Dark Poetry

[Daisy]

“Demons’ Wood” (1953), by Joseph Payne Brennan

In fevered sleep I sought the snow
Deep in a wood the demons know,
Where tides of terror and of grief
Have shriveled black each twisted leaf,
Where hope lies frozen iron-fast
And all the future bears the past.
The ground was slate; the trees were stone
From whence all birds had finally flown.
No one moved and no one spoke
—Until at last the still sky broke.
The silent snow fell cold and white
Till I was lost in swirling night,
Drowned in silence, sunk in sleep,
Sealed forever, dark and deep.

[Daisy]

“Pressed by the Moon, Mute Arbitress of Tides [Written in the churchyard at Middleton in Sussex]” (1786), by Charlotte Smith

Pressed by the moon, mute arbitress of tides,
While the loud equinox its power combines,
The sea no more its swelling surge confines,
But o’er the shrinking land sublimely rides.
The wild blast, rising from the western cave,
Drives the huge billows from their heaving bed,
Tears from their grassy tombs the village dead,
And breaks the silent sabbath of the grave!
With shells and seaweed mingled, on the shore
Lo! their bones whiten in the frequent wave;
But vain to them the winds and waters rave;
They hear the warring elements no more:
While I am doomed—by life’s long storm oppressed,
To gaze with envy on their gloomy rest.

[Jezetha]

'Birds of prey', a sonnet, reads like a political allegory. The title is bad, though. Better to let the reader in the dark during the octet (the first eight lines).

[Daisy]

Dear Johan,

Your observation about “Birds of Prey” as a political allegory is spot-on. The version of the poem that I posted in this thread comes from Claude McKay’s 1922 collection, Harlem Shadows. But an earlier, considerably different, version appeared in the October 9, 1920 issue of the Workers’ Dreadnought, a communist newspaper published in London by the suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst. In the original version, the poem’s eighth line reads: “Birds of the darkness—human birds of prey” (italics mine). It’s explicitly clear, in this earlier text, that the “human birds of prey” are the rich, who thrive on the labor of the poor.

If you think McKay was a bit tin-eared with the poem’s title, you simply won’t believe the pseudonym under which he chose to publish it: Hugh Hope!

Best always,

Nicole

[vegetable theories]

"Pibroch" by Ted Hughes

The sea cries with it's meaningless voice
Treating alike it's dead and it's living,
Probably bored with the appearance of heaven
After so many millions of nights without sleep,
Without purpose, without self-deception.

Stone likewise. A pebble is imprisoned
Like nothing in the universe.
Created for black sleep. Or growing
Conscious of the sun's red spot occasionally,
Then dreaming it is the Foetus of God.

Over the stone rushes the wind
Able to mingle with nothing,
Like the hearing of the blind stone itself.
Or turns, as if the stone's mind came feeling
A fantasy of directions.

Drinking the sea eating the rock
A tree struggles to make leaves -
An old woman fallen from space
Unprepared for these conditions.
She hangs on, because her mind's gone completely.

Minute after minute, aeon after aeon,
Nothing lets up or develops.
And this is neither a bad variant or a tryout.
This is where the staring angels go through.
This is where all the stars bow down.

[Daisy]

"Why did I laugh tonight?" (1819), by John Keats

Why did I laugh tonight? No voice will tell:
No God, no Demon of severe response,
Deigns to reply from Heaven or from Hell.
Then to my human heart I turn at once--
Heart! thou and I are here sad and alone;
Say, wherefore did I laugh! O mortal pain!
O Darkness! Darkness! ever must I moan,
To question Heaven and Hell and Heart in vain.
Why did I laugh? I know this being's lease
My fancy to its utmost blisses spreads;
Yet could I on this very midnight cease,
And the world's gaudy ensigns see in shreds.
Verse, Fame, and Beauty are intense indeed,
But Death intenser--Death is Life's high meed.

[Ligeia]

There is a Reaper, whose name is Death,
And, with his sickle keen,
He reaps the bearded grain at a breath,
And the flowers that grow between.

"Shall I have naught that is fair?" saith he;
"Have naught but the bearded grain?
Though the breath of these flowers is sweet to me,
I will give them all back again."

He gazed at the flowers with tearful eyes,
He kissed their drooping leaves;
It was for the Lord of Paradise
He bound them in his sheaves.

"My Lord has need of these flowerets gay,"
The Reaper said, and smiled;
"Dear tokens of the earth are they,
Where he was once a child."

"They shall all bloom in fields of light,
Transplanted by my care,
And saints, upon their garments white,
These sacred blossoms wear."

And the mother gave, in tears and pain,
The flowers she most did love;
She knew she should find them all again
In the fields of light above.

O, not in cruelty, not in wrath,
The Reaper came that day;
'T was an angel visited the green earth,
And took the flowers away

The Reaper And the Flowers - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

[Daisy]

"The Dead" by Miroslav Holub (1923-1998), trans. Ewald Osers

After his third operation, his heart
riddled like an old fairground target,
he woke up on his bed
and said: Now I'll be fine,
fit as a fiddle. And have you ever seen
horses coupling?

He died that night.

And another dragged on through eight insipid years
like a river weed in an acid stream,
as if pushing up his pallid
skewered face over the cemetery wall.

Until that face eventually vanished.

Both here and there the angel of death
quite simply stamped his hobnailed boot
on their medulla oblongata.

I know they died the same way.
But I don't believe that they are
dead the same way.

[Ligeia]

THE DEMON

Out of the body emerges the demon
out of the body extend
tentacles which grapple towards the other body
to suck out glances, embrace
limbs, quarry entrails,
out of the body project saliva sperm sweat-ducts
channels for the instillation of vaginal fluids
for the pincers to open and close, the joints
to function, and the otherwise unpaired, unworldly bodies
to engage like cogs
It’s exactly the same body
that suckles and nurtures and restores some things
and sucks out and milks and empties others
and burns up yet others like a jet of fire
reducing flesh and bones to ashes
yet without ever annihilating memories and fantasies.
Out of the bodies’ ashes
emerges the demon again
as painters depicted it
in churches that haven’t been completely deserted
the demon with goat’s legs
forked tongue, red eyes, snake’s tail
a huge, inflated yet smooth member
sexless, androgyne
that lurks in all of us
the dog squashed on the tarmac
its bloody tongue hanging out
like a red penis after ejaculation
steaming guts gaping open
quivering like an insatiable vulva.
At any moment it may emerge from within us
fly out of our mouths with our kisses, our words
our food, our squeals of pleasure and pain –
the demon we carry all our years
in a gestation that’s as endless
and brief as our lives.
At any moment it too may
break free of us.

Titos Patrikios

[Andrea Bonazzi]

Contra Mortem

Death is the eternal tedious platitude
With which all tales invariably end.
Deviceless seems the scurvy Demiurge
Who can invent no other doom, but must
Repeat, as puerile penny-a-liners do,
This horror staled by time-long usage. Why,
For variation's sake, if for naught else,
Not dower with immortality one rose,
One seer, one star, one duad of blest lovers?...
O, bestial, dumb submission! Will no voice
Cry out against this cosmic abatoir
Where God the butcher drives us one by one
Into the slaughter-pen and slits our throats?
In lieu of prayer or incense, let us proffer
A protest and a taunt, deriding Him
Who is corruption's pimp, and caterer
To pampered maggots....


--Clark Ashton Smith

(1930-1938, in The Complete Poetry and Translations Vol. 2: The Wine of Summer)