underneath the blood beaches
That same vast unmurmuring crowd
which has neither consent
nor condemnation
endures the duration
of these gyrations;
lively scrapes of adulation
denials
the acrid scent of guilt-
the ascent of lonely gulls
intent upon the quality of the lie
within their impatient cries,
will, as with all scavengers,
pick at the edges of the carpet
the lashings
that will conceal them from the wind
that stirs the sand up on the blood beaches.
In a list
Please tell me what you think
Comments
1 - 7 of 7
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once I
dropped a coin in hell
after a long while
its fall echoed
empty and I thought
it's winter already
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Reading Rilke I thinks, you are.
Angel: if there were a place we know nothing of, and there,
on some unsayable carpet, lovers revealed
what here they could never master, their high daring
figures of heart’s flight,
their towers of desire, their ladders,
long since standing where there was no ground, leaning,
trembling, on each other – and mastered them,
in front of the circle of watchers, the countless, soundless dead:
Would these not fling their last, ever-saved,
ever-hidden, unknown to us, eternally
valid coins of happiness in front of the finally
truly smiling pair on the silent
carpet?
Yup. Those gulls are quite the thieves.
I have had full bags of lunch picked up and flown off while I'm out swimming with the sea monsters.
anyway. To the Idea of this:
I think, of Rilke's Angels, that They are beyond being as we humans, can comprehend. Beyond what we can know, experience, understand. I've not had time really to dig into the theory of Rilke's Angels being more closely related to the Angels of Islam rather than the Angels of Christianity. It is deep stuff -- a bit too deep for me to get my head wrapped around really, gives me a bit of a head ache but I keep trying anyway.
Henry Corbin has helped me some -- trying to grasp this Idea of Rilke and his Angels:
There is, Corbin tells us, a remarkable concordance between certain mystical Islamic accounts of the Angel and the late poetry of Ranier Maria Rilke. Rilke indeed believed that his vision of the Angel had more in common with the Angels of Islam than with those of the Christianity he knew. Rilke’s mystic vision implies a cosmology that denies any gulf between Heaven and Earth - they are, rather, continuous. It is I think this fundamental intuition that makes his work so important for Corbin. Corbin, whose knowledge of German theology, philosophy and literature was astonishingly broad and deep, believed that the Elegies “formulate exactly, literally” the central themes of the Islamic mystic vision which he so passionately defended. He quotes from a well known letter Rilke wrote a year before his death: “our task is to stamp this provisional, perishing earth into ourselves so deeply, so painfully and passionately, that its being may rise again, ‘invisibly,’ in us.” We must perform a transfiguration of the visible into the invisible. It is in the figure of the Angel, central to the Elegies, that this transformation appears already accomplished. Rilke wrote,
The Angel of the Elegies is the being who vouches for the recognition in the invisible of a higher order of reality. – Hence “terrible” to us, because we, its lovers and transformers, do still cling to the visible. – All the worlds of the universe are plunging into the invisible as into their next deepest reality… We are these transformers of the earth; our entire existence, the flights and plunges of our love, everything qualifies us for this task (besides which there is, essentially, no other).
Corbin says that this is precisely the view of Avicenna, Suhrawardi, Mulla Sadra and Ibn ‘Arabi. In language that mirrors Rilke’s, the 20th century Shi’ite theologian Mohammad Hosayn Tabataba’i said that the function of the Gnostic in this world is to be the workshop for the production of the invisible, the transcendent. The imagination in us provides the necessary meeting place between this world and the Divine. Corbin tells of a Shi’ite tradition which holds that the blood of Imam Hosayn, Prince of Martyrs, must remain suspended forever
between Heaven and Earth, for if it were ever to fall, the world would come to an end. The Angel allows us to perceive all things as suspended between Heaven and Earth in the mundus imaginalis. The Imagination establishes the reality of the “meeting place of the two seas” where Moses meets Khidr, the Verdant One.
(Adapted from After Propehcy: Imagination, Incarnation and the Unity of the Prophetic Tradition by the author.)
Anyway.
Nice sounds and images here but feels like only a small piece of something much larger to come. That is of course if I'm even in the right ball park here -- with Rilke's Elegies being your inspiration.
Hope there will be more.
Lisa
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LOL
I could have guessed you would unravel the riddle
Isn't poetry ... a marbe game?
I only flip a coin
or a feather.
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Always more to a Lute poem than meets the eye isn't there?
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the first bit is overdone- i feel like i've died and gone to tion hell
you seem to be a bit all over the place with images
scavenger gulls picking at carpet doesn't really work for me- as i think you would have
to have some pretty creative reasoning to put a gull in a carpeted room- not that it can't be done i suppose
but then it seems you would worry more about the shit on the walls rather than the gulls picking carpet
a couple minor nits:
that stirs -perhaps which stirs
i would also eliminate the before blood
i'm sure this will turn from acrid to perfume with your fine honed poetry skills.
m
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I wrote a poem about seagulls once ...
Here it is:
Seagulls in Distress
Dedicated to the USA
Oh, you seagulls in distress
moaning shades of man-made flames
flying perplexed from my dreams
crying out all vanished names
Oh, you seagulls in distress
circles of a hollow maze
Death is but a short caress
echoing the halo phrase
Oh, you seagulls in distress
phoenixed from demolished dome
veering towards safer nest:
rest in love, eternal home
Myra Lochner
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Your poetry as I said before ...
challenges the reader. Perhaps one should give a definite clue to the eager soul, wanting to relate ... When I look at the title, I immediately sense tension: coins seldom bring happiness. And when it refers to Chinese Coins, it is bad news for an American.
What I see here, is a poem calculating the outcome of the greed and the fake glamor of individuals, while the silent majority does not breathe one word of objection against the self love and flattering ... The sea gulls, with their broader eye view and their piercing cries of impatience cannot wait to reveal those killed in innocence, sucked in by the sand of time.
An angry social or political statement of a kind.
Well.
I am rather stubborn when I review your work. So forgive me if I ask: what's with that capital T in the second line?
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