Night walk, by Franz Wright

Frederic Chopin - Nocturne in C Minor, Op. 48, No. 1
with Arthur Rubistein

The all-night convenience store's empty
and no one is behind the counter.
You open and shut the glass door a few times
causing a bell to go off,
but no one appears. You only came
to but a pack of cigarettes, maybe
a copy of yesterday's newspaper --
finally you take one and leave
thirty-five cents in its place.
It is freezing, but it is a good thing
to step outside again:
you can feel less alone in the night,
with lights on here and there
between the dark buildings and trees.
Your own among them, somewhere.
There must be thousands of people
in this city who are dying
to welcome you into their small bolted rooms,
to sit you down and tell you
what has happened to their lives.
And the night smells like snow.
Walking home for a moment
you almost believe you could start again.
And an intense love rushes to your heart,
and hope. It's unendurable, unendurable.




from God's Silence: Poems

Lament

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky - Symphony No.6 in B minor Op. 74
IV. Finale (Adagio lamentoso - Andante)
Leningrad Philharmonic, with Evgeny Mravinsky, 1960


The lungs hold grief hostage
behind bone bars, hold the grief
though its torch keeps singeing
bat memories on jagged flights.

The heart knows where the key
is that will cleave a door, a door
or many for the bats to break
down and steal fire, and the light.

The heart holds the key hostage,
wants to blunt it, hide it, kill it
for what would be left behind
the blood flood, a different death.

A poem from my diary, by Avrom Sutzkever

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky - String Quartet No.1, Op. 11 in D major, 1871
II. Andante cantabile, with Borodin Quartet

Who will remain, what will remain? A wind will stay,
the blindness of the blind man who has gone away,
a string of foam, the sign of the sea,
a little cloud entangled in a tree.

Who will remain, what will remain?
A primeval seed will sprout again
A fiddle-rose honoring herself will live.
Seven blades of grass will know what's hers to give.

Of all the stars due north of here,
the one that landed in a tear will stay.
There will always be a drop of wine left over in its jug.
Who will stay? God will stay. Isn't that enough?



translated from the Yiddish by Myra Mniewski

thank you VV for this post

At the End of the Year, by John O'Donohue

Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky - Waltz of the Flowers, The Nutcracker Suite Op. 71a

The particular mind of the ocean
Filling the coastline's longing
With such brief harvest
Of elegant, vanishing waves
Is like the mind of time
Opening us shapes of days.

As this year draws to its end,
We give thanks for the gifts it brought
And how they became inlaid within
Where neither time nor tide can touch them.

The days when the veil lifted
And the soul could see delight;
When a quiver caressed the heart
In the sheer exuberance of being here.

Surprises that came awake
In forgotten corners of old fields
Where expectation seemed to have quenched.

The slow, brooding times
When all was awkward
And the wave in the mind
Pierced every sore with salt.

The darkened days that stopped
The confidence of the dawn.

Days when beloved faces shone brighter
With light from beyond themselves;
And from the granite of some secret sorrow
A stream of buried tears loosened.

We bless this year for all we learned,
For all we loved and lost
And for the quiet way it brought us
Nearer to our invisible destination.

The Faces at Braga, by David Whyte

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart - Laudate Dominum
from Vesperae solenne de confessore KV 339
with Lucia Popp

In monastery darkness
by the light of one flashlight
the old shrine room waits in silence

While above the door
we see the terrible figure,
fierce eyes demanding, "Will you step through?"

And the old monk leads us,
bent back nudging blackness
prayer beads in the hand that beckons.

We light the butter lamps
and bow, eyes blinking in the
pungent smoke, look up without a word,

see faces in meditation,
a hundred faces carved above,
eye lines wrinkled in the hand held light.

Such love in solid wood!
Taken from the hillsides and carved in silence
they have the vibrant stillness of those who made them.

Engulfed by the past
they have been neglected, but through
smoke and darkness they are like the flowers

we have seen growing
through the dust of eroded slopes,
then slowly opening faces turned toward the mountain.

Carved in devotion
their eyes have softened through age
and their mouths curve through delight of the carvers hand.

If only our own faces
would allow the invisible carver's hand
to bring the deep grain of love to the surface.

If only we knew
as the carver knew, how the flaws
in the wood led his searching chisel to the very core,

we would smile, too
and not need faces immobilized
by fear and the weight of things undone.

When we fight with our failing
we ignore the entrance to the shrine itself
and wrestle with the guardian, fierce figure on the side of good.

And as we fight
our eyes are hooded with grief
and our mouths are dry with pain.

If only we could give ourselves
to the blows of the carvers hands,
the lines in our faces would be the trace lines of rivers

feeding the sea
where voices meet, praising the features
of the mountain and the cloud and the sky.

Our faces would fall away
until we, growing younger toward death
every day, would gather all our flaws in celebration

to merge with them perfectly,
impossibly, wedded to our essence,
full of silence from the carver's hands.



from panhala.net

Postcard From Home, by Al Zolynas

W. A. Mozart - Non Più Di Fiori, La Clemenza di Tito
with Lucia Popp

Sitting on the deck, bare feet
on the railing, I watch and listen to
this day spilling out its myriad flow of details, one
after another, one on top of another, seamlessly,
with no apologies, not the slightest backing off:
two ruby-throated humming birds
drinking their sugar water, distant dogs
barking, the sudden shriek
of wood surrendering to a neighbor's power saw,
those boulders poking out of the hillside, another subdivision
materializing on the stripped land across the valley.
Each detail says "This!"
and has always and ever only said "This!"
Wish I were here.

The Whistle, by Kathy Mangan

Ciprian Porumbescu - Ballad for Violin and Piano

You could whistle me home from anywhere
in the neighborhood; avenues away,
I’d pick out your clear, alternating pair
of notes, the signal to quit my child’s play
and run back to our house for supper,
or a Saturday trip to the hardware store.
Unthrottled, wavering in the upper
reaches, your trilled summons traveled farther
than our few blocks. I’ve learned too, how your heart’s
radius extends, though its beat
has stopped. Still, some days a sudden fear darts
through me, whether it’s my own city street
I hurry across, or at a corner in an unknown
town: the high, vacant air arrests me—where’s home?


from Poetry Foundation