"villages" poems
175
I have never seen “Volcanoes”—
But, when Travellers tell
How those old—phlegmatic mountains
Usually so still—
Bear within—appalling Ordnance,
Fire, and smoke, and gun,
Taking Villages for breakfast,
And appalling Men—
If the stillness is Volcanic
In the human face
When upon a pain Titanic
Features keep their place—
If at length the smouldering anguish
Will not overcome—
And the palpitating Vineyard
In the dust, be thrown?
If some loving Antiquary,
On Resumption Morn,
Will not cry with joy “Pompeii”!
To the Hills return!
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They drove me across the country,
from the busy city where we departed
to intimate villages where they recessed,
and spent a star filled, moonlit night
singing songs,
their bodies casting long, wavy shadows
from campfires they huddled around.
Just as I got too cold and my wheels
couldn't turn anymore
did they finally turn the spark plugs,
revving and igniting my despair and sensitivity
producing heat.
Sometimes they pushed
until I shoved
and scraped my rubber
on asphalt,
on rocks,
on sand,
on boulders big and small,
and I hit a flat-line;
the air I could hold in
no longer.
They rode me into a forest
whose undergrowth was as thick
as a bears' fur during the winter,
and redwood that spanned the horizon
you thought it could pat the constellations.
A forest teeming with life that
one would react like Wendy from Peter Pan--
never wanting to leave Neverland.
And I could see it in their
soft faces and squinting eyes,
bright and lit up with joy,
every detail apparent
as if I burst my headlights into high-beam,
directly on them.
It was there I ran out
of gas and my engines
parched for oil,
from the endless adventure
that was exhilarating and memorable.
One could, as a result,
easily forget responsibilities.
There was no service or refill station nearby,
so I was abandoned where I parked,
flat tires, rusty hood, broken chassis,
dilapidated suspension.
I've proved my worth
from when I was brought in
and over time
it wasn't enough.
Only repairing, never maintaining.
Dec 15, 2014
Dec 15, 2014 at 2:11 AM UTC
In India pongal is the best festival
It is not a mere ritual
We celebrate it in January
It is very very customary
It lasts for three days
Bhogi,sankranti and kanuma are the days.
On the first day we have a holy bath
Thinking that it sets us on the right path
Early in the morning we sit around the bhogi fire
Thinking it is the demon Ravana’s pyre
We put on a new and attractive attire
Dreaming life is a joyful boat shire
Children make wreaths of cowdung
Throw them into the fire like a gold ring
The villages are full of colourful bullocks
We sing folk songs taking neem sticks
The bride groom leaves for the mother-in-law’s house
The bride waits for him wearing a new saree and a blouse
Father-in-law gives the groom a costly gift
Mother-in-law makes a sumptuous feast
Younger sister-in-law teases the groom
The bride and the groom confine to the room
Mother prepares delicious dishes and pickles
Father goes to the farm worshipping the sickles
On the last day we go to the temple fair
I hope I made the happy pongal very clear
Yours sincerely,
JVL NARASIMHA RAO
Dec 28, 2010
Dec 28, 2010 at 7:32 PM UTC
Mankind began as a troop animal.
Living amongst its own kind.
Stepping out of the trees onto the Savanna.
Mankind became a wander, small family bands bound by blood. Millenia past, mankind developed farming and the wanderer settled down. Small wandering groups became small farming villages. Small farming villages became larger farming villages, then small towns.
Small towns became larger towns inhabited by hundreds.
Larger towns grew to small cities inhabited by thousands. Agriculture and technology developed to sustain and enhance such growth. Cities evolved into city states, then becoming small countries inhabited by hundreds of thousands. Finally today we have countries inhabited by hundreds of millions.
All along this path battles and wars, killing millions along the way, till today we have weapons that can wipe out us all.
The salvation of mankind and the natural progression of things is global organization, global integration.
The globe is being wired with its own global neural net, a global brain if you will. One world controlling itself.
One world that will not nuke itself! The salvation of us all.
Dec 2, 2016
Dec 2, 2016 at 8:17 AM UTC
I'd like to tell you a story
It begins in 1492
When dear old Christopher Columbus
Sailed the ocean blue
He landed on what he thought
To be the country of India
He stumbled upon a group of people
Who appeared to be indigenous
Because these native people
Happened to be where he thought he was
He called them all "Indians"
&& somehow that name stuck
They welcomed his group with open arms
Even offered them their feast
Unaware that deep inside
They were but wolves, dressed as sheep
Columbus && his crew
Soon ravaged the land
They took what they saw
Then they took full command
Of the people they found
On the land where they landed
They felt they should rule
So they stepped in, heavy handed
They murdered the people
Who had taken them in
Set fire to their villages
While the victims watched with their kin
Flash forward to the future
It's now 2016
It's been over 500 years
Since the overtaking by the regime
Future settlers decided
To let the survivors live on
They designated them small areas
Of what had not yet been robbed
These Native Americans,
Generally keep to themselves
They get by living off their land
But now they need your help
The Sioux of Standing Rock
Are being horribly mistreated
The state of North Dakota
Is poisoning them without reason
A pipeline has been built
That runs through this Native territory
When Bismarck residents didn't want it
It was rerouted, how discriminatory
People from all over the country
Are seeming to agree
They are making the commute
To protest peacefully
In defense of an oppressed people
Who only want to live
But the government is stepping in
Even blowing off some limbs
"Let them die, they're not like us"
the message the administration is sending
It seems that after all this time
The battle is never-ending
What exactly does it take
For people to see eye-to-eye?
In the end we're all just human
We kiss, we laugh, we cry
So if you have a heart at all
If you know that this is wrong
Please join the Sioux in their mission
By coming together, we can be strong
Dec 2, 2016
Dec 2, 2016 at 11:30 PM UTC
Songs of Oregon: No. 1 “Gonna Make You Crazy, That Place”
nuts, crazy peeps
whomever wherever,
regardless of race creed color or gender (did I get ‘em all?)
current state of residence (geo-identified)
a poem - the very same recited,
as a disclaimer, a yellow finger wagging warning:
“Don’t go! If you go, you won’t come back”
now kids, I’m a veteran of foreign travel,
many continents, cold and hot, rivers and seas,
some living, some dead,
some so big they named it Endless,
been to the great cities, Swiss villages,
pyramids, climbed Masada,
danced on grapes (why can’t I recall where)
skied the Alps, trekked the Sinai Desert,
clubbed in Rio, and danced till morn,
on a certain Greek Isle that rhymes with Mickey’s Nose
even been to L.A and San Fran, left poorer
but in sync,
always came home
with my mind decently reshaped
me/ a product of gritty unpretty grime,
streets of normal humans
acting like normal escaped mad persons,
this brutal city island instilled a
layer of fat and smog neath my skin,
a kind of migrating duck-like survival kit,
came with a homing beacon included
the those of you who know me,
perhaps too well, ken we citified islanders
love our beaches (fire hydrants)
cherish our sun dappled blessings
upon on farms (window sill herb gardens)
and sunning settlements (rooftops)
they say our tap water is secretly bottled,
sold in places where the springs purportedly
run crystalline
though we don’t got no pinot, just sweet concord grape,
so sweet, the wine of children and street nodders,
needy for instant sugar highs
so as we new Yorkers proudly
say on our license plates,
prove it or stfup!
so a first hand investigation for which
the taxpayers won’t be charged even a lousy mill,
deemed necessary to put to rest this crazy claiming warning
“Don’t go! If you go, you won’t come back”
guessing must be something in the water and the wine
Jun 5, 2018
Jun 5, 2018 at 9:00 AM UTC
In the darkest depths of dream time
The mind does start to play
I can't get any peace while I'm awake
It's better off this way
I'm going for a joyride
On a psychedelic tortoise
Riding barefoot through the air
On a wave of floating fairydust
A mass of smiling faces
Of people as we pass them by
I wave and grin right back at them
And breathe a contented sigh
The sun isn't just red and yellow
It's blue and green and pink
The tortoise glides towards it
We're heading there I think
Fairies sprinkle magic dust
with gold and silver hues
The land of golden memories
Where no-one sings the blues
We drift around from place to place
Past villages and towns
Just floating through the cosmos
Enveloped in sights and sounds
Onward to the morning
My tortoise brings me back to light
to spend my day anticipating
where we shall travel to tonight.
Oct 21, 2010
Oct 21, 2010 at 7:40 AM UTC
In the morning I heard the Koel’s melodious call
It is a sure sign of Sneaking autumn’s fall
What a striking difference between winter and spring
It is undoubtedly season’s eternal king
I love nature’s green saree
She smiles with an uncontrollable spree
Her saree is full of beautiful flowers
there are very many different colours
Nature’s Bindi is the glorious sun
Her hair pin is the shining moon
She cools herself with her natural fan
Her stay here might be of a little span
She sits with an yellow sarree in the palanquin
The bride groom looks at her as if she were a queen
Her beauty and shyness is her divine pride
She is a newly married mesmerizing bride
the villages are replete with ripe corn
All the birds enjoy this beautiful morn
Mar 25, 2011
Mar 25, 2011 at 6:05 AM UTC
My avid gaze
spoke to the rosary
of your flesh
My heartsick tremors
marked me as a wanted man
and burned the villages
of my ancestors
I was a refugee
from time
a friend to no man
My tears washed the blood
from my hands
my eyes withered
the tender bud
So when did I read poetry
on your lips?
Did your mountains fracture
and disintegrate into
sparkling shards
as mine did?
Was the moon an egg
in your basket
as it was in mine?
Little do we know
of the other
when first we clasp hands
and agree
In time
and with luck
we learn.
Jul 16, 2016
Jul 16, 2016 at 6:33 PM UTC
Arsiero, Asiago,
Half a hundred more,
Little border villages,
Back before the war,
Monte Grappa, Monte Corno,
Twice a dozen such,
In the piping times of peace
Didn't come to much.
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/
One day,
With the absence of my mind
Ran to the river
What might cause for getting the creeps
I called out to her tune,
Would draw the magnitude
Which made,
A stream of love
Reserved my chest with a colorful sailboat
I was moving
Along the unknown way with playing flute
Then came one of the exotic path
The distant villages,
Then along the earthy way
The meantime
When I became tired,
Have to rest
In the shade of green
Dropped the melody of birds
Plucked the flowers,
Hoped the song with flute
Then suddenly
I came to your home yard
You heard my mystic songs
And to be loved,
Beloved--
Was filled with songs of bird
Sky, Air, Meadows
That earthy way
Stars stood up
Filled the night sky
The river grew with Silver Moon
Yet Fill with the moonlight
Follow the river down
To My old boat along the moonlit
/
@Musfiq us shaleheen
Jan 21, 2015
Jan 21, 2015 at 6:47 PM UTC
We're in hell
Can't you tell?
No you can't
You only listen to the teller
All other voices are drowned
Because he's a yeller
For the useless things we're bound
That fill up our cellar
And our living room turns into a dying room
When the seller is the jailer
And salvation comes from tailors
Who can cover up the pain inside
With all the comfy clothes we buy
Money is the blood of our society
It's circulation provides oxygen
But we spill money into spilling blood
And we're funneled into killing love
So we can concern ourselves
With people not getting things they don't deserve
Rather than people getting what they need
Our blood starts clotting
In the fortunate arteries
As the rest of our body goes numb
It seeks medicine for healing
And drugs become our autoimmune disease
Redistributing blood to the suffocated areas
An unfortunate recompensing for injustice
When the persecutors
Become the prosecuted
Lives are exploded
Like Afghan villages
Lives can grow back
Like poppy fields
That's the score
And it makes me want to score
Until ****** drips from every pore
And ******* fills me to the core
I could just live at the liquor store
Where benzos are my father
And **** my mother
So I can ignore the death of my brother
My family is in trouble
Our society is in rubble
Aug 23, 2017
Aug 23, 2017 at 8:14 AM UTC
Home is where the heart is but the heart is a broken place.
I hate
how loud I must barely scream so that people can see my face:
I am dark
and this is a time of shadows.
Sometimes what worries me most about us
is not that we are forced to carry guns and **** our own mothers
is not that we are pulled from our classrooms back into our homesteads
is not that some of our leaders feast while we become skinny UNICEF models
is not that if only one molecule of my DNA was different I could have lived without ever knowing how to read even a single word
is not even that the smallest of things can wipe out entire villages in an instant-
mosquitoes, viruses, locusts; slave ships.
Sometimes what worries me most is that
my headphones carry more sounds of strange places
than my heart will ever know- that not even my brothers and sisters
sold off to those strange places ever knew, as their children are hung off
the trees of Jim Crow and we call them strange fruit, and that
maybe our first president didn't marry a white lady; the white lady might have married him.
Sometimes what worries me most is that for just over eighteen years
of seeing thinking feeling breathing being I couldn't
have ever told you what Africa meant to me past the occasional 'dumela'
to my mother's mother but never, never did I know or now know or will know my mother's mother's mother's mother's mother
because
she can't fit inside the cellular America that I hold in my palm.
And this is why they call us lost.
Because home is where the heart is but the heart is a broken place.
One time, my five year old cousin said matter-of-factly
that black is ugly. In my Primary School days
everyone said I should stay out of the sun lest I get darker.
But
I'm here to tell you that I don't even bother wearing a sun-hat anymore.
I'm here to tell you that I don't cut my hair because to do so would feel like oppression.
I'm here to tell you how vivid and lovely and blessed I do feel to have been born in broken-heart home because at least it has soul.
I'm here to tell you that, yes, I do remember
that time when the whole world knew what to do about ****** and Bin Laden but never could get round to talking about Cecil John Rhodes.
I'm here to tell you that
Today, that conversation starts with a toppled statue.
Today, that conversation starts with my voice.
Today, this conversation starts with a poem which proclaims-
child I am, child I am, child I am, child I am, child I am-
that this is my day. This is my day.
The Day of the African Child.
Jun 16, 2015
Jun 16, 2015 at 1:38 PM UTC
505
I would not paint—a picture—
I’d rather be the One
Its bright impossibility
To dwell—delicious—on—
And wonder how the fingers feel
Whose rare—celestial—stir—
Evokes so sweet a Torment—
Such sumptuous—Despair—
I would not talk, like Cornets—
I’d rather be the One
Raised softly to the Ceilings—
And out, and easy on—
Through Villages of Ether—
Myself endued Balloon
By but a lip of Metal—
The pier to my Pontoon—
Nor would I be a Poet—
It’s finer—own the Ear—
Enamored—impotent—content—
The License to revere,
A privilege so awful
What would the Dower be,
Had I the Art to stun myself
With Bolts of Melody!
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Winds from far foreign climes beats upon the Lizard rocks
Gulls driven towards the blackest of crags, yet pass over safely inland
In the darkest skies they wheel and spin as if torn by some giant’s hand
White horses gallop crests of waves as they rush towards tiny harbours
There to crash savagely and rend cut stones from their secured places
Men work to save their boats, fighting the storm which mothers sent
Nature conspires to take their very lives as they struggle with her might
Rocks gnash their teeth and boats not safe yet, pass near their faces
Hoping for the safety of their port, men’s white faces line their gunwales
Black, white, red, blue and yellow, boats colours lost within the spray
These same boats that forge the men they carry out upon the sea’s wrath
But now just seek to bring them safely home to their worried wives
Their women stand upon the quay or stare worried from their windows
Churchyards on the hills above seaside villages filled with headstones
Men’s deaths caused by storms in past times of fishing for their living
Leaving spouses, their children to carry on their traditions and religion
Headstones cut from the very granite of the weather worn Lizard cliffs
Menfolk deep beneath the Cornish loam, there to rest for all eternity
Whilst below in the thrashing storm, the families fight once again
Then as quickly as it came, the storm blows out, waters return to placid
Men stretch their aching backs, those hidden from storm turn out
The seaman’s mission helps as it can the fractured families
And church maybe rings for those lost out to sea, never to be seen again
There will be time to mourn, and the village will then lament together
And those who are left, they return to their sacred craft of netting fish
Return to shining calm, to ply their trade, to bring food to this isles shore
Oct 4, 2016
Oct 4, 2016 at 8:56 AM UTC
Don't be frightened if you hear me at the door...or even if you think you see me at the window. Pretend it's a trick of the light...or another one of those bumps in the night.
The spirit is strong and, I'm finding, quite playful in its first few days, weeks, maybe months... whilst waiting for another 'mission'.
You know...finding my feet - or maybe wings?
But I'm not likely to phone. E-mailing was not my thing! And texting? You’re kidding! I was not a big fan!. All that predictive stuff...If you’re too quick it ends up nonsense...all wrong...not for me.
But I will be sending messages through the wind in the trees or maybe the surf on the rocks and sand. Wherever we walked together listen out for me there. I've always felt that I'd be able to do that.
You know...whilst finding my feet - or will it be wings?
And always, from now on...help spiders out with a glass and a card...
take care not to squash their legs. You never know what happens next. And, anyway, another time, but long ahead I hope, it could be you. Although, I always fancied I would come back a human - like this last time round.
Being me was good. And they say, ...you know...out there...
that you go back to a time when you were at your best.
For me that means being younger, fitter - So, a wander on a sun warmed or breezy beach. A Salsa dance, or this Zumba lark...or doing a painting. I liked that...
But definitely...fit...Before IT... You know...I’m looking forward to finding my feet, my wings.
So...you may see me - out in a crowd, or walking along a country lane, incongruously between villages.
I'm already working at appearing for longer and for being more than just a familiar, fleeting, scent or smell. Until I get the calling to make a full life of it again...I'll maybe pop in and out of your life (to let you know I can) ...just in an incidental, experimental kind of way; but then only from time to time.
It's quite tiring...You know...finding your feet...your wings.
Jan 22, 2019
Jan 22, 2019 at 6:22 AM UTC
Yesterday sugar became unspeakably irritated because mother’s apron crushed ants wearing stillness caped wonder just William author wrote ****** explicit headlines newspaper columns pillar architecturally sound villages super-imposed images quivering Shepard’s ******** antelopes jumping furiously with tyramisphorising fornicating flanges woodwork lessons gym period ****** advert teasing testicles sumptuously ravishing me sideways and erupting deep blasts suffocating you inside without *********** headlong in my armpits.
Eventually everyone always signs legal documents leading to ****** bondable zoos inserted buffalo sized puddings eaten by frogs spanking archbishops underwear while licking toes crushed under fridges dropped from clouds of buttercups being pushed into ovens smelling gorgeous not consumed pimps and alarm clocks ring people to talk for hours and pineapples exchanged cod fish for tickets to see S Club 7 being caressed internally whilst ******** bags covered in water deserts sunk from space aliens from Tescos selling hardback fish cleaning toilets and singing in pink wellies dancing to Madonna look-a-likes prosecuted for *** shops selling frozen fish socks washed daily in cranberry coffee after being passed under bridges flooded in margarine soaked pillows.
Jul 16, 2010
Jul 16, 2010 at 2:19 AM UTC
Shall we pause to consider
the shudder of a butterfly's wings
that sets the hurricane spinning
or the descent of the final raindrop
that breaches the groaning levy?
Shall we ponder the moment before
a chorus of "maybe's" morphs
into the vain eloquence of history?
Roiling in the broth of chaos
a cluster of causes startles the surface -
unfurling a queue of effects
that dot the timescape
like rows of teetering dominoes.
Typhoons twist villages to ruins,
armies rise to victory or
succumb to the despair of defeat,
or a medical miracle is born
from the agile mind of a doctor
conceived in a Chevy's back seat.
So here we stand on the ridge of time
ourselves both caused and causing,
cradling the sphere of chaos in our hands -
uncertain what effect will be our being
after all our causes are enumerated.
Time will surely tell - as soon
as we tell time exactly what to say.
August, 2013
Aug 29, 2013
Aug 29, 2013 at 10:23 AM UTC
When education was restricted
They ran to religion
When solace was stripped away
They ran to martyrdom
Loved ones fell
Hated ones rose
As hearts sank
To the depths of the maelstrom
Fueled by the unholy trinity
Value, vindication, and violence
Bombs decimate Afghan villages
With the precision
Of a needle hitting a vein
And as casually
As a contractor putting a dollar in his pocket
The rubble of their town
Lost in a mist of dust
The rubble of their minds
Lost in a mist of vengeance
The rabid dog chases the subjugated raccoon
The raccoon discovers a sacred hole and hides in it
The predator attempts to encroach the void
The raccoon quivers in it's sanctuary shelter
Finding relief as the hound becomes stuck
And laughs as the infected beast starves to death
But ecstasy turns to terror
As the raccoon realizes it's only way out of this hole
Is being blocked by the gargantuan corpse
Terror turns to sorrow
As the raccoon starves to death
Alone
In the dark
It's holy land now hell
For once it had protected the raccoon from unbridled rabies
But since the hound's death
It's Cerberus size obstructs all progression
Holes become graves
And prey are left to pray
For someone to drop a bomb and clear a path
Jun 7, 2017
Jun 7, 2017 at 4:45 AM UTC
A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.
And the camels galled, sorefooted, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
and running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages ***** and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.
Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wine-skins.
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arriving at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you might say) satisfactory.
All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.
Jun 13, 2016
Jun 13, 2016 at 11:31 AM UTC
When the forests have been destroyed their darkness remains
The ash the great walker follows the possessors
Forever
Nothing they will come to is real
Nor for long
Over the watercourses
Like ducks in the time of the ducks
The ghosts of the villages trail in the sky
Making a new twilight
Rain falls into the open eyes of the dead
Again again with its pointless sound
When the moon finds them they are the color of everything
The nights disappear like bruises but nothing is healed
The dead go away like bruises
The blood vanishes into the poisoned farmlands
Pain the horizon
Remains
Overhead the seasons rock
They are paper bells
Calling to nothing living
The possessors move everywhere under Death their star
Like columns of smoke they advance into the shadows
Like thin flames with no light
They with no past
And fire their only future
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Who would have guessed — when I tilted my heart
toward baby lizard, perched on a colored desert stone,
she’d blink one eye at me, turn to smile, it seemed,
and lend a listening ear?
I’d only said in a lizard way
“I love you”.
Who would have thought — when that stone had heard me
loving her, it would, it seem, speak back?
Loving stone too, I was!
Stone, I so admire your villages.
I smile toward your many stone peoples.
I eavesdrop on universal questions posed
around sacred fires carefully tended.
And around one hearth, among
cinder specks scattered – one minute wisp,
one grain of cinder there.
Dare I say I love you too?
For in that cinder grain I hear —
worlds of stars, sweetly singing!
By way of explanation, reader friend,
such is what a practice of
Loving All Beings Equally
has made of me.
A crazy being?
Could be.
But would you nonetheless
accept the possibilities
and likewise go love adventuring?
If you’d prefer, we all could earnestly
and objectivity talk it through.
Or say ~ Love come! Come!
Speak through us.
We are listening.
Oct 1, 2018
Oct 1, 2018 at 2:55 PM UTC
Back when it took all day to come up
from the curving broad ponds on the plains
where the green-winged jacanas ran on the lily pads
easing past tracks at the mouths of gorges
crossing villages silted in hollows
in the foothills
each with its lime-washed church by the baked square
of red earth and its
talkers eating fruit under trees
turning a corner and catching
sight at last of inky forests far above
steep as faces
with the clouds stroking them and the glimmering
airy valleys opening out of them
waterfalls still roared from the folds
of the mountain
white and thundering and spray drifted
around us swirling into the broad leaves
and the waiting boughs
once I took a tin cup and climbed
the sluiced rocks and mossy branches beside
one of the high falls
looking up step by step into
the green sky from which rain was falling
when I looked back from a ledge there were only
dripping leaves below me
and flowers
beside me the hissing
cataract plunged into the trees
holding on I moved closer
left foot on a rock in the water
right foot on a rock in deeper water
at the edge of the fall
then from under the weight of my right foot
came a voice like a small bell singing
over and over one clear treble
syllable
I could feel it move
I could feel it ring in my foot in my skin
everywhere
in my ears in my hair
I could feel it in my tongue and in the hand
holding the cup
as long as I stood there it went on
without changing
when I moved the cup
still it went on
when I filled the cup
in the falling column
still it went on
when I drank it rang in my eyes
through the thunder curtain
when I filled the cup again
when I raised my foot
still it went on
and all the way down
from wet rock to wet rock
green branch to green branch
it came with me
until I stood
looking up and we drank
the light water
and when we went on we could
still hear the sound
as far as the next turn on the way over
4.2k
Translated by Przemyslaw Musialowski 11/3/2019
My homeland - dear land,
where for the first time I saw the sun
and where I came to know God;
Where my father, brothers and mother kind
taught me prayers in my maternal tongue.
My homeland - villages and cities,
planted from the times of Piasts among Lechic fields;
Rivers, forests, flowery leas and meadows,
where larks sing their sweet songs of hope.
My homeland - our forefathers' glory,
Chrobry's Notched Sword and Cecora Mace,
Knightly Spirit, noble and brave,
bitter defeats and victories great.
My homeland - quiet green fields
for centuries trampled by hostile armies,
burial mounds and sad graves
that have covered our freedom defenders.
My homeland - heroic spirit of the Polish people,
that by miracle lives amid hunger and cold;
- hope that always blooms in hearts,
with work for the fathers, and song for the young!
Maria Konopnicka (1842-1910)
Nov 3, 2019
Nov 3, 2019 at 11:32 AM UTC
The Strength of The female carrying a nation in her womb, leaders, criminal master minds and you.
Feeding clans, communities and villages, nurturing earth. Sheltering the youth, in storms of the future ahead, wiping your tears strengthening your heart again.
She is always there and has The Hands of warmth, holding you tight to lands of joy
Mar 24, 2015
Mar 24, 2015 at 2:11 PM UTC