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NPM #24 – Angel of Amphitrite’s Bay

April 24, 2016
tags: , ,

I am writing love letters in bottles,
I am throwing them into the sea;
I am begging the west wind for answers.
I am praying you’ll listen to me.

Statue_AmphitriteI am stranded alone on an island
Where the shores trace a fractal design,
And the tide sings a song about losing your way,
And I’m watching the sky for a sign.

They say Amphitrite loves all that are lost;
That she carries the drowned sailors home.
They say that her hair is like seafoam and salt,
That she uses the wind for her comb.

They say that she grows compass roses
On the shores of Bermuda, where all days are good.
They say that her heart beats in time with the waves.
And I would go with her, if only I could…

I am writing love letters in bottles.
I know that you won’t read a word.
I am throwing them into the waters.
I am innocent, I am absurd.

I am standing alone on this skerry
And I don’t know how we wound up here,
And the tide sings a song about lovers and loss,
And I’m drowning in silence and fear…

They say Old King Neptune’s a merciful man;
That he takes only what we can spare.
They say that his hands offer comfort, and more,
They tell me he’s always been fair.

They say that he loves compass roses
That he once told his daughter that he understood.
They say that he cries when the solstice tide turns,
And I would go with him, if only I could…

We don’t get to choose who we love, who we lose.
We don’t get to choose everything that we are.
They say that the Magpie was innocent once.
They say that she once fell in love with a star…

They say that she couldn’t stop crying,
She couldn’t be helped, and she fell long and far.
They say that she couldn’t help laughing
For her love, for her lady, the bright morning star…

I am writing love letters in bottles.
I am using a crow-feather quill.
I am throwing them into the riptide,
Pretending you think of me still.

I am standing alone on the shoreline
Like a magpie in patchwork display.
Call me lady of lost lover’s causes.
Call me Angel of Amphitrite’s Bay.

–Seanan McGuire

 

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NPM #23 – Sonnet 116

April 23, 2016
tags: , ,

W.b.260, page 7

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no; it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests, and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

-William Shakespeare

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NPM #22 – Lot’s Wife

April 22, 2016
tags: , , ,

anna

The just man followed then his angel guide
Where he strode on the black highway, hulking and bright;
But a wild grief in his wife’s bosom cried,
Look back, it is not too late for a last sight

Of the red towers of your native Sodom, the square
Where once you sang, the gardens you shall mourn,
And the tall house with empty windows where
You loved your husband and your babes were born.

She turned, and looking on the bitter view
Her eyes were welded shut by mortal pain;
Into transparent salt her body grew,
And her quick feet were rooted in the plain.

Who would waste tears upon her? Is she not
The least of our losses, this unhappy wife?
Yet in my heart she will not be forgot
Who, for a single glance, gave up her life.

 

-Anna Akhmatova (Translated by Richard Wilbur)

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NPM #21 – Cat Haiku

April 21, 2016
tags: , , ,

Her long, lithe body

Stretches out eager to yield

Control for beauty

-Dee Ito

marshall

Marshall Arisman

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NPM #20 – My heart flutters hastily

April 20, 2016
tags: , ,

papyrusMy heart flutters hastily,

When I think of my love of you;

It lets me not act sensibly,

It leaps from its place.

It lets me not put on a dress,

Nor wrap my scarf around me;

I put no paint upon my eyes,

I’m even not anointed.

“Don’t wait, go there,” says it to me,

As often as I think of him;

My heart, don’t act so stupidly,

Why do you play the fool?

Sit still, the brother comes to you,

And many eyes as well.

Let not the people say of me:

“A woman fallen through love!”

Be steady when you think of him,

My heart, do not flutter!

-4th stanza Chester Beatty I papyrus

 

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NPM #19 – “I have been a stranger in a strange land”

April 19, 2016
tags: ,

Life’s spell is so exquisite, everything conspires to break it.
Emily Dickinson

It wasn’t bliss. What was bliss
but the ordinary life? She’d spend hours
in patter, moving through whole days
touching, sniffing, tasting . . . exquisite
housekeeping in a charmed world.
And yet there was always

 

more of the same, all that happiness,
the aimless Being There.
So she wandered for a while, bush to arbor,
lingered to look through a pond’s restive mirror.
He was off cataloging the universe, probably,
pretending he could organize
what was clearly someone else’s chaos.

 

That’s when she found the tree,
the dark, crabbed branches
bearing up such speechless bounty,
she knew without being told
this was forbidden. It wasn’t
a question of ownership—
who could lay claim to
such maddening perfection?

 

And there was no voice in her head,
no whispered intelligence lurking
in the leaves—just an ache that grew
until she knew she’d already lost everything
except desire, the red heft of it
warming her outstretched palm.
-Rita Dove

Source: Poetry (October 2002).

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NPM #18 – So We’ll Go No More a Roving

April 18, 2016
tags: ,
byronSo, we’ll go no more a roving
   So late into the night,
Though the heart be still as loving,
   And the moon be still as bright.

 

For the sword outwears its sheath,
   And the soul wears out the breast,
And the heart must pause to breathe,
   And love itself have rest.

 

Though the night was made for loving,
   And the day returns too soon,
Yet we’ll go no more a roving
   By the light of the moon.
-George Gordon, Lord Byron
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NPM #17 – A Moment of Happiness

April 17, 2016
tags: ,
rumi

Jalal al-Din Rumi gathers Sufi mystics

A moment of happiness,

you and I sitting on the verandah,

apparently two, but one in soul, you and I.

We feel the flowing water of life here,

You and I, with the garden’s beauty

and the birds singing.

The stars will be watching us,

and we will show them

what it is to be a thin crescent moon.

You and I unselfed, will be together,

indifferent to idle speculation, you and I.

The parrots of heaven will be cracking sugar

as we laugh together, you and I.

In one form upon this earth,

and in another form in a timeless sweet land.

-Rumi

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NPM #16 – Annael Lee

April 16, 2016
tags: , , ,
annabel

Illustration by Abigail Larson 

It was many and many a year ago,

   In a kingdom by the sea,
That a maiden there lived whom you may know
   By the name of Annabel Lee;
And this maiden she lived with no other thought
   Than to love and be loved by me.

 

I was a child and she was a child,
   In this kingdom by the sea,
But we loved with a love that was more than love—
   I and my Annabel Lee—
With a love that the wingèd seraphs of Heaven
   Coveted her and me.

 

And this was the reason that, long ago,
   In this kingdom by the sea,
A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling
   My beautiful Annabel Lee;
So that her highborn kinsmen came
   And bore her away from me,
To shut her up in a sepulchre
   In this kingdom by the sea.

 

The angels, not half so happy in Heaven,
   Went envying her and me—
Yes!—that was the reason (as all men know,
   In this kingdom by the sea)
That the wind came out of the cloud by night,
   Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee.

 

But our love it was stronger by far than the love
   Of those who were older than we—
   Of many far wiser than we—
And neither the angels in Heaven above
   Nor the demons down under the sea
Can ever dissever my soul from the soul
   Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;

 

For the moon never beams, without bringing me dreams
   Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And the stars never rise, but I feel the bright eyes
   Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side
   Of my darling—my darling—my life and my bride,
   In her sepulchre there by the sea—
   In her tomb by the sounding sea.
-Edgar Allen Poe
Illustration by Abigail Larson 
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NPM #15 – The Highwayman

April 15, 2016
tags: , , ,
PART ONE
highwaymanThe wind was a torrent of darkness among the gusty trees.
The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas.
The road was a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor,
And the highwayman came riding—
         Riding—riding—
The highwayman came riding, up to the old inn-door.
He’d a French cocked-hat on his forehead, a bunch of lace at his chin,
A coat of the claret velvet, and breeches of brown doe-skin.
They fitted with never a wrinkle. His boots were up to the thigh.
And he rode with a jewelled twinkle,
         His pistol butts a-twinkle,
His rapier hilt a-twinkle, under the jewelled sky.
Over the cobbles he clattered and clashed in the dark inn-yard.
He tapped with his whip on the shutters, but all was locked and barred.
He whistled a tune to the window, and who should be waiting there
But the landlord’s black-eyed daughter,
         Bess, the landlord’s daughter,
Plaiting a dark red love-knot into her long black hair.
And dark in the dark old inn-yard a stable-wicket creaked
Where Tim the ostler listened. His face was white and peaked.
His eyes were hollows of madness, his hair like mouldy hay,
But he loved the landlord’s daughter,
         The landlord’s red-lipped daughter.
Dumb as a dog he listened, and he heard the robber say—
“One kiss, my bonny sweetheart, I’m after a prize to-night,
But I shall be back with the yellow gold before the morning light;
Yet, if they press me sharply, and harry me through the day,
Then look for me by moonlight,
         Watch for me by moonlight,
I’ll come to thee by moonlight, though hell should bar the way.”
He rose upright in the stirrups. He scarce could reach her hand,
But she loosened her hair in the casement. His face burnt like a brand
As the black cascade of perfume came tumbling over his breast;
And he kissed its waves in the moonlight,
         (O, sweet black waves in the moonlight!)
Then he tugged at his rein in the moonlight, and galloped away to the west.
ribbons

Illustration by Charles Mikolaycak

PART TWO
He did not come in the dawning. He did not come at noon;
And out of the tawny sunset, before the rise of the moon,
When the road was a gypsy’s ribbon, looping the purple moor,
A red-coat troop came marching—
         Marching—marching—
King George’s men came marching, up to the old inn-door.
They said no word to the landlord. They drank his ale instead.
But they gagged his daughter, and bound her, to the foot of her narrow bed.
Two of them knelt at her casement, with muskets at their side!
There was death at every window;
         And hell at one dark window;
For Bess could see, through her casement, the road that he would ride.
They had tied her up to attention, with many a sniggering jest.
They had bound a musket beside her, with the muzzle beneath her breast!
“Now, keep good watch!” and they kissed her. She heard the doomed man say—
Look for me by moonlight;
         Watch for me by moonlight;
I’ll come to thee by moonlight, though hell should bar the way!
She twisted her hands behind her; but all the knots held good!
She writhed her hands till her fingers were wet with sweat or blood!
They stretched and strained in the darkness, and the hours crawled by like years
Till, now, on the stroke of midnight,
         Cold, on the stroke of midnight,
The tip of one finger touched it! The trigger at least was hers!
The tip of one finger touched it. She strove no more for the rest.
Up, she stood up to attention, with the muzzle beneath her breast.
She would not risk their hearing; she would not strive again;
For the road lay bare in the moonlight;
         Blank and bare in the moonlight;
And the blood of her veins, in the moonlight, throbbed to her love’s refrain.
Tlot-tlot; tlot-tlot! Had they heard it? The horsehoofs ringing clear;
Tlot-tlot; tlot-tlot, in the distance? Were they deaf that they did not hear?
Down the ribbon of moonlight, over the brow of the hill,
The highwayman came riding—
         Riding—riding—
The red coats looked to their priming! She stood up, straight and still.
Tlot-tlot, in the frosty silence! Tlot-tlot, in the echoing night!
Nearer he came and nearer. Her face was like a light.
Her eyes grew wide for a moment; she drew one last deep breath,
Then her finger moved in the moonlight,
         Her musket shattered the moonlight,
Shattered her breast in the moonlight and warned him—with her death.
He turned. He spurred to the west; he did not know who stood
Bowed, with her head o’er the musket, drenched with her own blood!
Not till the dawn he heard it, and his face grew grey to hear
How Bess, the landlord’s daughter,
         The landlord’s black-eyed daughter,
Had watched for her love in the moonlight, and died in the darkness there.
Back, he spurred like a madman, shrieking a curse to the sky,
With the white road smoking behind him and his rapier brandished high.
Blood red were his spurs in the golden noon; wine-red was his velvet coat;
When they shot him down on the highway,
         Down like a dog on the highway,
And he lay in his blood on the highway, with a bunch of lace at his throat.
red

Illustration by Charles Mikolaycak

And still of a winter’s night, they say, when the wind is in the trees,
When the moon is a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas,
When the road is a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor,
A highwayman comes riding—
         Riding—riding—
A highwayman comes riding, up to the old inn-door.

 

Over the cobbles he clatters and clangs in the dark inn-yard.
He taps with his whip on the shutters, but all is locked and barred.
He whistles a tune to the window, and who should be waiting there
But the landlord’s black-eyed daughter,
         Bess, the landlord’s daughter,
Plaiting a dark red love-knot into her long black hair.
-Alfrend Noyes
This was one of the first poems I memorized back in 7th grade. The illustrations, except the first, are from The Highwayman illustrated by Charles Mikolaycak. Then, later, I found the Loreena McKennitt version and it remains one of my favorite pieces of music.
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