Theatrical Fun and Spring Poetry
Mar. 21st, 2004 05:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakOkay, this is officially the most fun I've had online in eons. Totally worth losing a night's sleep over. But I won't be able to stay online that long again in the near future, so the saga of Londo's outrageous flirtation with Anna Sheridan and their attempt to beat Mr. Morden and friends at poker while introducing Anakin Skywalker to the joys of gambling will take a while longer to complete.*g* It's certainly a break from the ongoing angst he's otherwise engaged in. *Pets Londo*
In other news, since![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
kathyh, bimo and cavendish all posted beautiful spring poems, and there can never be enough good poetry, I'll join the newly created meme club. Wordsworth wasn't the only English poet laureate to write a poem called Daffodils. So did the late Ted Hughes, in his last published collection, Birthday Letters. The poem is addressed to Sylvia Plath, of course.
Remember how we picked the daffodils?
Nobody else remembers, but I remember.
Your daughter came with her armfuls, eager and happy,
Helping the harvest. She has forgotten.
She cannot even remember you. And we sold them.
It sounds like sacrilege, but we sold them.
Were we so poor?
(...) The daffodils
Were incidental gildings of the deeds,
Treasure trove. They simply came,
And they kept on coming.
As if not from teh sod but falling from heaven.
Our lives were still a raid on our own good luck.
We knew we'd live forever. We had not learned
What a fleeting glance of the everlasting
Daffodils are. Never identified
The nuptial flight of the rarest ephemera -
Our own days!
We thought they were a windfall.
Never guessed they were a last blessing.
So we sold them. We worked at selling them
As if employed on somebody else's
Flower-farm. You bent at it
In the rain of that April - your last April.
We bent there togther, among the soft shrieks
Of their jostled stems, the wet shocks shaken
Of their girlish dance-frocks -
Fresh-opened dragonflies, wet and flimsy,
Opened too early.
We piled their frailty lights on a carpenter's bench,
Distributed leaves among the dozens -
Buckling blade-leaves, limber, groping for air, zink-silvered -
Propped their raw butts in bucket water,
Their oval, meaty butts,
And sold them, sevenpence a bunch -
Wind-wounds, spasms from the dark earth,
With their odourless metals,
A flamy purification of the deep grave's stony cold
As if ice had a breath -
We sold them, to wither.
The crop thickened faster than we couuld thin it.
Finally, we were overwhelmed
And we lost our wedding-present scissors.
Every March since then they have lifted again
Out of the same bulbs, the same
Baby-cries from the thaw,
Ballerinas too early for musc, shiverers
In the draughty wings of the year.
On that same groundswell of memory, fluttering
They return to forget you stooping there
Behind the rainy curtains of a dark April
Snipping their stems.
But somewhere your scissors remember. Whereever they are.
Here somehwere, blades wide open.
April by April
Sinking deeper
Through the sod - an anchor, a cross of rust.
****
And to finish my Plath-Hughes (Hughes-Plath?) homage, here is a photo taken during that spring he describes.
In other news, since
kathyh, bimo and cavendish all posted beautiful spring poems, and there can never be enough good poetry, I'll join the newly created meme club. Wordsworth wasn't the only English poet laureate to write a poem called Daffodils. So did the late Ted Hughes, in his last published collection, Birthday Letters. The poem is addressed to Sylvia Plath, of course.Remember how we picked the daffodils?
Nobody else remembers, but I remember.
Your daughter came with her armfuls, eager and happy,
Helping the harvest. She has forgotten.
She cannot even remember you. And we sold them.
It sounds like sacrilege, but we sold them.
Were we so poor?
(...) The daffodils
Were incidental gildings of the deeds,
Treasure trove. They simply came,
And they kept on coming.
As if not from teh sod but falling from heaven.
Our lives were still a raid on our own good luck.
We knew we'd live forever. We had not learned
What a fleeting glance of the everlasting
Daffodils are. Never identified
The nuptial flight of the rarest ephemera -
Our own days!
We thought they were a windfall.
Never guessed they were a last blessing.
So we sold them. We worked at selling them
As if employed on somebody else's
Flower-farm. You bent at it
In the rain of that April - your last April.
We bent there togther, among the soft shrieks
Of their jostled stems, the wet shocks shaken
Of their girlish dance-frocks -
Fresh-opened dragonflies, wet and flimsy,
Opened too early.
We piled their frailty lights on a carpenter's bench,
Distributed leaves among the dozens -
Buckling blade-leaves, limber, groping for air, zink-silvered -
Propped their raw butts in bucket water,
Their oval, meaty butts,
And sold them, sevenpence a bunch -
Wind-wounds, spasms from the dark earth,
With their odourless metals,
A flamy purification of the deep grave's stony cold
As if ice had a breath -
We sold them, to wither.
The crop thickened faster than we couuld thin it.
Finally, we were overwhelmed
And we lost our wedding-present scissors.
Every March since then they have lifted again
Out of the same bulbs, the same
Baby-cries from the thaw,
Ballerinas too early for musc, shiverers
In the draughty wings of the year.
On that same groundswell of memory, fluttering
They return to forget you stooping there
Behind the rainy curtains of a dark April
Snipping their stems.
But somewhere your scissors remember. Whereever they are.
Here somehwere, blades wide open.
April by April
Sinking deeper
Through the sod - an anchor, a cross of rust.
****
And to finish my Plath-Hughes (Hughes-Plath?) homage, here is a photo taken during that spring he describes.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
thanks
Date: 2004-03-21 08:34 am (UTC)And the picture is really adding to the [add appropriate word here] feeling of the poem.
So this settles it, finally, I need to get myself a copy of the Birthday Letters :-).
F.
A conspiracy unmasked
Date: 2004-03-22 01:09 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-03-21 09:44 am (UTC)I like Londo's angst- it's very Londo- but I know exactly what you mean. Anna needs to laugh more, too.
no subject
Date: 2004-03-21 09:14 pm (UTC)Though it occured to me Morden might deserve to win an Apocalypse Box.*g* But no, we have to beat him! BTW, I see Jack Sparrow is about to enter the game now as well...
no subject
Date: 2004-03-22 06:43 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-03-22 07:08 am (UTC)(Moreover, it will be very interesting to see what Jack will do with a Silmaril, the box, the poison and the shard of the Dark Crystal...
no subject
Date: 2004-03-23 10:25 am (UTC)Oh, and in case you missed it, the box has its own journal now.
no subject
Date: 2004-03-23 07:11 pm (UTC)Inspired. No, I hadn't known. It's 4am here, after all.*g*
thanks for the poetry and pic
Date: 2004-03-21 02:16 pm (UTC)Laffs out loud at the game and waits to see more-- lol
no subject
Date: 2004-03-21 02:40 pm (UTC)Online gambling. Tut, tut...*g*.
no subject
Date: 2004-03-21 08:26 pm (UTC)Re: Gambling - what can I say? Playing Londo definitely is corrupting me...