A Poetry Thread

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Go to the Limits of Your Longing​

Written by Rainer Maria Rilke

God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.

These are the words we dimly hear:

You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.

Flare up like a flame
and make big shadows I can move in.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don’t let yourself lose me.

Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.

Give me your hand.

Book of Hours, I 59
 
donbosco said:

Go to the Limits of Your Longing​

Written by Rainer Maria Rilke

God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.

These are the words we dimly hear:

You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.

Flare up like a flame
and make big shadows I can move in.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don’t let yourself lose me.

Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.

Give me your hand.

Book of Hours, I 59
Click to expand...
That is lovely.
 
Onondaga Thanksgiving Address (Most historically known as The Words That Come Before All Else)

Today we have gathered and when we look upon the faces around us we see that the cycles of life continue.
We have been given the duty to live in balance and harmony with each other and all living things.
So now let us bring our minds together as one as we give greetings and thanks to each other as People.
Now our minds are one.*

Not a poem exactly but a recitation for every day and every gathering.
 
There is more...Thanksgiving Address...i.e., the response.

We are thankful to our Mother the Earth, for she gives us every-
thing that we need for life. She supports our feet as we walk about
upon he1: It gives us joy that she still continues tq care for us, just
as she has from the beginning of time. To our Mother, we send
thanksgiving, love, and respect. Now our minds are one.
 

“AMERICA IS A GUN” by Brian Bilston​

England is a cup of tea.
France, a wheel of ripened brie.
Greece, a short, squat olive tree.
America is a gun.
Brazil is football on the sand.
Argentina, Maradona’s hand.
Germany, an oompah band.
America is a gun.
Holland is a wooden shoe.
Hungary, a goulash stew.
Australia, a kangaroo.
America is a gun.
Japan is a thermal spring.
Scotland is a highland fling.
Oh, better to be anything
than America as a gun.
 
IMG_0378.jpeg

The Spanish Flu May Get You Too
From ‘The Carolina Mountaineer And Waynesville Courier,’ Thursday, October 27, 1917.
 
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Song of Myself, 52​

Walt Whitman
1819 – 1892

The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains of my gab and my loitering.

I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

The last scud of day holds back for me,
It flings my likeness after the rest and true as any on the shadow’d wilds,

It coaxes me to the vapor and the dusk.

I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun,
I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags.

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.

You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.

Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you.
 
The juxtaposition of the Onodaga Thanksgiving Address and the America is a Gun poem put me in mind of William S. Burroughs' Thanksgiving poem. It's a bit more sardonic than the former and a bit more caustic than the latter. Warning for language...

Thanksgiving Day, Nov. 28, 1986​

William S. Burroughs​

For John Dillinger
In hope he is still alive

Thanks for the wild turkey and the Passenger Pigeons, destined to be shit out through wholesome American guts —

thanks for a Continent to despoil and poison —

thanks for Indians to provide a modicum of challenge and danger —

thanks for vast herds of bison to kill and skin, leaving the carcasses to rot —

thanks for bounties on wolves and coyotes —

thanks for the AMERICAN DREAM to vulgarize and falsify until the bare lies shine through —

thanks for the KKK, for n****r-killing lawmen feeling their notches, for decent church-going women with their mean, pinched, bitter, evil faces —

thanks for “Kill a Queer for Christ” stickers —

thanks for laboratory AIDS —

thanks for Prohibition and the War Against Drugs —

thanks for a country where nobody is allowed to mind his own business —

thanks for a nation of finks — yes,

thanks for all the memories… all right, let’s see your arms… you always were a headache and you always were a bore —

thanks for the last and greatest betrayal of the last and greatest of human dreams.
 

“What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why”​

BY Edna St. Vincent Millay

What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,
I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
Under my head till morning; but the rain
Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh
Upon the glass and listen for reply,
And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain
For unremembered lads that not again
Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.

Thus in the winter stands the lonely tree,
Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,
Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:
I cannot say what loves have come and gone,
I only know that summer sang in me
A little while, that in me sings no more.
 
donbosco said:
IMG_0378.jpeg

The Spanish Flu May Get You Too
From ‘The Carolina Mountaineer And Waynesville Courier,’ Thursday, October 27, 1917.
Click to expand...
DB
A friend and I were hired to help dig up graves and move a cemetery for the widening of Randleman Rd in Gboro in the late 1970’s. It had been a church turned hardware store with a cemetery next door.
In NC at that time you had to be a GC and Funeral Director to move graves you also have to hand dig them and get the local health department inspector (usually restaurants) to certify the hole was cleared out. Anyway there hadn’t been anyone buried there since the 1940s. So most of the graves were from 1915-1925 and were mostly smaller like babies or children. I was getting $15 an hour and minimum wage was $1.35!
Long story short that’s how I found out that there was a Spanish Flue in the 1915-1920 period.
Honestly like the Wilmington coop and other stuff I think I understand why conspiracies are popular. I kinda feel like we’re doing the same thing with Covid 19.
In 50 years will anyone remember?
Anyway sorry for the detour.
 
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