Dark Poetry

[Daisy]

“The bees that increase and diminish” by Bo Carpelan (b. 1926), trans. Robin Fulton

The bees that increase and diminish their persistent singing
increase and diminish the heat too — their fury
blocks the sky’s windows, divides the ground into shadow and sun.
Rest on such a day is confused, in your dream
the room is locked and you’ll never find the key —
the number’s forgotten. The sun slowly enters clouds.
Silence, like a graveyard of the winds
where each thinning stem stands with its back to you
hiding the twisting path. You didn’t think
that dusk would fall so quickly?
You thought someone would meet you before nightfall?
Years are forgotten—you leave no tracks and listen no more
even to the echo of songs from black thickets.
When you waken you look at the window.
The vehement light there is itself a token of darkness.

[bendk]

Postscript: The King in Yellow
Ann K. Schwader


"Soul-sick, I laid aside that slender text
(its serpent binding slithered from my hands),
And sought the healing ease of sleep - now vexed
By tainted wisdom's hideous demands.
Black stars betrayed the region of my dreams
I traced Cassilda's path along that shore
Whose poisoned mists obscure forevermore

Deep Hali's nameless horror. Shattered screams
Rang echoing from dread Carcosa's towers
Where nothing human dwells, nor ever dwelt
In twisted cells where the disembodied Powers
Still make themselves most maddeningly felt.
Too late, I knew that tortured voice as mine,
And woke to see I clutched.....the Yellow Sign."

[bendk]

A Lost Song of Cassilda
Ann K. Schwader


Carcosa's final sunset dies,
And I alone send up this tune
Beyond that shore where cloud waves rise,

For Death has veiled my sister's eyes
To mock the mist-enshrouded moons
Carcosa's final sunset dies

As Truth distains his pale disguise,
Men's thoughts which stretched through afternoon
Beyond that shore where cloud waves rise,

Recoil as they attain their prize
Our royal father's jaundiced rune
Carcosa's final sunset dies

While black stars desecrate the skies,
And whippoorwills displace the loon
Beyond that shore where cloud waves rise

My soul shall taste its own demise
And trail funeral tatters soon...
Carcosa's final sunset dies
Beyond that shore where cloud waves rise

[bendk]

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)


THE SECOND COMING

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity. Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

[G. S. Carnivals]

She had been through the hoop time
and time again, what with a series of
life-threatening illnesses, together
with more than her fair share of bereave-
ments, accidents and shattered romances.

Yet she made light of them. Her
heart didn't sink. Her mascara did not
run. Everything, good and ill, was part
of life's rich and varied tapestry.

So, here she was--simply sick again.

In her delirium, she recalled an
occasion many years before as a small
girl. She was skipping rope with the
other kids, well past the time when
twilight had given up its ghost to the
moon. Indeed, the street-lamps did
little to disperse the encroaching
darkness...

A tall man appeared at the entrance to
the cul de sac--swinging his own skipping-
rope in time with the children's.

She shuddered, remembering that time.
Today, she is in the process of suffering
her last illness, but she does not realize
how final it is.

Simply from past experience, she
fully expected there to be other ill-
nesses, other diseases queuing up to
infect her--like romances.

The sickroom door swings open and a
tall darkness stands silhouetted in its
frame; the tall darkness swings things
that look like tubes--in time with her
heart. A heart that skips a beat...

And later she might have wondered if
she were about to fall in love--yet one
more heavy romance--until the last saving
stitch dropped, making the embroidery of
life's tapestry run like painted tears.

D. F. Lewis - "Simply Sick Again"

[Daisy]

“Behind the Wall” by Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-1973), trans. Peter Filkins

I hang as snow from the branches
in the valley of spring,
as a cold spell I float on the wind,
falling damp upon the blossoms
as a drop
in which they decay
as if sunk in a swamp.
I am the Continual-Thought-Of-Dying.

Because I cannot walk firmly, I fly
through every sky above secure buildings
and knock down pillars and undermine walls.
Since I cannot sleep at night, I warn
others with the distant roar of the sea.
I pass through the mouth of waterfalls
and let topple from mountains the rumbling boulders.

I am the child of great fear for the world,
who within peace and joy hangs suspended
like the stroke of a bell in the day’s passing
and like the scythe in the ripe pasture.

I am the Continual-Thought-Of-Dying.

[Daisy]

“November” by Giovanni Pascoli (1855-1912), trans. William Jay Smith

The air gemlike, the sun so clear
that you seek apricots in flower
and find in your heart only the white
thorn’s bitter scent.

The thornbush is dry; stick-like the plants
stand now revealed in somber silhouette
against a vacant sky; and earth resounds
with hollow step.

Silence: but hear in the distant wind
descending faintly on orchard and flowerbed
the crackling leaves—in this, the cold
summer of the dead.

[Daisy]

From “Winter” (1726) in The Seasons, by James Thomson (1700-1748)

As thus the snows arise, and, foul and fierce,
All Winter drives along the darkened air,
In his own loose-revolving fields the swain
Disastered stands; sees other hills ascend,
Of unknown joyless brow, and other scenes,
Of horrid prospect, shag the trackless plain;
Nor finds the river nor the forest, hid
Beneath the formless wild, but wanders on
From hill to dale, still more and more astray,
Impatient flouncing through the drifted heaps,
Stung with the thoughts of home—the thoughts of home
Rush on his nerves and call their vigor forth
In many a vain attempt. How sinks his soul!
What black despair, what horror fills his heart,
When, for the dusky spot which fancy feigned
His tufted cottage rising through the snow,
He meets the roughness of the middle waste,
Far from the track and blest abode of man,
While round him night resistless closes fast,
And every tempest, howling o’er his head,
Renders the savage wilderness more wild.
Then throng the busy shapes into his mind
Of covered pits, unfathomably deep,
A dire descent! beyond the power of frost;
Of faithless bogs; of precipices huge,
Smoothed up with snow; and (what is land unknown,
What water) of the still unfrozen spring,
In the loose marsh or solitary lake,
Where the fresh fountain from the bottom boils.
These check his fearful steps; and down he sinks
Beneath the shelter of the shapeless drift,
Thinking o’er all the bitterness of death,
Mixed with the tender anguish nature shoots
Through the wrung bosom of the dying man—
His wife, his children, and his friends unseen.
In vain for him the officious wife prepares
The fire fair-blazing and the vestment warm;
In vain his little children, peeping out
Into the mingling storm, demand their sire
With tears of artless innocence. Alas!
Nor wife nor children more shall he behold,
Nor friends, nor sacred home. On every nerve
The deadly winter seizes, shuts up sense,
And, o’er his inmost vitals creeping cold,
Lays him along the snows a stiffened corse,
Stretched out and bleaching in the northern blast.

[G. S. Carnivals]

Quote Originally Posted by Jezetha

Quote Originally Posted by G. S. Carnivals In her delirium, she recalled an occasion many years before as a small girl. She was skipping rope with the other kids, well past the time when twilight had given up its ghost to the moon. Indeed, the street-lamps did little to disperse the enroaching darkness... D. F. Lewis - "Simply Sick Again" It would be a 'weird' pun, but 'enroaching' should read 'encroaching', IMO...;)

Please advise, des. , , and !

[Nemonymous]

I'm sure it was meant to be 'encroaching'.

But I like 'enroaching', too. :-)
like enspidering...