"cathay" poems
No. It's an impudent falsehood. Men did not
Invariably think the newer way Prosaic
mad, inelegant, or what not.
Was the first pointed arch esteemed a blot
Upon the church? Did anybody say How
modern and how ugly? They did not.
Plate-armour, or windows glazed, or verse fire-hot
With rhymes from France, or spices from Cathay,
Were these at first a horror? They were not.
If, then, our present arts, laws, houses, food
All set us hankering after yesterday,
Need this be only an archaising mood?
Why, any man whose purse has been let blood
By sharpers, when he finds all drained away
Must compare how he stands with how he stood.
If a quack doctor's breezy ineptitude
Has cost me a leg, must I forget straightway
All that I can't do now, all that I could?
So, when our guides unanimously decry
The backward glance, I think we can guess why.
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Here, where men's eyes were empty and as bright
As the blank windows set in glaring brick,
When the wind strengthens from the sea -- and night
Drops like a fog and makes the breath come thick;
By the deserted paths, the vacant halls,
One may see figures, twisted shades and lean,
Like the mad shapes that crawl an Indian screen,
Or paunchy smears you find on prison walls.
Turn the **** gently! There's the Thumbless Man,
Still weaving glass and silk into a dream,
Although the wall shows through him -- and the Khan
Journeys Cathay beside a paper stream.
A Rabbit Woman chitters by the door --
-- Chilly the grave-smell comes from the turned sod --
Come -- lift the curtain -- and be cold before
The silence of the eight men who were God!
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See, as the carver carves a rose,
A wing, a toad, a serpent's eye,
In cruel granite, to disclose
The soft things that in hardness lie,
So this one, taking up his heart,
Which time and change had made a stone,
Carved out of it with dolorous art,
Laboring yearlong and alone,
The thing there hidden-rose, toad, wing?
A frog's hand on a lily pad?
Bees in a cobweb?-no such thing!
A girl's head was the thing he had,
Small, shapely, richly crowned with hair,
Drowsy, with eyes half closed, as they
Looked through you and beyond you, clear
To something farther than Cathay:
Saw you, yet counted you not worth
The seeing, thinking all the while
How, flower-like, beauty comes to birth;
And thinking this, began to smile.
Medusa! For she could not see
The world she turned to stone and ash.
Only herself she saw, a tree
That flowered beneath a lightning-flash.
Thus dreamed her face-a lovely thing
To worship, weep for, or to break . . .
Better to carve a claw, a wing,
Or, if the heart provide, a snake.
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I'm part of people I have known
And they are part of me;
The seeds of thought that I have sown
In other minds I see.
There's something of me in the throne
And in the gallows tree.
There's something of me in each one
With whom I work and play,
For islanded there can be none
In this dynamic day;
And meshed with me perchance may be
A ***** in Cathay.
There's me in you and you in me,
For deeply in us delves
Such common thought that never we
Can call ourselves ourselves.
In coils of universal fate
No man is isolate.
For you and I are History,
The all that ever was;
And woven in the tapestry
Of everlasting laws,
Persist will we in Time to be,
Forever you and me.
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I'm sick of embarking in dories
Upon an emotional sea.
I'm wearied of playing Dolores
(A role never written for me).
I'll never again like a cub lick
My wounds while I squeal at the hurt.
No more I'll go walking in public,
My heart hanging out of my shirt.
I'm tired of entwining me garlands
Of weather-worn hemlock and bay.
I'm over my longing for far lands--
I wouldn't give that for Cathay.
I'm through with performing the ballet
Of love unrequited and told.
Euterpe, I tender you vale;
Good-by, and take care of that cold.
I'm done with this burning and giving
And reeling the rhymes of my woes.
And how I'll be making my living,
The Lord in His mystery knows.
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How shall I know, unless I go
To Cairo and Cathay,
Whether or not this blessed spot
Is blest in every way?
Now it may be, the flower for me
Is this beneath my nose;
How shall I tell, unless I smell
The Carthaginian rose?
The fabric of my faithful love
No power shall dim or ravel
Whilst I stay here,—but oh, my dear
If I should ever travel!
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It was only the shape of the mushroom cloud
That gave the game away,
It’s not that we weren’t expecting it,
It could happen any day,
But when it came on a Sunday as
We all trooped out of church,
We wondered, where was the Saviour,
Had he left us in the lurch?
By chance, the missile had missed the town
Fell thirty miles away,
Up in the distant ranges
In the vineyards of Cathay,
So much for the vintage of Semillon
I thought, with barely a frown,
Will anyone miss it once we’ve gone
And scorched that fertile ground?
It’s strange, with imminent death you feel
So suddenly detached,
Go in, and shelter from scorching heat
And shards of broken glass,
That’s all there was with the Cathay bomb
It fell so far away,
I looked at Jean and she looked at me
Was this our final day?
The sound came rumbling over the hill,
In a long, unbroken sigh,
I clung to her and she clung to me,
There wasn’t time to cry,
A moment passed and a moment more
And still we stood our ground,
I thought we might get to live some more
While God was looking down.
We’d lost our friends in the vineyards
They’d been vaporised to dust,
Jean said we’d better not think of it,
But I replied we must.
We both were seized with a single urge
As we clawed our way to bed,
And thought we couldn’t be doing this
If both of us were dead.
An eerie glow in the sky that night
Kept all of us awake,
We didn’t know where the bomb was from
Or what more we could take.
A second cloud in a mushroom stew
Rose up, there would be more,
From somewhere else where the evil grew,
The day of the mushroom spore.
David Lewis Paget
Jul 21, 2017
Jul 21, 2017 at 5:17 AM UTC
Half across the world from me
Lie the lands I'll never see--
I, whose longing lives and dies
Where a ship has sailed away;
I, that never close my eyes
But to look upon Cathay.
Things I may not know nor tell
Wait, where older waters swell;
Ways that flowered at Sappho's tread,
Winds that sighed in Homer's strings,
Vibrant with the singing dead,
Golden with the dust of wings.
Under deeper skies than mine,
Quiet valleys dip and shine.
Where their tender grasses heal
Ancient scars of trench and tomb
I shall never walk: nor kneel
Where the bones of poets bloom.
If I seek a lovelier part,
Where I travel goes my heart;
Where I stray my thought must go;
With me wanders my desire.
Best to sit and watch the snow,
Turn the lock, and poke the fire.
1.3k
Inside the back of a cigarette pack where a picture card sat I read about Mafeking and Cathay,
I saw 'Grace' with his bat and 'Miranda's fruit hat,steam ships and trains, which monarchs reigned,butterflies and stars,the age of the cars,airplanes and costumes,fruits and legumes,flowers and trees,birds of paradise which pleased me,pictures which teased me,
and all of this sat in the back of a pack
of cigarettes.
Jan 17, 2014
Jan 17, 2014 at 2:31 AM UTC
The Cruise of Your Sun
To say goodbye to good old Sol as he
Slips west beyond the trees and sails away
Is not an errant childhood sentiment,
For his appointed tasks are dutiful
Pacing the planet like a sailor on watch,
Seeing to the safety of every space.
His battle-lantern can be seen aloft
From California to those lonely isles
Where pirates’ bones lie mouldering on the beach,
And then to far Nippon and old Cathay
To watch obscure philosophers brush verse.
A course steered west above the Hindu Kush
He notes that India is still in place.
The solar voyage continues at best speed
Above the desolate plain where now-ruined Troy
Once stood defiantly against the Greeks
For the allure of glory transient.
A meander above the Meander
Soon leads to noble, marbled Italy
Where art and wine and Latium’s dark-eyed arts
Beguile the world with visions of the eternal.
The Mediterranean beneath his keel,
Sol courses the Pillars of Hercules
And singing, soars above the Atlantic
The cold, austere Atlantic, deep blue tomb
Of shadowy civilizations ancient
Before Atlantis was born, when the Nile
Flowed as a shaded brook ‘neath forests green
The sun soars west, to where he’s happiest,
And that is wherever you happen to be;
And when at dawn he sails back home again,
He brings you a present - light from a star.
Nov 27, 2017
Nov 27, 2017 at 4:37 PM UTC
One fine day
we'll find China
printed or
stamped through
everything
made in Peking.
Hong Kong, Taiwan?
old school and
they're gone
this is the new Cathay
doing it their way
one fine day.
Feb 5, 2017
Feb 5, 2017 at 10:13 AM UTC
Agreed with the Fact yet set to annoy
Which the Divers-of-Cathay had to Boast
And parallel his habits mark your ploy
Knowing well it has never been your Toast
So we shield the Mum; And back her Reason
Blessed be her Task for Correctness wont
Of twine Cultures each worn to their Season
With each their own Technique to Fame become
That this Plait your own; And stunned to amend
Insured of the Prime and Perfect Design
For Videos and Lights, void such Practice spend
Eager to promote the Youth which is thine.
That Youth the very Fragile Vase and Form
Sense these Vibrations then summon the Storm.
Mar 20, 2013
Mar 20, 2013 at 2:30 AM UTC
bring and buy wherever the eyes lead you
and
in Peking they're leaking ingenious devices.
I follow the old road, the silk road and eat mandarins for dessert,
there are no ships in the desert only an ocean of sand,
the land appears barren, but it's only a mirage,
a collage of life exists here.
Anyway
I really did like Cathay
Now I am flotsam
floating off Haiphong
so long
'me old China'
Jul 3, 2017
Jul 3, 2017 at 2:52 PM UTC
¡Si atracción de aventuras tus sueños arrebata,
Conquistador, sal pronto! ¿Quiere tu alma sedienta
La conquista, el peligro, la gloria o la tormenta?
¡Parte, para que sacies la ambición que te mata!
Verás surgir, radiante, del mar que la retrata,
A Cathay, donde el tumbo de las olas revienta,
y verás a Cipango, fabulosa, opulenta,
Levantar a los cielos sus torres de oro y plata.
Irás hermosas perlas hollando indiferente;
De marfil, de diamantes y de mirra, cargadas
Verás las carabelas sobre la mar rugiente;
y señor aclamado de Tierras y de Mares,
Los reyes que dominen las islas conquistadas
Besarán, humillados, el suelo que pisares...
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