Archive for the ‘Poetry’ Category

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Animals

Published by peter on 2024-10-17 in Poetry. Closed

Animals

The lion died.
The moons over the forest faded.
The surface was flooded
with mournful tears.

Herons, rats, and hydras
gathered in the raspberry patch,
praying until morning,
chanting hymns.

By morning in the raspberry patch,
everything became unclear:
there’s no one to pray to,
no one to fear.

The elephant started waltzing.
Vermicelli – leeches
began indulging
in women and drunkenness.

With a ruler,
compass, and template,
a frightening scarecrow
was drawn by the lynx.

The animals, astonished,
terrified beyond measure,
fell to their knees
beside the scarecrow.

Everything in the raspberry batch
became clear to the fullest:
there is
someone to pray to,
there is
someone to fear.

– Victor Sosnora (1936-2019)
From In Search of Entertainment (1960-1962)
(translated by and thanks to AD)

Jesuit Poets

Published by peter on 2024-06-18 in History, Oratory, Poetry, Religion and Rhetoric. Closed

I am belatedly posting about a superb address I heard given at a mass to celebrate the Fourth Centenary of the (then) English Province of the Society of Jesus, held in Farm Street Church, London on 21 January 2023. The mass was celebrated by Vincent Cardinal Nichols, Archbishop of Westminster, and the sermon given by Fr Damian Howard SJ, Provincial of the British Province. The music at the mass included the world premiere of James MacMillan’s “Precious in the sight of the Lord” (with MacMillan in the congregation).

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Honesty of intention

Published by peter on 2017-05-14 in Books, Human intelligence, Poetry, Recent Reading and Religion. 0 Comments

Some people I have encountered in this life have impressed me with their integrity-of-purpose, the coherence, sincerity and compellingness of their objectives and mission.  Sometimes these objectives have been political, as in the case of Don Day and Bill Mansfield. In other cases, they have been spiritual or religious, as in the case of Jes Albert Moeller, whom I first met in 1984. There are other people whose purposes are both political and spiritual, something which seems to have been true for Vaclav Havel.
 
In my experience, this human attribute is rare.  And I have never seen or heard anyone else talk of it, until now.  In Judith Wright’s autobiography, she speaks (page 234) of her partner and later husband, the philosopher Jack McKinney, meeting her father:

That my father was grieved by my relationship with Jack is undeniable but, once they met, he gave in to Jack’s obvious honesty of intention and the needs of my own that Jack was filling. . . . “

Judith Wright [1999]: Half a Lifetime.  Edited by Patricia Clarke. Melbourne, Australia: Text Publishing.

Pangrams

Published by peter on 2017-05-06 in Humour, Literature and Poetry. 0 Comments

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
How quickly daft jumping zebras vex!
The five boxing wizards jump quickly.
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.

Piping 101

Published by peter on 2017-05-01 in Humour, Oratory and Poetry. 0 Comments

 

Leslie Claret (Kurtwood Smith) in Patriot (S1, Ep2, min 17):

Sell them on the structure. You can talk about it with confidence. Keep it simple. A little something like this, John.

Hey. Let me walk you through the Donnelly nut spacing and crack system rim-riding rip configuration. Using a field of half-C sprats, and brass-fitted nickel slits, our bracketed caps, and splay-flexed brace columns, vent dampers to dampening hatch depths of one half meter from the damper crown to the spur of plinth. How? Well, we bolster twelve husked nuts to each girdle-jerry, while flex tandems press a task apparatus of ten vertically-composited patch-hamplers. Then, pinflam-fastened pan traps at both maiden-apexes of the jim-joist.

A little something like that, Lakeman.

Praise to the writers of this series! The sounds here reminded me of the second stanza of Browning’s The Pied Piper of Hamelin:

Hamelin Town’s in Brunswick,
By famous Hanover city;
The river Weser, deep and wide,
Washes its wall on the southern side;
A pleasanter spot you never spied;
But, when begins my ditty,
Almost five hundred years ago,
To see the townsfolk suffer so
From vermin, was a pity.

Rats!
They fought the dogs and killed the cats,
And bit the babies in the cradles,
And ate the cheeses out of the vats,
And licked the soup from the cooks’ own ladles,
Split open the kegs of salted sprats,
Made nests inside men’s Sunday hats,
And even spoiled the women’s chats,
By drowning their speaking
With shrieking and squeaking
In fifty different sharps and flats.

Is it you, here on LinkedIn?

Published by peter on 2017-04-28 in Humour and Poetry. 0 Comments

From the old LinkedIn page of TH:

Evangelizing since childhood. My first evangelization was with “an ordinary man”. He was a shadow of doubt. I told him anyone would be, if anyone would be him. But that it was not the issue. Jazz was the issue, and he listened.
Second, third, and fourth. They were the usual suspects. And were happy with a bird. Only a bird. Can you imagine.
The next. And next, that must be you. Let me ask you. Is it you, here on LinkedIn? Or your question mark. Your exclamation mark, a wish, an unconviction.
Start central is all what I’m saying. Rhythm.
Specialties: Unspecializing in any sense, and making sense of the rhythm. Cache-cache.”

The Stinson Crash

Published by peter on 2017-02-19 in Heroes, History and Poetry. 0 Comments

Today, 19 February 2017, is the 80th anniversary of the crash of the Stinson in Lamington Ranges National Park in Southern Queensland, half a kilometre from the border with New South Wales, in 1937. I attended the 50th anniversary commemoration in February 1987, where I met some of the original rescue party, as I reported here. The plane was the Stinson Model A Brisbane.

The plane was on a scheduled Airlines of Australia flight from Brisbane to Sydney, with 2 pilots and 5 passengers on board. Both pilots and 2 passengers died in the crash. One passenger, James Westray, went for help, but died after falling down a waterfall.  Judith Wright, who later lived in nearby Mount Tamborine for two decades, wrote a poem about Westray, The Lost Man. The two survivors, John Proud and Joseph Binstead, owed their rescue to the intuition and perseverance of legendary bushman Bernard O’Reilly.

The passengers and crew were:
Joseph Robert Binstead, wool broker, of Manly NSW
John Seymour Proud, mining engineer, of Wahroonga NSW
William Walden Fountain, architect, 41 of Hamilton, Brisbane QLD (originally from New Jersey)
James Ronald Nairne Graham, Managing Director, 55 of Hunters Hill NSW
William James Guthrie Westray, Insurance Underwriter, 25 of Kensington, London, England
Commercial Pilot, Beverly George Merivale Shepherd, 25 of Sydney NSW
Commercial Pilot, Reginald Haslem Boyden, 41 of Randwick NSW.

Proud (1907-1997) went on to a prominent career as a mining engineer and executive, and was a generous philanthropist.  Some more information can be found here.

A report in the Beaudesert Times on the 80th anniversary trek is here.