turn not from the stars your brow
That your eyes may rest on mine.

Pure at heart we wander now:
We have hopes beyond to-day;
And our quest does not allow
Rest or dreams along the way.

We are, in our distant hope,
One with all the great and wise:
Comrade, do not turn or grope
For some lesser light that dies.

We must rise or we must fall:
Love can know no middle way:
If the great life do not call,
Then is sadness and decay.

George William Russell

Day 623

Day's pictures

Day 623-1

Colours in lamplight

Colours in lamplight are previews,
scarcely eschewed as wave-length turbulence
tuned to closeness and friendship.
Colours in firelight are skin-warmed
glowings, harbouring contentment,
revealing intuitive insight.
Colours in moonlight are barely shown
shy smiles recalled with eidetic
intensity from reservoirs of sight.
Colours in candlelight are filigree
reflections, decorative shimmers
of sympathetic enchantment.
But in the hard light of day
they become flagrant solidities
that get in the way of our true feelings.

Ivan Donn Carswell

Old friends as memories

Poetry

Old friends as memories

I close my eyes and see descriptions.
Partially finished disappeared in time.
Gone, but alive.
Left behind ways.
Worn down paradise from many days
with each other, of what went before.If I could look
through the door back
join in again.
Perfume and imprint
the hours will
halt, and stand silent still.I open my eyes, time travels on.
Now, today, I will refine
the memories for later
my friends, the smell, what I inhale
of now I shall take
forwards in time something to long.
To the paradise before that I have nowI close my eyes, for one more time
For you, my friends
From now and before.

The original Dutch version I made before.

Oude vrienden als herinneringen.

Day 621

Day's pictures

Day 621-1

A Winter Eden

A winter garden in an alder swamp,
Where conies now come out to sun and romp,
As near a paradise as it can be
And not melt snow or start a dormant tree.

It lifts existence on a plane of snow
One level higher than the earth below,
One level nearer heaven overhead,
And last year’s berries shining scarlet red.

It lifts a gaunt luxuriating beast
Where he can stretch and hold his highest feat
On some wild apple tree’s young tender bark,
What well may prove the year’s high girdle mark.

So near to paradise all pairing ends:
Here loveless birds now flock as winter friends,
Content with bud-inspecting. They presume
To say which buds are leaf and which are bloom.

A feather-hammer gives a double knock.
This Eden day is done at two o’clock.
An hour of winter day might seem too short
To make it worth life’s while to wake and sport.

Robert Frost

Day 616

Day's pictures

Day 616-1

The Snow Man

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place
For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

Wallace Stevens