Tuesday, May 12, 2009

"THE CAVE"

Paleolithic Bulls and Other Animals Crowd Calcite Walls at Lascaux, France by Sisse Brimberg
Paleolithic Bulls and Other Animals Crowd Calcite Walls at Lascaux, France




Poetry is so hard

without metaphor or simile.

Nature escapes me

Rhya’s earth, an illusion.

I rub my eyes and sigh

"You know no words".

What drives this need

to sit in quietness and pain?

What need at Lascaux

to picture deer and bull?

Just a bursting!

Ah! the humanness of it!

The rapture, when words were few.


V


Saturday, May 02, 2009

Requiem by John Updike

It came to me the other day:

Were I to die, no one would say,

“Oh, what a shame! So young, so full

Of promise — depths unplumbable!”

Instead, a shrug and tearless eyes

Will greet my overdue demise;

The wide response will be, I know,

“I thought he died a while ago.”

For life’s a shabby subterfuge,

And death is real, and dark, and huge.

The shock of it will register

Nowhere but where it will occur.

— JOHN UPDIKE