Meaning by Czeslaw Milosz

Meaning
by Czeslaw Milosz

—When I die, I will see the lining of the world.
The other side, beyond bird, mountain, sunset.
The true meaning, ready to be decoded.
What never added up will add up,
What was incomprehensible will be comprehended.

—And if there is no lining to the world?
If a thrush on a branch is not a sign,
But just a thrush on the branch? If night and day
Make no sense following each other?
And on this earth there is nothing except this earth?

—Even if that is so, there will remain
A word wakened by lips that perish,
A tireless messenger who runs and runs
Through interstellar fields, through the revolving galaxies,
And calls out, protests, screams.

King don Luis
by Oscar Vladislas de Lubicz-Milosz (tr. John Peck)


King don Luis wanted to see again
The palace called Sweet Years.

Cloak of grief and a black horse.

Bell in the blank of evening:
Never so ominous as this--

Harsh as the wind's hurry
Through abandoned houses.

Indeed, it is a sound
Travelling farther than time.

Doors swinging into reveries
Over men dead, and women.

Treacherous advent, entering
From what dreams, what shores.

Over my mind it sleeps
In false glimmers of poison.

And the tall beggar, most certainly,
Is that sound's body.

On the road into exile.
Sinister, self-encountering!

I see two eyes nearly headless,
Two eyes on two legs of thread.

Farther than the forgotten,
Deeper than the drowned.

The black horse pricks its ears.

The king's blood would cry out
The smell of silence is so old.

An Illustrated Guide to the Post-Apocalypse by Annelyse Gelman

From the Japanese by Louise Glück

Why love what you will lose?

There is nothing else to love.



(*i'm not actually sure if this is the whole poem.)

The Fire by Louise Glück

Had you died when we were together
I would have wanted nothing of you.
Now I think of you as dead, it is better.

Often, in the cool early evenings of the spring
when, with the first leaves,
all that is deadly enters the world,
I build a fire for us of pine and apple wood;
repeatedly,
the flames flare and diminish
as the night comes on in which
we see one another so clearly—

And in the days we are contented
as formerly
in the long grass,
in the woods’ green doors and shadows.

And you never say
Leave me
since the dead do not like being alone.

"I'm beginning to know myself. I don't exist..."

by Fernando Pessoa (tr. Edwin Honig & Susan M Brown)

I'm beginning to know myself. I don't exist.
I'm the space between what I'd like to be and what others
     made of me.
Or half that space, because there's life there too...
So that's what I finally am...
Turn off the light, close the door, stop shuffling your
     slippers out there in the hall.
Just let me be at ease and all by myself in my room.
It's a cheap world.

“Life: XIX”
by Emily Dickinson

“Pain has an element of blank;
It cannot recollect
When it began, or if there were
A day when it was not.

It has no future but itself,
Its infinite realms contain
Its past, enlightened to perceive
New periods of pain.”

The Figure In The Scene

by Thomas Hardy

          It pleased her to step in front and sit

             Where the cragged slope was green,

While I stood back that I might pencil it

              With her amid the scene;

                  Till it gloomed and rained;

But I kept on, despite the drifting wet

                   That fell and stained

My draught, leaving for curious quizzings yet

                    The blots engrained.

                And thus I drew her there alone,

                     Seated amid the guaze

Of moisture, hooded, only her outline shown,

                      With rainfall marked across.

                       - Soon passed our stay;

Yet her rainy form is the Genius still of the spot,

                       Immutable, yea,

Though the place now knows her no more,

   and has known her not

                        Ever since that day.

              

By Her Aunt's Grave
by Thomas Hardy

'Sixpence a week', says the girl to her lover,
'Aunt used to bring me, for she could confide
In me alone, she vowed. 'Twas to cover
The cost of her headstone when she died.
And that was a year ago last June;
I've not yet fixed it. But I must soon.'

'And where is the money now, my dear?'
'O, snug in my purse...Aunt was so slow
In saving it - eighty weeks, or near.'...
'Let's spend it,' he hints. 'For she won't know.
There's a dance to-night at the Load of Hay.'
She passively nods. And they go that way.

The Photograph
by Thomas Hardy

The flame crept up the portrait line by line
As it lay on the coals in the silence of night's profound,
     And over the arm's incline,
And along the marge of the silkwork superfine,
And gnawed at the delicate bosom's defenceless round.

Then I vented a cry of hurt, and averted my eyes;
The spectacle was one that I could not bear,
     To my deep and sad surprise;
But, compelled to heed, I again looked furtivewise
Till the flame had eaten her breasts, and mouth,
     and hair.

'Thank God, she is out of it now!' I said at last,
In a great relief of heart when the thing was done
     That had set my soul aghast,
And nothing was left of the picture
     unsheathed from the past
But the ashen ghost of the card it had figured on.

She was a woman long hid amid packs of years,
She might have been living or dead; she was lost
     to my sight,
     And the deed that had nigh drawn tears
Was done in a casual clearance of life's arrears;
But I felt as if I had put her to death that night!...

- Well; she knew nothing thereof did she survive,
And suffered nothing if numbered among the dead;
     Yet - yet - if on earth alive
Did she feel a smart, and with vague strange
     anguish strive ?
If in heaven, did she smile at me sadly
     and shake her head?