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Poems
Meena Menon Sep 2021
A Police History
Meena Menon
Sep 2021
Flicker Shimmer Glow
The brightest star can shine even with thick black velvet draped over it.
Quartz, lime and salt crystals formed a glass ball.
The dark womb held me, warm and soft.
My mom called my cries when I was born the most sorrowful sound she had ever heard.
She said she’d never heard a baby make a sound like that.
I’d open my eyes in low light until the world’s light healed rather than hurt.
The summer before eighth grade, July 1992,
I watched a shooting star burn by at 100,000 miles per hour as I stood on the balcony
while my family celebrated my birthday inside.
It made it into the earth’s atmosphere
but it didn’t look like it was coming down;
I know it didn’t hit the ground but it burned something in the time it was here.
The glass ball of my life cracked inside.
Light reflected off the salt crystal cracks.
I saw the beauty of the light within.
Nacre from my shell kept those cracks from getting worse,
a wild pearl as defense mechanism.
In 2001, I quit my job after they melted and poured tar all over my life.
All summer literature class bathtubs filled with rose hip oil cleaned the tar.
That fall logic and epistemology classes spewed black ink all over my philosophy
written over ten years then.
Tar turned to asphalt when I met someone from my old job for a drink in November
and it paved a road for my life that went to the hospital I was in that December
where it sealed the roof on my life
when I was almost murdered there
and in February after meeting her for another drink.
They lit a fire at the top of the glacier and pushed the burning pile of black coal off the edge,
burnt red, looking like flames falling into the valley.
While that blazed the side of the cliff something lit an incandescent light.
The electricity from the metal lightbulb ***** went through wires and heated the filament between until it glowed.
I began putting more work into emotional balance from things I learned at AA meetings.
In Spring 2003, the damage that the doctors at the hospital in 2001 had done
made it harder for light to reflect from the cracks in the glass ball.
I’d been eating healthy and trying to get regular exercises since 1994
but in Spring 2003 I began swimming for an hour every morning .
The water washed the pollution from the burning coals off
And then I escaped in July.
I moved to London to study English Language and Linguistics.
I would’ve studied English Language and Literature.
I did well until Spring 2004 when I thought I was being stalked.
I thought I was manic.
I thought I was being stalked.
I went home and didn’t go back for my exams after spring holiday.
Because I felt traumatized and couldn’t write poetry anymore,
I used black ink to write my notes for my book on trauma and the Russian Revolution.
I started teaching myself German.
I stayed healthy.
In 2005, my parents went to visit my mom’s family in Malaysia for two weeks.
I thought I was being stalked.
I knew I wasn’t manic.
I thought I was being stalked.
I told my parents when they came home.
They thought I was manic.
I showed them the shoe prints in the snow of different sizes from the woods to the windows.
They thought I was manic.
I was outside of my comfort zone.
I moved to California. I found light.
I made light,
the light reflected off the salt crystals I used to heal the violence inflicted on me from then on.
The light turned the traffic lights to not just green from red
but amber and blue.
The light turned the car signals left and right.
The light reflected off of salt crystals, light emitting diodes,
electrical energy turned directly to light,
electroluminescence.
The electrical currents flowed through,
illuminating.
Alone in the world, I moved to California in July 2005
but in August I called the person I escaped in 2003,
the sulfur and nitrogen that I hated.
He didn’t think I was manic but I never said anything.
I never told him why I asked him to move out to California.
When his coal seemed like only pollution,
I asked him to leave.
He threatened me.
I called the authorities.
They left me there.
He laughed.
Then the violence came.
****: stabbed and punched, my ****** bruised, purple and swollen.
The light barely reflected from the glass ball wIth cracks through all the acid rain, smoke and haze.
It would take me half an hour to get my body to do what my mind told it to after.
My dad told me my mom had her cancer removed.
The next day, the coal said if I wanted him to leave he’d leave.
I booked his ticket.
I drove him to the airport.
Black clouds gushed the night before for the first time in months,
the sky clear after the rain.
He was gone and I was free,
melted glass, heated up and poured—
looked like fire,
looked like the Snow Moon in February
with Mercury in the morning sky.
I worked through ****.
I worked to overcome trauma.
Electricity between touch and love caused acid rain, smoke, haze, and mercury
to light the discharge lamps, streetlights and parking lot lights.
Then I changed the direction of the light waves.
Like lead glass breaks up the light,
lead from the coal, cleaned and replaced by potassium,
glass cut clearly, refracting the light,
electrolytes,
electrical signals lit through my body,
thick black velvet drapes gone.
Lava
I think that someone wrote into some palm leaf a manuscript, a gift, a contract.
After my parents wedding, while they were still in India,
they found out that my dad’s father and my mom’s grandfather worked for kings administering temples and collecting money for their king from the farmers that worked the rice paddies each king owned. They both left their homes before they left for college.
My dad, a son of a brahmin’s son,
grew up in his grandmother’s house.
His mother was not a Brahmin.
My mother grew up in Malaysia where she saw the children from the rubber plantation
when she walked to school.
She doesn’t say what caste she is.
He went to his father’s house, then college.
He worked, then went to England, then Canada.
She went to India then Canada.
They moved to the United States around Christmas 1978
with my brother while she was pregnant with me.
My father signed a contract with my mother.
My parents took ashes and formed rock,
the residue left in brass pots in India,
the rocks, so hot, they turned back to lava miles away before turning back to ash again,
then back to rock,
the lava from a super volcano,
the ash purple and red.
Circles on a Moss Covered Volcano
The eruption beatifies the magma.
It becomes obsidian,
only breaks with a fracture,
smooth circles where it breaks.
My mom was born on the grass
on a lawn
in a moss covered canyon at the top of a volcanic island.
My grandfather lived in Malaysia before the Japanese occupied.
When the volcano erupted,
the lava dried at the ocean into black sand.
The British allied with the Communist Party of Malaysia—
after they organized.
After the Americans defeated the Japanese at Pearl Harbor,
the British took over Malaysia again.
They kept different groups apart claiming they were helping them.
The black sand had smooth pebbles and sharp rocks.
Ethnic Malay farmers lived in Kampongs, villages.
Indians lived on plantations.
The Chinese lived in towns and urban areas.
Ethnic Malays wanted independence.
In 1946, after strikes, demonstrations, and boycotts
the British agreed to work with them.
The predominantly Chinese Communist Party of Malaysia went underground,
guerrilla warfare against the British,
claiming their fight was for independence.
For the British, that emergency required vast powers
of arrest, detention without trial and deportation to defeat terrorism.
The Emergency became less unpopular as the terrorism became worse.
The British were the iron that brought oxygen through my mom’s body.
She loved riding on her father’s motorcycle with him
by the plantations,
through the Kampongs
and to the city, half an hour away.
The British left Malaysia independent in 1957
with Malaysian nationalists holding most state and federal government offices.
As the black sand stretches towards the ocean,
it becomes big stones of dried lava, flat and smooth.
My mom thought her father and her uncle were subservient to the British.
She thought all things, all people were equal.
When her father died when she was 16, 1965,
they moved to India,
my mother,
a foreigner in India, though she’s Indian.
She loved rock and roll and mini skirts
and didn’t speak the local language.
On the dried black lava,
it can be hard to know the molten lava flickers underneath there.
Before the Korean War,
though Britain and the United States wanted
an aggressive resolution
condemning North Korea,
they were happy
that India supported a draft resolution
condemning North Korea
for breach of the peace.
During the Korean War,
India, supported by Third World and other Commonwealth nations,
opposed United States’ proposals.
They were able to change the U.S. resolution
to include the proposals they wanted
and helped end the war.
China wanted the respect of Third World nations
and saw the United States as imperialist.
China thought India was a threat to the Third World
by taking aid from the United States and the Soviets.
Pakistan could help with that and a seat at the United Nations.
China wanted Taiwan’s seat at the UN.
My mother went to live with her uncle,
a communist negotiator for a corporation,
in India.
A poet,
he threw parties and invited other artists, musicians and writers.
I have the same brown hyperpigmentation at my joints that he had.
During the day, only the steam from the hot lava can be seen.
In 1965, Pakistani forces went into Jammu and Kashmir with China’s support.
China threatened India after India sent its troops in.
Then they threatened again before sending their troops to the Indian border.
The United States stopped aid to Pakistan and India.
Pakistan agreed to the UN ceasefire agreement.
Pakistan helped China get a seat at the UN
and tried to keep the west from escalating in Vietnam.
The smoldering sound of the lava sizzles underneath the dried lava.
When West Pakistan refused to allow East Pakistan independence,
violence between Bengalis and Biharis developed into upheaval.
Bengalis moved to India
and India went into East Pakistan.
Pakistan surrendered in December 1971.
East Pakistan became independent Bangladesh
The warm light of the melted lava radiates underneath but burns.
In 1974, India tested the Smiling Buddha,
a nuclear bomb.
After Indira Gandhi’s conviction for election fraud in 1973,
Marxist Professor Narayan called for total revolution
and students protested all over India.
With food shortages, inflation and regional disputes
like Sikh separatists training in Pakistan for an independent Punjab,
peasants and laborers joined the protests.
Railway strikes stopped the economy.
In 1975, Indira Gandhi, the Iron Lady,
declared an Emergency,
imprisoning political opponents, restricting freedoms and restricting the press,
claiming threats to national security
because the war with Pakistan had just ended.
The federal government took over Kerala’s communist dominated government and others.
My mom could’ve been a dandelion, but she’s more like thistle.
She has the center that dries and flutters in the wind,
beautiful and silky,
spiny and prickly,
but still fluffy, downy,
A daisy.
They say thistle saved Scotland from the Norse.
Magma from the volcano explodes
and the streams of magma fly into the air.
In the late 60s,
the civil rights movement rose
against the state in Northern Ireland
for depriving Catholics
of influence and opportunity.
The Northern Irish police,
Protestant and unionist, anti-catholic,
responded violently to the protests and it got worse.
In 1969, the British placed Arthur Young,
who had worked at the Federation of Malaya
at the time of their Emergency
at the head of the British military in Northern Ireland.
The British military took control over the police,
a counter insurgency rather than a police force,
crowd control, house searches, interrogation, and street patrols,
use of force against suspects and uncooperative citizens.
Political crimes were tolerated by Protestants but not Catholics.
The lava burns the rock off the edge of the volcano.
On January 30, 1972, ****** Sunday,
British Army policing killed 13 unarmed protesters
fighting for their rights over their neighborhood,
protesting the internment of suspected nationalists.
That led to protests across Ireland.
When banana leaves are warmed,
oil from the banana leaves flavors the food.
My dad flew from Canada to India in February 1972.
On February 4, my dad met my mom.
On February 11, 1972,
my dad married my mom.
They went to Canada,
a quartz singing bowl and a wooden mallet wrapped in suede.
The rock goes down with the lava, breaking through the rocks as it goes down.
In March 1972, the British government took over
because they considered the Royal Ulster Police and the Ulster Special Constabulary
to be causing most of the violence.
The lava blocks and reroutes streams,
melts snow and ice,
flooding.
Days later, there’s still smoke, red.
My mom could wear the clothes she liked
without being judged
with my dad in Canada.
She didn’t like asking my dad for money.
My dad, the copper helping my mother use that iron,
wanted her to go to college and finish her bachelors degree.
She got a job.
In 1976, the police took over again in Northern Ireland
but they were a paramilitary force—
armored SUVs, bullet proof jackets, combat ready
with the largest computerized surveillance system in the UK,
high powered weapons,
trained in counter insurgency.
Many people were murdered by the police
and few were held accountable.
Most of the murdered people were not involved in violence or crime.
People were arrested under special emergency powers
for interrogation and intelligence gathering.
People tried were tried in non-jury courts.
My mom learned Malayalam in India
but didn’t speak well until living with my dad.
She also learned to cook after getting married.
Her mother sent her recipes; my dad cooked for her—
turmeric, cumin, coriander, cayenne and green chiles.
Having lived in different countries,
my mom’s food was exposed to many cultures,
Chinese and French.
Ground rock, minerals and glass
covered the ground
from the ash plume.
She liked working.
A volcano erupted for 192 years,
an ice age,
disordered ices, deformed under pressure
and ordered ice crystals, brittle in the ice core records.
My mother liked working.
Though Khomeini was in exile by the 1970s in Iran,
more people, working and poor,
turned to him and the ****-i-Ulama for help.
My mom didn’t want kids though my dad did.
She agreed and in 1978 my brother was born.
Iran modernized but agriculture and industry changed so quickly.
In January 1978, students protested—
censorship, surveillance, harassment, illegal detention and torture.
Young people and the unemployed joined.
My parents moved to the United States in December 1978.
The regime used a lot of violence against the protesters,
and in September 1978 declared martial law in Iran.
Troops were shooting demonstrators.
In January 1979, the Shah and his family fled.
On February 11, 1979, my parents’ anniversary,
the Iranian army declared neutrality.
I was born in July 1979.
The chromium in emeralds and rubies colors them.
My brother was born in May and I was born in July.
Obsidian—
iron, copper and chromium—
isn’t a gas
but it isn’t a crystal;
it’s between the two,
the ordered crystal and the disordered gas.
They made swords out of obsidian.
Warm Light Shatters
The eruption beatifies the magma.
It becomes obsidian,
only breaks with a fracture,
smooth circles where it breaks.
My dad was born on a large flat rock on the edge of the top
of a hill,
Molasses, sweet and dark, the potent flavor dominates,
His father, the son of a Brahmin,
His mother from a lower caste.
His father’s family wouldn’t touch him,
He grew up in his mother’s mother’s house on a farm.
I have the same brown hyperpigmentation spot on my right hand that he has.
In 1901, D’Arcy bought a 60 year concession for oil exploration In Iran.
The Iranian government extended it for another 32 years in 1933.
At that time oil was Iran’s “main source of income.”
In 1917’s Balfour Declaration, the British government proclaimed that they favored a national home for the Jews in Palestine and their “best endeavors to facilitate the achievement” of that.
The British police were in charge of policing in the mandate of Palestine. A lot of the policemen they hired were people who had served in the British army before, during the Irish War for Independence.
The army tried to stop how violent the police were, police used torture and brutality, some that had been used during the Irish War for Independence, like having prisoners tied to armored cars and locomotives and razing the homes of people in prison or people they thought were related to people thought to be rebels.
The police hired Arab police and Jewish police for lower level policing,
Making local people part of the management.
“Let Arab police beat up Arabs and Jewish police beat up Jews.”
The lava blocks and reroutes streams, melts snow and ice, flooding.
In 1922, there were 83,000 Jews, 71,000 Christians, and 589,000 Muslims.
The League If Nations endorsed the British Mandate.
During an emergency, in the 1930s, British regulations allowed collective punishment, punishing villages for incidents.
Local officers in riots often deserted and also shared intelligence with their own people.
The police often stole, destroyed property, tortured and killed people.
Arab revolts sapped the police power over Palestinians by 1939.
My father’s mother was from a matrilineal family.
My dad remembers tall men lining up on pay day to respectfully wait for her, 5 feet tall.
She married again after her husband died.
A manager from a tile factory,
He spoke English so he supervised finances and correspondence.
My dad, a sunflower, loved her: she scared all the workers but exuded warmth to the people she loved.
Obsidian shields people from negative energy.
David Cargill founded the Burmah Oil Co. in 1886.
If there were problems with oil exploration in Burma and Indian government licenses, Persian oil would protect the company.
In July 1906, many European oil companies, BP, Royal Dutch Shell and others, allied to protect against the American oil company, Standard Oil.
D’Arcy needed money because “Persian oil took three times as long to come on stream as anticipated.”
Burmah Oil Co. began the Anglo-Persian Oil Co. as a subsidiary.
Ninety-seven percent of British Petroleum was owned by Burmah Oil Co.
By 1914, the British government owned 51% of the Anglo-Persian Oil Co.
Anglo-Persian acquired independence from Burmah Oil and Royal Dutch Shell with two million pounds from the British government.
The lava burns the rock off the edge of the volcano.
In 1942, after the Japanese took Burma,
the British destroyed their refineries before leaving.
The United Nations had to find other sources of oil.
In 1943, Japan built the Burma-Thailand Railroad with forced labor from the Malay peninsula who were mostly from the rubber plantations.
The rock goes down with the lava, breaking through the rocks as it goes down.
In 1945. Japan destroyed their refineries before leaving Burma.
Cargill, Watson and Whigham were on the Burmah Oil Co. Board and then the Anglo Iranian Oil Co. Board.
In 1936 Palestine, boycotts, work stoppages, and violence against British police officials and soldiers compelled the government to appoint an investigatory commission.
Leaders of Egypt, Trans Jordan, Syria and Iraq helped end the work stoppages.
The British government had the Peel Commission read letters, memoranda, and petitions and speak with British officials, Jews and Arabs.
The Commission didn’t believe that Arabs and Jews could live together in a single Jewish state.
Because of administrative and financial difficulties the Colonial Secretary stated that to split Palestine into Arab and Jewish states was impracticable.
The Commission recommended transitioning 250,000 Arabs and 1500 Jews with British control over their oil pipeline, their naval base and Jerusalem.
The League of Nations approved.
“It will not remove the grievance nor prevent the recurrence,” Lord Peel stated after.
The Arab uprising was much more militant after Peel. Thousands of Arabs were wounded, ten thousand were detained.
In Sykes-Picot and the Husain McMahon agreements, the British promised the Arabs an independent state but they did not keep that promise.
Representatives from the Arab states rejected the Peel recommendations.
United Nations General Assembly Resolution181 partitioned Palestine into Arab and Jewish states with an international regime for the city of Jerusalem backed by the United States and the Soviet Union.
The Israeli Yishuv had strong military and intelligence organization —-
the British recognized that their interest was with the Arabs and abstained from the vote.
In 1948, Israel declared the establishment of its state.
Ground rock, minerals, and gas covered the ground from the ash plume.
The Palestinian police force was disbanded and the British gave officers the option of serving in Malaya.
Though Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy supported snd tried to get Israel to offer the Arabs concessions, it wasn’t a major priority and didn’t always approve of Israel’s plans.
Arabs that had supported the British to end Turkish rule stopped supporting the West.
Many Palestinians joined left wing groups and violent third world movements.
Seventy-eight percent of the territory of former Palestine was under Israel’s control.
My dad left for college in 1957 and lived in an apartment above the United States Information services office.
Because he graduated at the top of his class, he was given a job with the public works department of the government on the electricity board.
“Once in, you’ll never leave.”
When he wanted a job where he could do real work, his father was upset.
He broke the chains with bells for vespers.
He got a job in Calcutta at Kusum Products and left the government, though it was prestigious to work there.
In the chemical engineering division, one of the projects he worked on was to design a *** distillery, bells controlled by hammers, hammers controlled by a keyboard.
His boss worked in the United Kingdom for. 20 years before the company he worked at, part of Power Gas Corporation, asked him to open a branch in Calcutta.
He opened the branch and convinced an Industrialist to open a company doing the same work with him. The branch he opened closed after that.
My dad applied for labor certification to work abroad and was selected.
His boss wrote a reference letter for my him to the company he left in the UK. My dad sent it telling the company when he was leaving for the UK.
The day he left for London, he got the letter they sent in the mail telling him to take the train to Sheffield the next day and someone from the firm would meet him at the station.
His dad didn’t know he left, he didn’t tell him.
He broke the chains with chimes for schisms.
Anglo-Persian Oil became Anglo-Iranian Oil in 1935.
The British government used oil and Anglo-Persian oil to fight communism, have a stronger relationship with the United States and make the United Kingdom more powerful.
The National Secularists, the Tudeh, and the Communists wanted to nationalize Iran’s oil and mobilized the Iranian people.
The British feared nationalization in Iran would incite political parties like the Secular Nationalists all over the world.
In 1947, the Iranian government passed the Single Article Law that “[increased] investment In welfare benefits, health, housing, education, and implementation of Iranianization through substitution of foreigners” at Anglo-Iranian Oil Co.
“Anglo-Iranian Oil Company made more profit in 1950 than it paid to the Iranian government in royalties over the previous half century.”
The Anglo-Iranian Oil Company tried to negotiate a new concession and claimed they’d hire more Iranian people into jobs held by British and people from other nationalities at the company.
Their hospitals had segregated wards.
On May 1, 1951, the Iranian government passed a bill that nationalized Anglo- Iranian Oil Co.’s holdings.
During the day, only the steam from the hot lava can be seen.
In August 1953, the Iranian people elected Mossadegh from the Secular Nationalist Party as prime minister.
The British government with the CIA overthrew Mossadegh using the Iranian military after inducing protests and violent demonstrations.
Anglo-Iranian Oil changed its name to British Petroleum in 1954.
Iranians believe that America destroyed Iran’s “last chance for democracy” and blamed America for Iran’s autocracy, its human rights abuses, and secret police.
The smoldering sound of the lava sizzles underneath the dried lava.
In 1946, Executive Yuan wanted control over 4 groups of Islands in the South China Sea to have a stronger presence there: the Paracels, the Spratlys, Macclesfield Bank, and the Pratas.
The French forces in the South China Sea would have been stronger than the Chinese Navy then.
French Naval forces were in the Gulf of Tonkin, U.S. forces were in the Taiwan Strait, the British were in Hong Kong, and the Portuguese were in Macao.
In the 1950s, British snd U.S. oil companies thought there might be oil in the Spratlys.
By 1957, French presence in the South China Sea was hardly there.
When the volcano erupted, the lava dried at the ocean into black sand.
By 1954, the Tudeh Party’s communist movement and intelligence organization had been destroyed.
Because of the Shah and his government’s westernization policies and disrespectful treatment of the Ulama, Iranians began identifying with the Ulama and Khomeini rather than their government.
Those people joined with secular movements to overthrow the Shah.
In 1966, Ne Win seized power from U Nu in Burma.
“Soldiers ruled Burma as soldiers.”
Ne Win thought that western political
Institutions “encouraged divisions.”
Minority groups found foreign support for their separatist goals.
The Karens and the Mons supported U Nu in Bangkok.
Rare copper, a heavy metal, no alloys,
a rock in groundwater,
conducts electricity and heat.
In 1965, my Dad’s cousin met him at Heathrow, gave him a coat and £10 and brought him to a bed and breakfast across from Charing Cross Station where he’d get the train to Sheffield the next morning.
He took the train and someone met him at the train station.
At the interview they asked him to design a grandry girder, the main weight bearing steel girder as a test.
Iron in the inner and outer core of the earth,
He’d designed many of those.
He was hired and lived at the YMCA for 2 1/2 years.
He took his mother’s family name, Menon, instead of his father’s, Varma.
In 1967, he left for Canada and interviewed at Bechtel before getting hired at Seagrams.
Iron enables blood to carry oxygen.
His boss recommended him for Dale Carnegie’s leadership training classes and my dad joined the National Instrument Society and became President.
He designed a still In Jamaica,
Ordered all the parts, nuts and bolts,
Had all the parts shipped to Jamaica and made sure they got there.
His boss supervised the construction, installation and commission in Jamaica.
Quartz, heat and fade resistant, though he was an engineer and did the work of an engineer, my dad only had the title, technician so my dad’s boss thought he wasn’t getting paid enough but couldn’t get his boss to offer more than an extra $100/week or the title of engineer; he told my dad he thought he should leave.
In 1969, he got a job at Celanese, which made rayon.
He quit Celanese to work at McGill University and they allowed him to take classes to earn his MBA while working.
The United States and Israel’s alliance was strong by 1967.
United Nations Security Council Resolution 242 at the end of the Third Arab Israeli War didn’t mention the Palestinians but mentioned the refugee problem.
After 1967, the Palestinians weren’t often mentioned and when mentioned only as terrorists.
Palestinians’ faith in the “American sponsored peace process” diminished, they felt the world community ignored and neglected them also.
Groups like MAN that stopped expecting anything from Arab regimes began hijacking airplanes.
By 1972, the Palestine Liberation Organization had enough international support to get by the United States’ veto in the United Nations Security Council and Arab League recognition as representative of the Palestinian people.
The Palestinians knew the United States stated its support, as the British had, but they weren’t able to accomplish anything.
The force Israel exerted in Johnson’s United States policy delivered no equilibrium for the Palestinians.
In 1969, all political parties submitted to the BSPP, Burma Socialist Programme Party.
Ne Win nationalized banks and oil and deprived minorities of opportunities.
Ne Win became U Nu Win, civilian leader of Burma in 1972 and stopped the active role that U Nu defined for Burma internationally
He put military people in power even when they didn’t have experience which triggered “maldistribution of goods and chronic shortages.”
Resources were located in areas where separatist minorities had control.
The British presence in the South China Sea ended in 1968.
The United States left Vietnam in 1974 and China went into the Western Paracels.
The U.S. didn’t intervene and Vietnam took the Spratlys.
China wanted to claim the continental shelf In the central part of the South China Sea and needed the Spratlys.
The United States mostly disregarded the Ulama In Iran and bewildered the Iranian people by not supporting their revolution.
Obsidian—
iron, copper and chromium—
isn’t a gas
but it isn’t a crystal;
it’s between the two,
the ordered crystal and the disordered gas.
They made swords out of obsidian.
Edelweiss
I laid out in my backyard in my bikini.
I love the feeling of my body in the sun.
I’d be dark from the end of spring until winter.
The snow froze my bare feet through winter ,
my skin pale.
American towns in 1984,
Free, below glaciers the sunlight melted the snow,
a sea of green and the edelweiss on the edge of the limestone,
frosted but still strong.
When the spring warmed the grass,
the grass warmed my feet.
The whole field looked cold and white from the glacier but in the meadow,
the bright yellow centers of those flowers float free in the center of the white petals.
The bright yellow center of those edelweiss scared the people my parents ran to America from India to get away from.
On a sidewalk in Queens, New York in 1991, the men stared and yelled comments at me in short shorts and a fitted top in the summer.
I grabbed my dad’s arm.
The Bread and Coconut Butter of Aparigraha
Twelve year old flowerhead,
Marigold, yarrow and nettle,
I’d be all emotion
If not for all my work
From the time I was a teenager.
I got depressed a lot.
I related to people I read about
In my weather balloon,
Grasping, ignorant, and desperate,
But couldn’t relate to other twelve year olds.
After school I read Dali’s autobiography,
Young ****** Autosodomized by Her Own Chastity.
Fresh, green nettle with fresh and dried yarrow for purity.
Dead souls enticed to the altar by orange marigolds,
passion and creativity,
Coax sleep and rouse dreams.
Satellites measure indirectly with wave lengths of light.
My weather balloon measures the lower and middle levels of the atmosphere directly,
Fifty thousand feet high,
Metal rod thermometer,
Slide humidity sensor,
Canister for air pressure.
I enjoy rye bread and cold coconut butter in my weather balloon,
But I want Dali, and all the artists and writers.
Rye grows at high altitudes
But papyrus grows in soil and shallow water,
Strips of papyrus pith shucked from their stems.
When an anchor’s weighed, a ship sails,
But when grounded we sail.
Marigolds, yarrow and nettle,
Flowerhead,
I use the marigold for sleep,
The yarrow for endurance and intensity,
toiling for love and truth,
And the nettle for healing.
Strong rye bread needs equally strong flavors.
By the beginning of high school,
I read a lot of Beat literature
And found Buddhism.
I loved what I read
But I didn’t like some things.
I liked attachment.
I got to the ground.
Mushrooms grow in dry soil.
Attachment to beauty is Buddha activity.
Not being attached to things I don’t find beautiful is Buddha activity.
I fried mushrooms in a single layer in oil, fleshy.
I roasted mushrooms at high temperatures in the oven, crisp.
I simmered mushrooms in stock with kombu.
Rye bread with cold coconut butter and cremini mushrooms,
raw, soft and firm.
Life continues, life changes,
Attachments, losses, mourning and suffering,
But change lures growth.
I find stream beds and wet soil.
I lay the strips of papyrus next to each other.
I cross papyrus strips over the first,
Then wet the crossed papyrus strips,
Press and cement them into a sheet.
I hammer it and dry it in the sun,
With no thought of achievement or self,
Flowerhead,
Hands filled with my past,
Head filled with the future,
Dali, artists poets,
Wishes and desires aligned with nature,
Abundance,
Cocoa, caraway, and molasses.
If I ever really like someone,
I’ll be wearing the dress he chooses,
Fresh green nettle and yarrow, the seeds take two years to grow strong,
Lasting love.
Marigolds steer dead souls from the altar to the afterlife,
Antiseptic, healing wounds,
Soothing sore throats and headaches.
Imperturbable, stable flowerhead,
I empty my mind.
When desires are aligned with nature, desire flows.
Papyrus makes paper and cloth.
Papyrus makes sails.
Charcoal from the ash of pulverized papyrus heals wounds.
Without attachment to the fruit of action
There is continuation of life,
Rye bread and melted coconut butter,
The coconut tree in the coconut butter,
The seed comes from the ground out of nothing,
Naturalness.
It has form.
As the seed grows the seed expresses the tree,
The seed expresses the coconut,
The seed expresses the coconut butter.
Rye bread, large open hollows, chambers,
Immersed in melted coconut butter,
Desire for expansion and creation,
No grasping, not desperate.
When the mind is compassion, the mind is boundless.
Every moment,
only that,
Every moment,
a scythe to the papyrus in the stream bed of the past.
Sound on Powdery Blue
Potter’s clay, nymph, plum unplumbed, 1993.
Dahlia, ice, powder, musk and rose,
my source of life emerged in darkness, blackness.
Seashell fragments in the sand,
The glass ball of my life cracked inside,
Light reflected off the salt crystal cracks,
Nacre kept those cracks from getting worse.
Young ****** Autosodomized By Her Own Chastity,
Nymph, I didn’t want to give my body,
Torn, *****, ballgown,
To people who wouldn’t understand me,
Piquant.
Outside on the salt flats,
Aphrodite, goddess of beauty, pleasure and fertility and
Asexual Artemis, goddess of animals, and the hunt,
Mistress of nymphs,
Punish with ruthless savagery.
In my bedroom, blue caribou moss covered rocks, pine, and yew trees,
The heartwood writhes as hurricane gales, twisters and whirlwinds
Contort their bark,
Roots strong in the soil.
Orris root dried in the sun, bulbs like wood.
Dahlia runs to baritone soundbath radio waves.
Light has frequencies,
Violet between blue and invisible ultraviolet,
Flame, slate and flint.
Every night is cold.
Torii gates, pain secured as sacred.
An assignation, frost hardy dahlia and a plangent resonant echo.
High frequency sound waves convert to electrical signals,
Breathe from someone I want,
Silt.
Beam, radiate, ensorcel.
I break the bark,
Sap flows and dries,
Resin seals over the tear.
I distill pine,
Resin and oil for turpentine, a solvent.
Quiver, bemired,
I lead sound into my darkness,
Orris butter resin, sweet and warm,
Hot jam drops on snow drops,
Orange ash on smoke,
Balm on lava,
The problem with cotton candy.
Electrical signals give off radiation or light waves,
The narrow frequency range where
The crest of a radio wave and the crest of a light wave overlap,
Infrared.
Glaciers flow, sunlight melts the upper layers of the snow when strong,
A wet snow avalanche,
A torrent, healing.
Brown sugar and whiskey,
Undulant, lavender.
Pine pitch, crystalline, sticky, rich and golden,
And dried pine rosin polishes glass smooth
Like the smell of powdery orris after years.
Softness, flush, worthy/not worthy,
Rich rays thunder,
Intensify my pulse,
Frenzied red,
Violet between blue and invisible ultraviolet.
Babylon—flutter, glow.
Unquenchable cathartic orris.
Pink Graphite
Camellias, winter shrubs,
Their shallow roots grow beneath the spongy caribou moss,
Robins egg blue.
After writing a play with my gifted students program in 1991,
I stopped spending all my free time writing short stories,
But the caribou moss was still soft.
In the cold Arctic of that town,
The evergreen protected the camellias from the afternoon sun and storms.
They branded hardy camellias with a brass molded embossing iron;
I had paper and graphite for my pencils.
After my ninth grade honors English teacher asked us to write poems in 1994,
It began raining.
We lived on an overhang.
A vertical rise to the top of the rock.
The rainstorm caused a metamorphic change in the snowpack,
A wet snow avalanche drifted slowly down the moss covered rock,
The snow already destabilized by exposure to the sunlight.
The avalanche formed lakes,
rock basins washed away with rainwater and melted snow,
Streams dammed by the rocks.
My pencils washed away in the avalanche,
My clothes heavy and cold.
I wove one side of each warp fiber through the eye of the needle and one side through each slot,
Salves, ointments, serums and tinctures.
I was mining for graphite.
They were mining me,
The only winch, the sound through the water.
A steep staircase to the red Torii gates,
I broke the chains with bells for vespers
And chimes for schisms,
And wove the weft across at right angles to the warp.
On a rocky ledge at the end of winter,
The pink moon, bitters and body butter,
They tried to get me to want absinthe,
Wormwood for bitterness and regret.
Heat and pressure formed carbon for flakes of graphite.
Heat and pressure,
I made bitters,
Brandy, grapefruit, chocolate, mandarin rind, tamarind and sugar.
I grounded my feet in the pink moss,
paper dried in one hand,
and graphite for my pencils in the other.
Flakes
I don’t let people that put me down be part of my life.
Gardens and trees,
My shadow sunk in the grass in my yard
As I ate bread, turmeric and lemon.
Carbon crystallizes into graphite flakes.
I write to see well,
Graphite on paper.
A shadow on rock tiles with a shield, a diamond and a bell
Had me ***** to humiliate me.
Though I don’t let people that put me down near me,
A lot of people putting me down seemed like they were following me,
A platform to jump from
While she had her temple.
There was a pink door to the platform.
I ate bread with caramelized crusts and
Drank turmeric lemonade
Before I opened that door,
Jumped and
Descended into blankets and feathers.
I found matches and rosin
For turpentine to clean,
Dried plums and licorice.
In the temple,
In diamonds, leather, wool and silk,
She had her shield and bells,
Drugs and technology,
Thermovision 210 and Minox,
And an offering box where people believed
That if their coins went in
Their wishes would come true.
Hollyhock and smudging charcoal for work,
Belled,
I ground grain in the mill for the bread I baked for breakfast.
The bells are now communal bells
With a watchtower and a prison,
Her shield, a blowtorch and flux,
Her ex rays, my makeshift records
Because Stalin didn’t like people dancing,
He liked them divebombing.
Impurities in the carbon prevent diamonds from forming,
Measured,
The most hard, the most expensive,
But graphite’s soft delocalized electrons move.
OCEAN BED
The loneliness of going to sleep by myself.
I want a bed that’s high off the ground,
a mattress, an ocean.
I want a crush and that person in my bed.
Only that,
a crush in my bed,
an ocean in my bed.
Just love.
But I sleep with my thumbs sealed.
I sleep with my hands, palms up.
I sleep with my hands at my heart.
They sear my compassion with their noise.
They hold their iron over their fire and try to carve their noise into my love,
scored by the violence of voices, dark and lurid,
but not burned.
I want a man in my bed.
When I wake up in an earthquake
I want to be held through the aftershocks.
I like men,
the waves come in and go out
but the ocean was part of my every day.
I don’t mind being fetishized in the ocean.
I ran by the ocean every morning.
I surfed in the ocean.
I should’ve gone into the ocean that afternoon at Trestles,
holding my water jugs, kneeling at the edge.
Morning
I want to fall asleep in the warm arms of a fireman.
I want to wake up to the smell of coffee in my kitchen.
Morning—the molten lava in the outer core of the earth embeds the iron from the inner core into the earth’s magnetic field.
The magnetic field flips.
The sun, so strong, where it gets through the trees it burns everything but the pine.
The winds change direction.
Storms cast lightening and rain.
Iron conducts solar flares and the heavy wind.
In that pine forest, I shudder every time I see a speck of light for fear of neon and fluorescents. The eucalyptus cleanses congestion.
And Kerouac’s stream ululates, crystal bowl sound baths.
I follow the sound to the water.
The stream ends at a bluff with a thin rocky beach below.
The green water turns black not far from the shore.
Before diving into the ocean, I eat globe mallow from the trees, stems and leaves, the viscous flesh, red, soft and nutty.
I distill the pine from one of the tree’s bark and smudge the charcoal over my skin.
Death, the palo santo’s lit, cleansing negative energy.
It’s been so long since I’ve smelled a man, woodsmoke, citrus and tobacco.
Jasmine, plum, lime and tuberose oil on the base of my neck comforts.
Parabolic chambers heal, sound waves through water travel four times faster.
The sound of the open sea recalibrates.
I dissolve into the midnight blue of the ocean.
I want to fall asleep in the warm arms of a fireman.
I want to wake up to the smell of coffee in my kitchen.
I want hot water with coconut oil when I get up.
We’d lay out on the lawn, surrounded by high trees that block the wind.
Embers flying through the air won’t land in my yard, on my grass, or near my trees.
Blue Paper
Haze scatters blue light on a planet.
Frought women, livid, made into peonies by Aphrodites that caught their men flirting and blamed the women, flushed red.
and blamed the women, flushed red.
Frought women, livid, chrysanthemums, dimmed until the end of the season, exchanged and retained like property.
Blue women enter along the sides of her red Torii gates, belayed, branded and belled, a plangent sound.
By candles, colored lights and dried flowers she’s sitting inside on a concrete floor, punctures and ruin burnished with paper, making burnt lime from lime mortar.
Glass ***** on the ceiling, she moves the beads of a Palestinian glass bead bracelet she holds in her hands.
She bends light to make shadows against thin wooden slats curbed along the wall, and straight across the ceiling.
A metier, she makes tinctures, juniper berries and cotton *****.
Loamy soil in the center of the room,
A hawthorn tree stands alone,
A gateway for fairies.
large stones at the base protecting,
It’s branches a barrier.
It’s leaves and shoots make bread and cheese.
It’s berries, red skin and yellow flesh, make jam.
Green bamboo stakes for the peonies when they whither from the weight of their petals.
And lime in the soil.
She adds wood chips to the burnt lime in the kiln,
Unrolled paper, spools, and wire hanging.
Wood prayer beads connect her to the earth,
The tassels on the end of the beads connect her to spirit, to higher truth.
Minerals, marine mud and warm basins of seawater on a flower covered desk.
She adds slaked lime to the burnt lime and wood chips.
The lime converts to paper,
Trauma victims speak,
Light through butterfly wings.
She’s plumeria with curved petals, thick, holding water
The brightest star can shine even with thick black velvet draped over it.
Quartz, lime and salt crystals formed a glass ball.
The dark womb held me, warm and soft.
My mom called my cries when I was born the most sorrowful sound she had ever heard.
She said she’d never heard a baby make a sound like that.
I’d open my eyes in low light until the world’s light healed rather than hurt.
The summer before eighth grade, July 1992,
I watched a shooting star burn by at 100,000 miles per hour as I stood on the balcony
while my family celebrated my birthday inside.
It made it into the earth’s atmosphere
but it didn’t look like it was coming down;
I know it didn’t hit the ground but it burned something in the time it was here.
The glass ball of my life cracked inside.
Light reflected off the salt crystal cracks.
I saw the beauty of the light within.
Nacre from my shell kept those cracks from getting worse,
a wild pearl as defense mechanism.
In 2001, I quit my job after they melted and poured tar all over my life.
All summer literature class bathtubs filled with rose hip oil cleaned the tar.
That fall logic and epistemology classes spewed black ink all over my philosophy
written over ten years then.
Tar turned to asphalt when I met someone from my old job for a drink in November
and it paved a road for my life that went to the hospital I was in that December
where it sealed the roof on my life
when I was almost murdered there
and in February after meeting her for another drink.
They lit a fire at the top of the glacier and pushed the burning pile of black coal off the edge,
burnt red, looking like flames falling into the valley.
While that blazed the side of the cliff something lit an incandescent light.
The electricity from the metal lightbulb ***** went through wires and heated the filament between until it glowed.
I began putting more work into emotional balance from things I learned at AA meetings.
In Spring 2003, the damage that the doctors at the hospital in 2001 had done
made it harder for light to reflect from the cracks in the glass ball.
I’d been eating healthy and trying to get regular exercises since 1994
but in Spring 2003 I began swimming for an hour every morning .
The water washed the pollution from the burning coals off
And then I escaped in July.
I moved to London to study English Language and Linguistics.
I would’ve studied English Language and Literature.
I did well until Spring 2004 when I thought I was being stalked.
I thought I was manic.
I thought I was being stalked.
I went home and didn’t go back for my exams after spring holiday.
Because I felt traumatized and couldn’t write poetry anymore,
I used black ink to write my notes for my book on trauma and the Russian Revolution.
I started teaching myself German.
I stayed healthy.
In 2005, my parents went to visit my mom’s family in Malaysia for two weeks.
I thought I was being stalked.
I knew I wasn’t manic.
I thought I was being stalked.
I told my parents when they came home.
They thought I was manic.
I showed them the shoe prints in the snow of different sizes from the woods to the windows.
They thought I was manic.
I was outside of my comfort zone.
I moved to California. I found light.
I made light,
the light reflected off the salt crystals I used to heal the violence inflicted on me from then on.
The light turned the traffic lights to not just green from red
but amber and blue.
The light turned the car signals left and right.
The light reflected off of salt crystals, light emitting diodes,
electrical energy turned directly to light,
electroluminescence.
The electrical currents flowed through,
illuminating.
Alone in the world, I moved to California in July 2005
but in August I called the person I escaped in 2003,
the sulfur and nitrogen that I hated.
He didn’t think I was manic but I never said anything.
I never told him why I asked him to move out to California.
When his coal seemed like only pollution,
I asked him to leave.
He threatened me.
I called the authorities.
They left me there.
He laughed.
Then the violence came.
****: stabbed and punched, my ****** bruised, purple and swollen.
The light barely reflected from the glass ball wIth cracks through all the acid rain, smoke and haze.
It would take me half an hour to get my body to do what my mind told it to after.
My dad told me my mom had her cancer removed.
The next day, the coal said if I wanted him to leave he’d leave.
I booked his ticket.
I drove him to the airport.
Black clouds gushed the night before for the first time in months,
the sky clear after the rain.
He was gone and I was free,
melted glass, heated up and poured—
looked like fire,
looked like the Snow Moon in February
with Mercury in the morning sky.
I worked through ****.
I worked to overcome trauma.
Electricity between touch and love caused acid rain, smoke, haze, and mercury
to light the discharge lamps, streetlights and parking lot lights.
Then I changed the direction of the light waves.
Like lead glass breaks up the light,
lead from the coal, cleaned and replaced by potassium,
glass cut clearly, refracting the light,
electrolytes,
electrical signals lit through my body,
thick black velvet drapes gone.
Lava
I think that someone wrote into some palm leaf a manuscript, a gift, a contract.
After my parents wedding, while they were still in India,
they found out that my dad’s father and my mom’s grandfather worked for kings administering temples and collecting money for their king from the farmers that worked the rice paddies each king owned. They both left their homes before they left for college.
My dad, a son of a brahmin’s son,
grew up in his grandmother’s house.
His mother was not a Brahmin.
My mother grew up in Malaysia where she saw the children from the rubber plantation
when she walked to school.
She doesn’t say what caste she is.
He went to his father’s house, then college.
He worked, then went to England, then Canada.
She went to India then Canada.
They moved to the United States around Christmas 1978
with my brother while she was pregnant with me.
My father signed a contract with my mother.
My parents took ashes and formed rock,
the residue left in brass pots in India,
the rocks, so hot, they turned back to lava miles away before turning back to ash again,
then back to rock,
the lava from a super volcano,
the ash purple and red.
Circles on a Moss Covered Volcano
The eruption beatifies the magma.
It becomes obsidian,
only breaks with a fracture,
smooth circles where it breaks.
My mom was born on the grass
on a lawn
in a moss covered canyon at the top of a volcanic island.
My grandfather lived in Malaysia before the Japanese occupied.
When the volcano erupted,
the lava dried at the ocean into black sand.
The British allied with the Communist Party of Malaysia—
after they organized.
After the Americans defeated the Japanese at Pearl Harbor,
the British took over Malaysia again.
They kept different groups apart claiming they were helping them.
The black sand had smooth pebbles and sharp rocks.
Ethnic Malay farmers lived in Kampongs, villages.
Indians lived on plantations.
The Chinese lived in towns and urban areas.
Ethnic Malays wanted independence.
In 1946, after strikes, demonstrations, and boycotts
the British agreed to work with them.
The predominantly Chinese Communist Party of Malaysia went underground,
guerrilla warfare against the British,
claiming their fight was for independence.
For the British, that emergency required vast powers
of arrest, detention without trial and deportation to defeat terrorism.
The Emergency became less unpopular as the terrorism became worse.
The British were the iron that brought oxygen through my mom’s body.
She loved riding on her father’s motorcycle with him
by the plantations,
through the Kampongs
and to the city, half an hour away.
The British left Malaysia independent in 1957
with Malaysian nationalists holding most state and federal government offices.
As the black sand stretches towards the ocean,
it becomes big stones of dried lava, flat and smooth.
My mom thought her father and her uncle were subservient to the British.
She thought all things, all people were equal.
When her father died when she was 16, 1965,
they moved to India,
my mother,
a foreigner in India, though she’s Indian.
She loved rock and roll and mini skirts
and didn’t speak the local language.
On the dried black lava,
it can be hard to know the molten lava flickers underneath there.
Before the Korean War,
though Britain and the United States wanted
an aggressive resolution
condemning North Korea,
they were happy
that India supported a draft resolution
condemning North Korea
for breach of the peace.
During the Korean War,
India, supported by Third World and other Commonwealth nations,
opposed United States’ proposals.
They were able to change the U.S. resolution
to include the proposals they wanted
and helped end the war.
China wanted the respect of Third World nations
and saw the United States as imperialist.
China thought India was a threat to the Third World
by taking aid from the United States and the Soviets.
Pakistan could help with that and a seat at the United Nations.
China wanted Taiwan’s seat at the UN.
My mother went to live with her uncle,
a communist negotiator for a corporation,
in India.
A poet,
he threw parties and invited other artists, musicians and writers.
I have the same brown hyperpigmentation at my joints that he had.
During the day, only the steam from the hot lava can be seen.
In 1965, Pakistani forces went into Jammu and Kashmir with China’s support.
China threatened India after India sent its troops in.
Then they threatened again before sending their troops to the Indian border.
The United States stopped aid to Pakistan and India.
Pakistan agreed to the UN ceasefire agreement.
Pakistan helped China get a seat at the UN
and tried to keep the west from escalating in Vietnam.
The smoldering sound of the lava sizzles underneath the dried lava.
When West Pakistan refused to allow East Pakistan independence,
violence between Bengalis and Biharis developed into upheaval.
Bengalis moved to India
and India went into East Pakistan.
Pakistan surrendered in December 1971.
East Pakistan became independent Bangladesh
The warm light of the melted lava radiates underneath but burns.
In 1974, India tested the Smiling Buddha,
a nuclear bomb.
After Indira Gandhi’s conviction for election fraud in 1973,
Marxist Professor Narayan called for total revolution
and students protested all over India.
With food shortages, inflation and regional disputes
like Sikh separatists training in Pakistan for an independent Punjab,
peasants and laborers joined the protests.
Railway strikes stopped the economy.
In 1975, Indira Gandhi, the Iron Lady,
declared an Emergency,
imprisoning political opponents, restricting freedoms and restricting the press,
claiming threats to national security
because the war with Pakistan had just ended.
The federal government took over Kerala’s communist dominated government and others.
My mom could’ve been a dandelion, but she’s more like thistle.
She has the center that dries and flutters in the wind,
beautiful and silky,
spiny and prickly,
but still fluffy, downy,
A daisy.
They say thistle saved Scotland from the Norse.
Magma from the volcano explodes
and the streams of magma fly into the air.
In the late 60s,
the civil rights movement rose
against the state in Northern Ireland
for depriving Catholics
of influence and opportunity.
The Northern Irish police,
Protestant and unionist, anti-catholic,
responded violently to the protests and it got worse.
In 1969, the British placed Arthur Young,
who had worked at the Federation of Malaya
at the time of their Emergency
at the head of the British military in Northern Ireland.
The British military took control over the police,
a counter insurgency rather than a police force,
crowd control, house searches, interrogation, and street patrols,
use of force against suspects and uncooperative citizens.
Political crimes were tolerated by Protestants but not Catholics.
The lava burns the rock off the edge of the volcano.
On January 30, 1972, ****** Sunday,
British Army policing killed 13 unarmed protesters
fighting for their rights over their neighborhood,
protesting the internment of suspected nationalists.
That led to protests across Ireland.
When banana leaves are warmed,
oil from the banana leaves flavors the food.
My dad flew from Canada to India in February 1972.
On February 4, my dad met my mom.
On February 11, 1972,
my dad married my mom.
They went to Canada,
a quartz singing bowl and a wooden mallet wrapped in suede.
The rock goes down with the lava, breaking through the rocks as it goes down.
In March 1972, the British government took over
because they considered the Royal Ulster Police and the Ulster Special Constabulary
to be causing most of the violence.
The lava blocks and reroutes streams,
melts snow and ice,
flooding.
Days later, there’s still smoke, red.
My mom could wear the clothes she liked
without being judged
with my dad in Canada.
She didn’t like asking my dad for money.
My dad, the copper helping my mother use that iron,
wanted her to go to college and finish her bachelors degree.
She got a job.
In 1976, the police took over again in Northern Ireland
but they were a paramilitary force—
armored SUVs, bullet proof jackets, combat ready
with the largest computerized surveillance system in the UK,
high powered weapons,
trained in counter insurgency.
Many people were murdered by the police
and few were held accountable.
Most of the murdered people were not involved in violence or crime.
People were arrested under special emergency powers
for interrogation and intelligence gathering.
People tried were tried in non-jury courts.
My mom learned Malayalam in India
but didn’t speak well until living with my dad.
She also learned to cook after getting married.
Her mother sent her recipes; my dad cooked for her—
turmeric, cumin, coriander, cayenne and green chiles.
Having lived in different countries,
my mom’s food was exposed to many cultures,
Chinese and French.
Ground rock, minerals and glass
covered the ground
from the ash plume.
She liked working.
A volcano erupted for 192 years,
an ice age,
disordered ices, deformed under pressure
and ordered ice crystals, brittle in the ice core records.
My mother liked working.
Though Khomeini was in exile by the 1970s in Iran,
more people, working and poor,
turned to him and the ****-i-Ulama for help.
My mom didn’t want kids though my dad did.
She agreed and in 1978 my brother was born.
Iran modernized but agriculture and industry changed so quickly.
In January 1978, students protested—
censorship, surveillance, harassment, illegal detention and torture.
Young people and the unemployed joined.
My parents moved to the United States in December 1978.
The regime used a lot of violence against the protesters,
and in September 1978 declared martial law in Iran.
Troops were shooting demonstrators.
In January 1979, the Shah and his family fled.
On February 11, 1979, my parents’ anniversary,
the Iranian army declared neutrality.
I was born in July 1979.
The chromium in emeralds and rubies colors them.
My brother was born in May and I was born in July.
Obsidian—
iron, copper and chromium—
isn’t a gas
but it isn’t a crystal;
it’s between the two,
the ordered crystal and the disordered gas.
They made swords out of obsidian.
Warm Light Shatters
The eruption beatifies the magma.
It becomes obsidian,
only breaks with a fracture,
smooth circles where it breaks.
My dad was born on a large flat rock on the edge of the top
of a hill,
Molasses, sweet and dark, the potent flavor dominates,
His father, the son of a Brahmin,
His mother from a lower caste.
His father’s family wouldn’t touch him,
He grew up in his mother’s mother’s house on a farm.
I have the same brown hyperpigmentation spot on my right hand that he has.
In 1901, D’Arcy bought a 60 year concession for oil exploration In Iran.
The Iranian government extended it for another 32 years in 1933.
At that time oil was Iran’s “main source of income.”
In 1917’s Balfour Declaration, the British government proclaimed that they favored a national home for the Jews in Palestine and their “best endeavors to facilitate the achievement” of that.
The British police were in charge of policing in the mandate of Palestine. A lot of the policemen they hired were people who had served in the British army before, during the Irish War for Independence.
The army tried to stop how violent the police were, police used torture and brutality, some that had been used during the Irish War for Independence, like having prisoners tied to armored cars and locomotives and razing the homes of people in prison or people they thought were related to people thought to be rebels.
The police hired Arab police and Jewish police for lower level policing,
Making local people part of the management.
“Let Arab police beat up Arabs and Jewish police beat up Jews.”
The lava blocks and reroutes streams, melts snow and ice, flooding.
In 1922, there were 83,000 Jews, 71,000 Christians, and 589,000 Muslims.
The League If Nations endorsed the British Mandate.
During an emergency, in the 1930s, British regulations allowed collective punishment, punishing villages for incidents.
Local officers in riots often deserted and also shared intelligence with their own people.
The police often stole, destroyed property, tortured and killed people.
Arab revolts sapped the police power over Palestinians by 1939.
My father’s mother was from a matrilineal family.
My dad remembers tall men lining up on pay day to respectfully wait for her, 5 feet tall.
She married again after her husband died.
A manager from a tile factory,
He spoke English so he supervised finances and correspondence.
My dad, a sunflower, loved her: she scared all the workers but exuded warmth to the people she loved.
Obsidian shields people from negative energy.
David Cargill founded the Burmah Oil Co. in 1886.
If there were problems with oil exploration in Burma and Indian government licenses, Persian oil would protect the company.
In July 1906, many European oil companies, BP, Royal Dutch Shell and others, allied to protect against the American oil company, Standard Oil.
D’Arcy needed money because “Persian oil took three times as long to come on stream as anticipated.”
Burmah Oil Co. began the Anglo-Persian Oil Co. as a subsidiary.
Ninety-seven percent of British Petroleum was owned by Burmah Oil Co.
By 1914, the British government owned 51% of the Anglo-Persian Oil Co.
Anglo-Persian acquired independence from Burmah Oil and Royal Dutch Shell with two million pounds from the British government.
The lava burns the rock off the edge of the volcano.
In 1942, after the Japanese took Burma,
the British destroyed their refineries before leaving.
The United Nations had to find other sources of oil.
In 1943, Japan built the Burma-Thailand Railroad with forced labor from the Malay peninsula who were mostly from the rubber plantations.
The rock goes down with the lava, breaking through the rocks as it goes down.
In 1945. Japan destroyed their refineries before leaving Burma.
Cargill, Watson and Whigham were on the Burmah Oil Co. Board and then the Anglo Iranian Oil Co. Board.
In 1936 Palestine, boycotts, work stoppages, and violence against British police officials and soldiers compelled the government to appoint an investigatory commission.
Leaders of Egypt, Trans Jordan, Syria and Iraq helped end the work stoppages.
The British government had the Peel Commission read letters, memoranda, and petitions and speak with British officials, Jews and Arabs.
The Commission didn’t believe that Arabs and Jews could live together in a single Jewish state.
Because of administrative and financial difficulties the Colonial Secretary stated that to split Palestine into Arab and Jewish states was impracticable.
The Commission recommended transitioning 250,000 Arabs and 1500 Jews with British control over their oil pipeline, their naval base and Jerusalem.
The League of Nations approved.
“It will not remove the grievance nor prevent the recurrence,” Lord Peel stated after.
The Arab uprising was much more militant after Peel. Thousands of Arabs were wounded, ten thousand were detained.
In Sykes-Picot and the Husain McMahon agreements, the British promised the Arabs an independent state but they did not keep that promise.
Representatives from the Arab states rejected the Peel recommendations.
United Nations General Assembly Resolution181 partitioned Palestine into Arab and Jewish states with an international regime for the city of Jerusalem backed by the United States and the Soviet Union.
The Israeli Yishuv had strong military and intelligence organization —-
the British recognized that their interest was with the Arabs and abstained from the vote.
In 1948, Israel declared the establishment of its state.
Ground rock, minerals, and gas covered the ground from the ash plume.
The Palestinian police force was disbanded and the British gave officers the option of serving in Malaya.
Though Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy supported snd tried to get Israel to offer the Arabs concessions, it wasn’t a major priority and didn’t always approve of Israel’s plans.
Arabs that had supported the British to end Turkish rule stopped supporting the West.
Many Palestinians joined left wing groups and violent third world movements.
Seventy-eight percent of the territory of former Palestine was under Israel’s control.
My dad left for college in 1957 and lived in an apartment above the United States Information services office.
Because he graduated at the top of his class, he was given a job with the public works department of the government on the electricity board.
“Once in, you’ll never leave.”
When he wanted a job where he could do real work, his father was upset.
He broke the chains with bells for vespers.
He got a job in Calcutta at Kusum Products and left the government, though it was prestigious to work there.
In the chemical engineering division, one of the projects he worked on was to design a *** distillery, bells controlled by hammers, hammers controlled by a keyboard.
His boss worked in the United Kingdom for. 20 years before the company he worked at, part of Power Gas Corporation, asked him to open a branch in Calcutta.
He opened the branch and convinced an Industrialist to open a company doing the same work with him. The branch he opened closed after that.
My dad applied for labor certification to work abroad and was selected.
His boss wrote a reference letter for my him to the company he left in the UK. My dad sent it telling the company when he was leaving for the UK.
The day he left for London, he got the letter they sent in the mail telling him to take the train to Sheffield the next day and someone from the firm would meet him at the station.
His dad didn’t know he left, he didn’t tell him.
He broke the chains with chimes for schisms.
Anglo-Persian Oil became Anglo-Iranian Oil in 1935.
The British government used oil and Anglo-Persian oil to fight communism, have a stronger relationship with the United States and make the United Kingdom more powerful.
The National Secularists, the Tudeh, and the Communists wanted to nationalize Iran’s oil and mobilized the Iranian people.
The British feared nationalization in Iran would incite political parties like the Secular Nationalists all over the world.
In 1947, the Iranian government passed the Single Article Law that “[increased] investment In welfare benefits, health, housing, education, and implementation of Iranianization through substitution of foreigners” at Anglo-Iranian Oil Co.
“Anglo-Iranian Oil Company made more profit in 1950 than it paid to the Iranian government in royalties over the previous half century.”
The Anglo-Iranian Oil Company tried to negotiate a new concession and claimed they’d hire more Iranian people into jobs held by British and people from other nationalities at the company.
Their hospitals had segregated wards.
On May 1, 1951, the Iranian government passed a bill that nationalized Anglo- Iranian Oil Co.’s holdings.
During the day, only the steam from the hot lava can be seen.
In August 1953, the Iranian people elected Mossadegh from the Secular Nationalist Party as prime minister.
The British government with the CIA overthrew Mossadegh using the Iranian military after inducing protests and violent demonstrations.
Anglo-Iranian Oil changed its name to British Petroleum in 1954.
Iranians believe that America destroyed Iran’s “last chance for democracy” and blamed America for Iran’s autocracy, its human rights abuses, and secret police.
The smoldering sound of the lava sizzles underneath the dried lava.
In 1946, Executive Yuan wanted control over 4 groups of Islands in the South China Sea to have a stronger presence there: the Paracels, the Spratlys, Macclesfield Bank, and the Pratas.
The French forces in the South China Sea would have been stronger than the Chinese Navy then.
French Naval forces were in the Gulf of Tonkin, U.S. forces were in the Taiwan Strait, the British were in Hong Kong, and the Portuguese were in Macao.
In the 1950s, British snd U.S. oil companies thought there might be oil in the Spratlys.
By 1957, French presence in the South China Sea was hardly there.
When the volcano erupted, the lava dried at the ocean into black sand.
By 1954, the Tudeh Party’s communist movement and intelligence organization had been destroyed.
Because of the Shah and his government’s westernization policies and disrespectful treatment of the Ulama, Iranians began identifying with the Ulama and Khomeini rather than their government.
Those people joined with secular movements to overthrow the Shah.
In 1966, Ne Win seized power from U Nu in Burma.
“Soldiers ruled Burma as soldiers.”
Ne Win thought that western political
Institutions “encouraged divisions.”
Minority groups found foreign support for their separatist goals.
The Karens and the Mons supported U Nu in Bangkok.
Rare copper, a heavy metal, no alloys,
a rock in groundwater,
conducts electricity and heat.
In 1965, my Dad’s cousin met him at Heathrow, gave him a coat and £10 and brought him to a bed and breakfast across from Charing Cross Station where he’d get the train to Sheffield the next morning.
He took the train and someone met him at the train station.
At the interview they asked him to design a grandry girder, the main weight bearing steel girder as a test.
Iron in the inner and outer core of the earth,
He’d designed many of those.
He was hired and lived at the YMCA for 2 1/2 years.
He took his mother’s family name, Menon, instead of his father’s, Varma.
In 1967, he left for Canada and interviewed at Bechtel before getting hired at Seagrams.
Iron enables blood to carry oxygen.
His boss recommended him for Dale Carnegie’s leadership training classes and my dad joined the National Instrument Society and became President.
He designed a still In Jamaica,
Ordered all the parts, nuts and bolts,
Had all the parts shipped to Jamaica and made sure they got there.
His boss supervised the construction, installation and commission in Jamaica.
Quartz, heat and fade resistant, though he was an engineer and did the work of an engineer, my dad only had the title, technician so my dad’s boss thought he wasn’t getting paid enough but couldn’t get his boss to offer more than an extra $100/week or the title of engineer; he told my dad he thought he should leave.
In 1969, he got a job at Celanese, which made rayon.
He quit Celanese to work at McGill University and they allowed him to take classes to earn his MBA while working.
The United States and Israel’s alliance was strong by 1967.
United Nations Security Council Resolution 242 at the end of the Third Arab Israeli War didn’t mention the Palestinians but mentioned the refugee problem.
After 1967, the Palestinians weren’t often mentioned and when mentioned only as terrorists.
Palestinians’ faith in the “American sponsored peace process” diminished, they felt the world community ignored and neglected them also.
Groups like MAN that stopped expecting anything from Arab regimes began hijacking airplanes.
By 1972, the Palestine Liberation Organization had enough international support to get by the United States’ veto in the United Nations Security Council and Arab League recognition as representative of the Palestinian people.
The Palestinians knew the United States stated its support, as the British had, but they weren’t able to accomplish anything.
The force Israel exerted in Johnson’s United States policy delivered no equilibrium for the Palestinians.
In 1969, all political parties submitted to the BSPP, Burma Socialist Programme Party.
Ne Win nationalized banks and oil and deprived minorities of opportunities.
Ne Win became U Nu Win, civilian leader of Burma in 1972 and stopped the active role that U Nu defined for Burma internationally
He put military people in power even when they didn’t have experience which triggered “maldistribution of goods and chronic shortages.”
Resources were located in areas where separatist minorities had control.
The British presence in the South China Sea ended in 1968.
The United States left Vietnam in 1974 and China went into the Western Paracels.
The U.S. didn’t intervene and Vietnam took the Spratlys.
China wanted to claim the continental shelf In the central part of the South China Sea and needed the Spratlys.
The United States mostly disregarded the Ulama In Iran and bewildered the Iranian people by not supporting their revolution.
Obsidian—
iron, copper and chromium—
isn’t a gas
but it isn’t a crystal;
it’s between the two,
the ordered crystal and the disordered gas.
They made swords out of obsidian.
Edelweiss
I laid out in my backyard in my bikini.
I love the feeling of my body in the sun.
I’d be dark from the end of spring until winter.
The snow froze my bare feet through winter ,
my skin pale.
American towns in 1984,
Free, below glaciers the sunlight melted the snow,
a sea of green and the edelweiss on the edge of the limestone,
frosted but still strong.
When the spring warmed the grass,
the grass warmed my feet.
The whole field looked cold and white from the glacier but in the meadow,
the bright yellow centers of those flowers float free in the center of the white petals.
The bright yellow center of those edelweiss scared the people my parents ran to America from India to get away from.
On a sidewalk in Queens, New York in 1991, the men stared and yelled comments at me in short shorts and a fitted top in the summer.
I grabbed my dad’s arm.
The Bread and Coconut Butter of Aparigraha
Twelve year old flowerhead,
Marigold, yarrow and nettle,
I’d be all emotion
If not for all my work
From the time I was a teenager.
I got depressed a lot.
I related to people I read about
In my weather balloon,
Grasping, ignorant, and desperate,
But couldn’t relate to other twelve year olds.
After school I read Dali’s autobiography,
Young ****** Autosodomized by Her Own Chastity.
Fresh, green nettle with fresh and dried yarrow for purity.
Dead souls enticed to the altar by orange marigolds,
passion and creativity,
Coax sleep and rouse dreams.
Satellites measure indirectly with wave lengths of light.
My weather balloon measures the lower and middle levels of the atmosphere directly,
Fifty thousand feet high,
Metal rod thermometer,
Slide humidity sensor,
Canister for air pressure.
I enjoy rye bread and cold coconut butter in my weather balloon,
But I want Dali, and all the artists and writers.
Rye grows at high altitudes
But papyrus grows in soil and shallow water,
Strips of papyrus pith shucked from their stems.
When an anchor’s weighed, a ship sails,
But when grounded we sail.
Marigolds, yarrow and nettle,
Flowerhead,
I use the marigold for sleep,
The yarrow for endurance and intensity,
toiling for love and truth,
And the nettle for healing.
Strong rye bread needs equally strong flavors.
By the beginning of high school,
I read a lot of Beat literature
And found Buddhism.
I loved what I read
But I didn’t like some things.
I liked attachment.
I got to the ground.
Mushrooms grow in dry soil.
Attachment to beauty is Buddha activity.
Not being attached to things I don’t find beautiful is Buddha activity.
I fried mushrooms in a single layer in oil, fleshy.
I roasted mushrooms at high temperatures in the oven, crisp.
I simmered mushrooms in stock with kombu.
Rye bread with cold coconut butter and cremini mushrooms,
raw, soft and firm.
Life continues, life changes,
Attachments, losses, mourning and suffering,
But change lures growth.
I find stream beds and wet soil.
I lay the strips of papyrus next to each other.
I cross papyrus strips over the first,
Then wet the crossed papyrus strips,
Press and cement them into a sheet.
I hammer it and dry it in the sun,
With no thought of achievement or self,
Flowerhead,
Hands filled with my past,
Head filled with the future,
Dali, artists poets,
Wishes and desires aligned with nature,
Abundance,
Cocoa, caraway, and molasses.
If I ever really like someone,
I’ll be wearing the dress he chooses,
Fresh green nettle and yarrow, the seeds take two years to grow strong,
Lasting love.
Marigolds steer dead souls from the altar to the afterlife,
Antiseptic, healing wounds,
Soothing sore throats and headaches.
Imperturbable, stable flowerhead,
I empty my mind.
When desires are aligned with nature, desire flows.
Papyrus makes paper and cloth.
Papyrus makes sails.
Charcoal from the ash of pulverized papyrus heals wounds.
Without attachment to the fruit of action
There is continuation of life,
Rye bread and melted coconut butter,
The coconut tree in the coconut butter,
The seed comes from the ground out of nothing,
Naturalness.
It has form.
As the seed grows the seed expresses the tree,
The seed expresses the coconut,
The seed expresses the coconut butter.
Rye bread, large open hollows, chambers,
Immersed in melted coconut butter,
Desire for expansion and creation,
No grasping, not desperate.
When the mind is compassion, the mind is boundless.
Every moment,
only that,
Every moment,
a scythe to the papyrus in the stream bed of the past.
Sound on Powdery Blue
Potter’s clay, nymph, plum unplumbed, 1993.
Dahlia, ice, powder, musk and rose,
my source of life emerged in darkness, blackness.
Seashell fragments in the sand,
The glass ball of my life cracked inside,
Light reflected off the salt crystal cracks,
Nacre kept those cracks from getting worse.
Young ****** Autosodomized By Her Own Chastity,
Nymph, I didn’t want to give my body,
Torn, *****, ballgown,
To people who wouldn’t understand me,
Piquant.
Outside on the salt flats,
Aphrodite, goddess of beauty, pleasure and fertility and
Asexual Artemis, goddess of animals, and the hunt,
Mistress of nymphs,
Punish with ruthless savagery.
In my bedroom, blue caribou moss covered rocks, pine, and yew trees,
The heartwood writhes as hurricane gales, twisters and whirlwinds
Contort their bark,
Roots strong in the soil.
Orris root dried in the sun, bulbs like wood.
Dahlia runs to baritone soundbath radio waves.
Light has frequencies,
Violet between blue and invisible ultraviolet,
Flame, slate and flint.
Every night is cold.
Torii gates, pain secured as sacred.
An assignation, frost hardy dahlia and a plangent resonant echo.
High frequency sound waves convert to electrical signals,
Breathe from someone I want,
Silt.
Beam, radiate, ensorcel.
I break the bark,
Sap flows and dries,
Resin seals over the tear.
I distill pine,
Resin and oil for turpentine, a solvent.
Quiver, bemired,
I lead sound into my darkness,
Orris butter resin, sweet and warm,
Hot jam drops on snow drops,
Orange ash on smoke,
Balm on lava,
The problem with cotton candy.
Electrical signals give off radiation or light waves,
The narrow frequency range where
The crest of a radio wave and the crest of a light wave overlap,
Infrared.
Glaciers flow, sunlight melts the upper layers of the snow when strong,
A wet snow avalanche,
A torrent, healing.
Brown sugar and whiskey,
Undulant, lavender.
Pine pitch, crystalline, sticky, rich and golden,
And dried pine rosin polishes glass smooth
Like the smell of powdery orris after years.
Softness, flush, worthy/not worthy,
Rich rays thunder,
Intensify my pulse,
Frenzied red,
Violet between blue and invisible ultraviolet.
Babylon—flutter, glow.
Unquenchable cathartic orris.
Pink Graphite
Camellias, winter shrubs,
Their shallow roots grow beneath the spongy caribou moss,
Robins egg blue.
After writing a play with my gifted students program in 1991,
I stopped spending all my free time writing short stories,
But the caribou moss was still soft.
In the cold Arctic of that town,
The evergreen protected the camellias from the afternoon sun and storms.
They branded hardy camellias with a brass molded embossing iron;
I had paper and graphite for my pencils.
After my ninth grade honors English teacher asked us to write poems in 1994,
It began raining.
We lived on an overhang.
A vertical rise to the top of the rock.
The rainstorm caused a metamorphic change in the snowpack,
A wet snow avalanche drifted slowly down the moss covered rock,
The snow already destabilized by exposure to the sunlight.
The avalanche formed lakes,
rock basins washed away with rainwater and melted snow,
Streams dammed by the rocks.
My pencils washed away in the avalanche,
My clothes heavy and cold.
I wove one side of each warp fiber through the eye of the needle and one side through each slot,
Salves, ointments, serums and tinctures.
I was mining for graphite.
They were mining me,
The only winch, the sound through the water.
A steep staircase to the red Torii gates,
I broke the chains with bells for vespers
And chimes for schisms,
And wove the weft across at right angles to the warp.
On a rocky ledge at the end of winter,
The pink moon, bitters and body butter,
They tried to get me to want absinthe,
Wormwood for bitterness and regret.
Heat and pressure formed carbon for flakes of graphite.
Heat and pressure,
I made bitters,
Brandy, grapefruit, chocolate, mandarin rind, tamarind and sugar.
I grounded my feet in the pink moss,
paper dried in one hand,
and graphite for my pencils in the other.
Flakes
I don’t let people that put me down be part of my life.
Gardens and trees,
My shadow sunk in the grass in my yard
As I ate bread, turmeric and lemon.
Carbon crystallizes into graphite flakes.
I write to see well,
Graphite on paper.
A shadow on rock tiles with a shield, a diamond and a bell
Had me ***** to humiliate me.
Though I don’t let people that put me down near me,
A lot of people putting me down seemed like they were following me,
A platform to jump from
While she had her temple.
There was a pink door to the platform.
I ate bread with caramelized crusts and
Drank turmeric lemonade
Before I opened that door,
Jumped and
Descended into blankets and feathers.
I found matches and rosin
For turpentine to clean,
Dried plums and licorice.
In the temple,
In diamonds, leather, wool and silk,
She had her shield and bells,
Drugs and technology,
Thermovision 210 and Minox,
And an offering box where people believed
That if their coins went in
Their wishes would come true.
Hollyhock and smudging charcoal for work,
Belled,
I ground grain in the mill for the bread I baked for breakfast.
The bells are now communal bells
With a watchtower and a prison,
Her shield, a blowtorch and flux,
Her ex rays, my makeshift records
Because Stalin didn’t like people dancing,
He liked them divebombing.
Impurities in the carbon prevent diamonds from forming,
Measured,
The most hard, the most expensive,
But graphite’s soft delocalized electrons move.
OCEAN BED
The loneliness of going to sleep by myself.
I want a bed that’s high off the ground,
a mattress, an ocean.
I want a crush and that person in my bed.
Only that,
a crush in my bed,
an ocean in my bed.
Just love.
But I sleep with my thumbs sealed.
I sleep with my hands, palms up.
I sleep with my hands at my heart.
They sear my compassion with their noise.
They hold their iron over their fire and try to carve their noise into my love,
scored by the violence of voices, dark and lurid,
but not burned.
I want a man in my bed.
When I wake up in an earthquake
I want to be held through the aftershocks.
I like men,
the waves come in and go out
but the ocean was part of my every day.
I don’t mind being fetishized in the ocean.
I ran by the ocean every morning.
I surfed in the ocean.
I should’ve gone into the ocean that afternoon at Trestles,
holding my water jugs, kneeling at the edge.
Morning
I want to fall asleep in the warm arms of a fireman.
I want to wake up to the smell of coffee in my kitchen.
Morning—the molten lava in the outer core of the earth embeds the iron from the inner core into the earth’s magnetic field.
The magnetic field flips.
The sun, so strong, where it gets through the trees it burns everything but the pine.
The winds change direction.
Storms cast lightening and rain.
Iron conducts solar flares and the heavy wind.
In that pine forest, I shudder every time I see a speck of light for fear of neon and fluorescents. The eucalyptus cleanses congestion.
And Kerouac’s stream ululates, crystal bowl sound baths.
I follow the sound to the water.
The stream ends at a bluff with a thin rocky beach below.
The green water turns black not far from the shore.
Before diving into the ocean, I eat globe mallow from the trees, stems and leaves, the viscous flesh, red, soft and nutty.
I distill the pine from one of the tree’s bark and smudge the charcoal over my skin.
Death, the palo santo’s lit, cleansing negative energy.
It’s been so long since I’ve smelled a man, woodsmoke, citrus and tobacco.
Jasmine, plum, lime and tuberose oil on the base of my neck comforts.
Parabolic chambers heal, sound waves through water travel four times faster.
The sound of the open sea recalibrates.
I dissolve into the midnight blue of the ocean.
I want to fall asleep in the warm arms of a fireman.
I want to wake up to the smell of coffee in my kitchen.
I want hot water with coconut oil when I get up.
We’d lay out on the lawn, surrounded by high trees that block the wind.
Embers flying through the air won’t land in my yard, on my grass, or near my trees.
Blue Paper
Haze scatters blue light on a planet.
Frought women, livid, made into peonies by Aphrodites that caught their men flirting and blamed the women, flushed red.
and blamed the women, flushed red.
Frought women, livid, chrysanthemums, dimmed until the end of the season, exchanged and retained like property.
Blue women enter along the sides of her red Torii gates, belayed, branded and belled, a plangent sound.
By candles, colored lights and dried flowers she’s sitting inside on a concrete floor, punctures and ruin burnished with paper, making burnt lime from lime mortar.
Glass ***** on the ceiling, she moves the beads of a Palestinian glass bead bracelet she holds in her hands.
She bends light to make shadows against thin wooden slats curbed along the wall, and straight across the ceiling.
A metier, she makes tinctures, juniper berries and cotton *****.
Loamy soil in the center of the room,
A hawthorn tree stands alone,
A gateway for fairies.
large stones at the base protecting,
It’s branches a barrier.
It’s leaves and shoots make bread and cheese.
It’s berries, red skin and yellow flesh, make jam.
Green bamboo stakes for the peonies when they whither from the weight of their petals.
And lime in the soil.
She adds wood chips to the burnt lime in the kiln,
Unrolled paper, spools, and wire hanging.
Wood prayer beads connect her to the earth,
The tassels on the end of the beads connect her to spirit, to higher truth.
Minerals, marine mud and warm basins of seawater on a flower covered desk.
She adds slaked lime to the burnt lime and wood chips.
The lime converts to paper,
Trauma victims speak,
Light through butterfly wings.
She’s plumeria with curved petals, thick, holding water
This is what I have written of my book. I’ll be changing where the poems with the historical research go. There are four more of those and nine of the other poems.
Mateuš Conrad
Mar 2020
i still managed to catch a whiff of britpop...
i was going to st. augustine's
and all the boys were all about the oasis
look... so ben sherman shirts...
never tucked into the trousers...
but this was in the 1990s...
of course the celebrations were short-lived...
sooner or later a prog variation of brit-pop
had to come about with radiohead...
i kind of skimmed over the early stuff...
there, there - from hail to the thief is my stand-out
track...
having just watched a movie about
the iceman... a one ryszard kuklinski -
well... if the icecream truck:
mongrel dutch-irish and this one ******
would never make into the guinea club...
or the elder fathers of zion...
guinea? seems i was misinformed...
rome's best wops... or donatello goombah...
i'm having trouble with all these
anglo-saxons slurs...
back in dandy ol' england...
it's not a great period piece:
happening right now...
to be in the protected class of citizentry:
no mosque... oh hell:
protected status with a falafel?
exactly... where's the falafel?
but from the movie... wow...
it is: but it isn't... a racial slar...
the one word from skiing these oomp'ah-
loomp'ahs *** 'ight...
and in mewwy ol' england i come across
the natives... almost for a second time...
not the same sort of natives
i met prior to my 1997 / 1998 interlude...
perhaps 7/7 happened?
i really don't know...
but no great cultural export...
no oasis was sang on the continent
after oasis songs were sung...
it's not like kasabian made it into that
transcendental meaning on offer...
hey! variations: pollack!
paul-lack! st. paul's lacking? what?
a head... in athens... ah ha... dry martini of
a joke...
but who am i?
profession? pole / paul...
******* in my spare time, jackson jr.,
because... it's hardly a slur...
it would be a slur if i were called
a *** or a goombah...
the anglo-saxons wouldn't exactly
the rooted natives...
but they would...
it's as if expected:
from speaking latin and the eagle-fetish
to brewing cappuccinos...
a dutch-irish... well a dumb pollack joke...
yes... and now that the virus is caughing
via the retards in the supermarket isles
or licking ice-cream / toilet rims...
i guess an honest workforce is...
something to be less ashamed of...
compared to this ****** nation of:
the readily to be exile puke of reason...
"of their own"...
i seem to have elevated my...
concern for words...
i have just started to read my Charles Dickens...
and relying on Monday
to eat a more delightful roast dinner:
i says... it taste better... because it's not
a Sunday... it's a Monday...
plus... the roast is not exactly a roast...
it has some elements of bleau at the center...
because... you can't expect three
people to eat that much meat in a single sitting:
given the recipe for those yorkies from
ol' grandma of a james martin...
100g of flours, 4 eggs... circa 200ml of milk...
salt, pepper...
the dough is left in the fridge for an hour
at least... the yorkie trays are put into the oven
at 220C with the oil...
while the tatties are browning and the beef
is readying itself for the abstract
of my mouth... and the cubism of my ***...
pristine squeeze...
if only in h'america...
what wouldn't a norman davies call
the polacks if not industrial albino (s)*******?
then who were or would be... eire-
just -ish?
but the new continent:
i'm toppling down into the torso of a well-off
snowman built from an avalanche...
if there were britons here prior...
which includes the welsh and the scots...
and those people of Shropshire...
and those botanical tsars of Kent...
whoever these people are...
the noble barbarians...
the better of vikings with no fjords
to revel in farming on?
maybe those kind of people...
that sort of the native...
oh god forbid i should entice the cosmopolitan
brood to enter the debate...
not in the heart of the matter: come york
and its shire...
some longshank hobbit might
just pop its head up to high and kiss
a guillotine!
if there were the anglo-saxons...
eh... some of us came... settled...
we wanted to... find... the englishman...
circa... 1860 - 1950... that sort of timeframe...
i guess we finds him...
question is... czy ja jestem, lecz czy on?
that's a good question...
is he the host and i the parasite...
well... funny that...
he isn't a body...
he's an oak that was uprooted
from somewhere among a many many
pines and birches in the eastern provinces
of this continent...
and moved... into a garden...
lurking: shadow... hunched crow
and some other hideous comparison...
am i the parasite? what host of a mind i did
acquire: who's me...
or i am him... then i'll drift into the other
trench and i'll tell the germans
that they're fighting anglican saxons...
what? yes i'll tell them...
they're not lutheran saxons...
they're anglican saxons...
how? they have a monarchy...
a crown, central...
no petty princes bound to a federation...
i have also some across the modern natives...
the alt-right and the ethno-nationalists...
apparently: i'm not in the club...
how could i be...
i overheard them talking about...
electing a monarch...
election of monarchy...
well... no point investing in the gene pool...
last time that was tried...
was in the guise of the polish-lithuanian
commonwealth...
the brothel of kings...
some were hungarians, some were "germans"...
some were even swedes...
the aristocracy elected a king...
a john lackland sorts from across europe...
until their big brother richard
or some variant of Otto or the proper didlo in
hand charles gustav would...
appear to wrestle with his baby brother's:
"betrothal" - evidently thart's one for the misnomer
and inversion...
the anglo-saxons as they were to be later known
as... no point beating about the bush...
but... i have measured myself against
these other inhabitants...
the welsh, the scots, the irish... and... well...
i'm not here on part of a conquering army...
my fellow countrymen are just about overwhelmed
by enjoying 100 years of privy
and freedom... little much of good will that do them...
a half-bred popular opinion:
that i hide my language in the freedom
i allow myself within english...
i'm here for the Dickens and the sunday roast beef:
and the yorkies... and the haggis and the neeps,
the mashed and roasted tatties...
and the black pud'...
i'm not here to see how far west my ***
will point while bowing toward mecca...
if you don't mind me saying...
like i am not here for that kippah u.f.o.
ghetto of Golders Green...
i'm not here for a Marx on loan...
i'm here for a... "hashtag"...
eh... the saxons have their unifying:
nomadic perspective to mind...
it's not like the saxons were not liked by...
say... the pomeranians...
or the swabians... or the brandenburgers...
the saxons: semites of the north...
pseudo-vikings wishing for the proto- prefix...
well... are the modern saxons...
saxons? the saxons ****** off to england...
later ****** off to build the british empire...
i'm sure... the modern "saxons" are just
that... brandenburgers... some swabians...
the germans that stayed and were the enemy
under kaiser wilhelm...
that great... grandson of queen victoria...
yes... that war wasn't the war to stop all lineage
in-breeding... because...
it would take whittle adoolf the failed
art student to wake up the petty-bourgeoisie...
fully donned in khaki...
and in hugo boss schwarz...
and in... gulag grey-leash... of the wehrmacht:
of course...
but anglo-saxons are, and were...
and there's this... grand ethno-etymology...
listening to the natives...
codes: white-genocide... ethnic displacement...
let me run back and check the state of affairs
in mother russia and ******-land...
polonia (in latin)... oh right...
i just heard... that a woman in russia...
university educated, a doctor, no less...
also believes that churches should be exempt from
restrictions on social gatherings...
because they are holy places...
and... viruses... in their primitive square / rectangular
modes of abstracting vectors...
or de-abstracting for a better cushion
of solid ground made... also have...
a sense of a higher-beings modus operandi
when plagued with doubt, or denial...
the virus knows what's scared to the russians...
too bad for all those russian buddhists...
dunno... what european are the westerners
worried about?
i'm here on "holiday"...
to read my Dickens: finally! it only took me
20 odd ******* years...
and my sunday roast on a monday...
if there came a wave of anglo-saxons...
while the pomeranians stayed strapped
to the holy german empire "thing"...
and because there weren't any anglo-bohemias...
or modern anglo-czechs...
i'll branch out anyways...
to the "greater" picture masquarade...
i'll be an anglo-slav if...
and... oh look! they're here already...
i'm an anglo-slav... among the other minority
of the afro-saxons...
after all... there are tiers to migration...
there's that tier of polacks moving with the government
during the "affair" of circa 1943...
the no. 303 boys...
and... after that? no one from ******-land
wanted to come to britain... h'america...
the golden retreiver...
given the cold war... de facto:
to the antonym of the mensa harvest...
i came in the 1990s...
******-land and the other 8... joined the already
failing european union in 2004...
hmm...
well... you did get that cabbage plucked...
that carrot too...
from... the sort of people without tic-toc
who... would rather **** braincells with a *****
after a god's monstrous maxim...
while i started sweating from my armpits
hunched with these words...
enough of braincells to ****...
not enough imaginative in a quasi-vivo state
of... the cannibal narcissus...
attention spans a week's worth of
goldfish adventures... licking ice-cream
you won't buy...
then again: a lacking paul...
is an otherwise over-eager pauline...
even if "we" were to become fully "integrated"...
like hell i was giving my mother tongue up
after that 1997 /1998 interlude...
i still wouldn't be able to teach my father the english
they speak: peppered with nuance from
the old mother grammar...
too bad... but the pronunciation is spot on...
i don't know why i should feel obliged to
the ******* on the cross to feel "circumcised"
for... his labyrinth...
i couldn't teach my father better english
than the english already spoken: among the natives,
for the natives...
at home... mother is the cue... tongue
and everything otherwise...
we'll sample with the natives their delight in
minority cuisines...
but come monday... esp. a monday...
after a lunchbox worth of food of a sunday
feeling lazy... well... it just tastes better when
it's not... predicated on a riposte of...
conventions and harangue of: past-participle
expectations...
that sentence is littered with misnomers...
to add to the... otherwise... bland... talk...
correct... talk...
but i really couldn't teach my father
better english...
i have made this language sacred in my own
right as... both parasite and host...
interchangeable... of course...
eh... master and slave dynamic doesn't really
get me all hot and bothered...
i much prefer the lessened hiararchical nuance...
the co-dependency the symbiosis...
of a parasite and a host...
after all... it would seem the head of the pyramid
is a... fungus infection of the brain...
or at worst... a placenta martriarch of
a family of tapeforms: where, otherwise...
a foetus should be...
i'm not into boot-licking...
but... if the anglo-saxons used these isles
as a spring-board to forever imitate the children
of zion...
i'm just the leftovers...
the anglo-slav among afro-saxons...
the "great replacement"...
woe'woe'woe... and that's a word that
should devolve into a calm down / halt insinuation...
who came after 2004... the people who didn't see loopholes
and wouldn't be seen gambling...
the sort of people that would most certainly
go back to the ***** and: the law & justice party
embrace...
the xenophobic extracts of:
the impossibilty of the red sea
parting story... since they would never be the ones
there...
that grey area...
like i am a grey area to them...
given... how many times did i want to spend
a summer at the ****** version of Woodstock...
Pol'and'Rock at Kustrin?
lack hell i am...
i'm confined to my little abode of folklore
anglo-saxony...
rather: not having played the boogie man
from an 1960s period piece of:
vaginal and viagral expectations...
or... that thing known as brit-pop in the 1990s...
or... i've passed through york...
on my way to edinburgh...
but yorkshire... beside the yorkies...
spuds? they call them?
maybe... i'm counting 7 x 5cl to leverage
me at half a 70cl... but... looking at
what 35cl looks like turned into dosage...
i'm seeing more... than half an empty bottle...
i'm seeing the bottle as half full...
i guess this "predicament" came from
alcoholic slang and... positivism...
it's hardly optimistic... given... it's only
a perspective on only one bottle...
and there's still that sea to drink!
well... that's that... it was a most
enthralling ride back toward a square-root of 0...
much appreciated...
now i'll just turn to the bed and the cushion
my head rests on...
and tell myself:
this person was never born...
nor will his words take to boast about...
a nativity play...
nor a pride in Shakespeare...
it's one thing's worth a good reading...
quiet another... to treat it as an enzyme for
the collective: a catalyst...
to "re-invent" the wheel... as it were...
i have given birth... to perhaps...
the greatest thing i could "steal"...
then again... i am very much...
exaggerating...
but this was not born from the ****** ethnicity
of some european island folk...
it was born on the continent...
and it was somehow lived in and with...
never allowed to exfoliate into a courtesan...
annoyance... i gave it a limbo cage
both the host and parasite could enjoy...
after all: this language is a parasite...
i acquired when integrating...
i am the host...
the parasite can dictate what it wants...
a blank page to exfoliate a boquet(t)e with / in...
it would most certainly appear more
orthographically sound: if boquete had an added T...
well... some will cite Shakespeare the first of and
the end of... what's defined as Ęglish...
i like to think of the... "subtle" master...
i somehow knew it was in him...
after watching the film-adaptations... not good enough...
not having read David Copperfield...
a brush with J. D. Salinger and all that
holden caulfield Son-of-Sam sort of crap...
i guess you just have to age a little...
a little is never greedy... and pounce on that great
big peacock playing: the pink elephant in the room!
that's me... Dickens wasn't impossible
to "unsee" or "not see"...
i just needed...
the right sort of hashbrown sort of nudge...
enough organic encounters with yorkies...
baked tatties... h.p. brown sauce and enough baked
beans...
yep... now i'm ready...
it's time to gently slide away from
Macbeth... and into Dickensian prose...
the Pickwick Papers is as any good place to start...
all the better: since it came highly
recommended why i was still in high-school...
all those... ****... 18 years later.
i was going to st. augustine's
and all the boys were all about the oasis
look... so ben sherman shirts...
never tucked into the trousers...
but this was in the 1990s...
of course the celebrations were short-lived...
sooner or later a prog variation of brit-pop
had to come about with radiohead...
i kind of skimmed over the early stuff...
there, there - from hail to the thief is my stand-out
track...
having just watched a movie about
the iceman... a one ryszard kuklinski -
well... if the icecream truck:
mongrel dutch-irish and this one ******
would never make into the guinea club...
or the elder fathers of zion...
guinea? seems i was misinformed...
rome's best wops... or donatello goombah...
i'm having trouble with all these
anglo-saxons slurs...
back in dandy ol' england...
it's not a great period piece:
happening right now...
to be in the protected class of citizentry:
no mosque... oh hell:
protected status with a falafel?
exactly... where's the falafel?
but from the movie... wow...
it is: but it isn't... a racial slar...
the one word from skiing these oomp'ah-
loomp'ahs *** 'ight...
and in mewwy ol' england i come across
the natives... almost for a second time...
not the same sort of natives
i met prior to my 1997 / 1998 interlude...
perhaps 7/7 happened?
i really don't know...
but no great cultural export...
no oasis was sang on the continent
after oasis songs were sung...
it's not like kasabian made it into that
transcendental meaning on offer...
hey! variations: pollack!
paul-lack! st. paul's lacking? what?
a head... in athens... ah ha... dry martini of
a joke...
but who am i?
profession? pole / paul...
******* in my spare time, jackson jr.,
because... it's hardly a slur...
it would be a slur if i were called
a *** or a goombah...
the anglo-saxons wouldn't exactly
the rooted natives...
but they would...
it's as if expected:
from speaking latin and the eagle-fetish
to brewing cappuccinos...
a dutch-irish... well a dumb pollack joke...
yes... and now that the virus is caughing
via the retards in the supermarket isles
or licking ice-cream / toilet rims...
i guess an honest workforce is...
something to be less ashamed of...
compared to this ****** nation of:
the readily to be exile puke of reason...
"of their own"...
i seem to have elevated my...
concern for words...
i have just started to read my Charles Dickens...
and relying on Monday
to eat a more delightful roast dinner:
i says... it taste better... because it's not
a Sunday... it's a Monday...
plus... the roast is not exactly a roast...
it has some elements of bleau at the center...
because... you can't expect three
people to eat that much meat in a single sitting:
given the recipe for those yorkies from
ol' grandma of a james martin...
100g of flours, 4 eggs... circa 200ml of milk...
salt, pepper...
the dough is left in the fridge for an hour
at least... the yorkie trays are put into the oven
at 220C with the oil...
while the tatties are browning and the beef
is readying itself for the abstract
of my mouth... and the cubism of my ***...
pristine squeeze...
if only in h'america...
what wouldn't a norman davies call
the polacks if not industrial albino (s)*******?
then who were or would be... eire-
just -ish?
but the new continent:
i'm toppling down into the torso of a well-off
snowman built from an avalanche...
if there were britons here prior...
which includes the welsh and the scots...
and those people of Shropshire...
and those botanical tsars of Kent...
whoever these people are...
the noble barbarians...
the better of vikings with no fjords
to revel in farming on?
maybe those kind of people...
that sort of the native...
oh god forbid i should entice the cosmopolitan
brood to enter the debate...
not in the heart of the matter: come york
and its shire...
some longshank hobbit might
just pop its head up to high and kiss
a guillotine!
if there were the anglo-saxons...
eh... some of us came... settled...
we wanted to... find... the englishman...
circa... 1860 - 1950... that sort of timeframe...
i guess we finds him...
question is... czy ja jestem, lecz czy on?
that's a good question...
is he the host and i the parasite...
well... funny that...
he isn't a body...
he's an oak that was uprooted
from somewhere among a many many
pines and birches in the eastern provinces
of this continent...
and moved... into a garden...
lurking: shadow... hunched crow
and some other hideous comparison...
am i the parasite? what host of a mind i did
acquire: who's me...
or i am him... then i'll drift into the other
trench and i'll tell the germans
that they're fighting anglican saxons...
what? yes i'll tell them...
they're not lutheran saxons...
they're anglican saxons...
how? they have a monarchy...
a crown, central...
no petty princes bound to a federation...
i have also some across the modern natives...
the alt-right and the ethno-nationalists...
apparently: i'm not in the club...
how could i be...
i overheard them talking about...
electing a monarch...
election of monarchy...
well... no point investing in the gene pool...
last time that was tried...
was in the guise of the polish-lithuanian
commonwealth...
the brothel of kings...
some were hungarians, some were "germans"...
some were even swedes...
the aristocracy elected a king...
a john lackland sorts from across europe...
until their big brother richard
or some variant of Otto or the proper didlo in
hand charles gustav would...
appear to wrestle with his baby brother's:
"betrothal" - evidently thart's one for the misnomer
and inversion...
the anglo-saxons as they were to be later known
as... no point beating about the bush...
but... i have measured myself against
these other inhabitants...
the welsh, the scots, the irish... and... well...
i'm not here on part of a conquering army...
my fellow countrymen are just about overwhelmed
by enjoying 100 years of privy
and freedom... little much of good will that do them...
a half-bred popular opinion:
that i hide my language in the freedom
i allow myself within english...
i'm here for the Dickens and the sunday roast beef:
and the yorkies... and the haggis and the neeps,
the mashed and roasted tatties...
and the black pud'...
i'm not here to see how far west my ***
will point while bowing toward mecca...
if you don't mind me saying...
like i am not here for that kippah u.f.o.
ghetto of Golders Green...
i'm not here for a Marx on loan...
i'm here for a... "hashtag"...
eh... the saxons have their unifying:
nomadic perspective to mind...
it's not like the saxons were not liked by...
say... the pomeranians...
or the swabians... or the brandenburgers...
the saxons: semites of the north...
pseudo-vikings wishing for the proto- prefix...
well... are the modern saxons...
saxons? the saxons ****** off to england...
later ****** off to build the british empire...
i'm sure... the modern "saxons" are just
that... brandenburgers... some swabians...
the germans that stayed and were the enemy
under kaiser wilhelm...
that great... grandson of queen victoria...
yes... that war wasn't the war to stop all lineage
in-breeding... because...
it would take whittle adoolf the failed
art student to wake up the petty-bourgeoisie...
fully donned in khaki...
and in hugo boss schwarz...
and in... gulag grey-leash... of the wehrmacht:
of course...
but anglo-saxons are, and were...
and there's this... grand ethno-etymology...
listening to the natives...
codes: white-genocide... ethnic displacement...
let me run back and check the state of affairs
in mother russia and ******-land...
polonia (in latin)... oh right...
i just heard... that a woman in russia...
university educated, a doctor, no less...
also believes that churches should be exempt from
restrictions on social gatherings...
because they are holy places...
and... viruses... in their primitive square / rectangular
modes of abstracting vectors...
or de-abstracting for a better cushion
of solid ground made... also have...
a sense of a higher-beings modus operandi
when plagued with doubt, or denial...
the virus knows what's scared to the russians...
too bad for all those russian buddhists...
dunno... what european are the westerners
worried about?
i'm here on "holiday"...
to read my Dickens: finally! it only took me
20 odd ******* years...
and my sunday roast on a monday...
if there came a wave of anglo-saxons...
while the pomeranians stayed strapped
to the holy german empire "thing"...
and because there weren't any anglo-bohemias...
or modern anglo-czechs...
i'll branch out anyways...
to the "greater" picture masquarade...
i'll be an anglo-slav if...
and... oh look! they're here already...
i'm an anglo-slav... among the other minority
of the afro-saxons...
after all... there are tiers to migration...
there's that tier of polacks moving with the government
during the "affair" of circa 1943...
the no. 303 boys...
and... after that? no one from ******-land
wanted to come to britain... h'america...
the golden retreiver...
given the cold war... de facto:
to the antonym of the mensa harvest...
i came in the 1990s...
******-land and the other 8... joined the already
failing european union in 2004...
hmm...
well... you did get that cabbage plucked...
that carrot too...
from... the sort of people without tic-toc
who... would rather **** braincells with a *****
after a god's monstrous maxim...
while i started sweating from my armpits
hunched with these words...
enough of braincells to ****...
not enough imaginative in a quasi-vivo state
of... the cannibal narcissus...
attention spans a week's worth of
goldfish adventures... licking ice-cream
you won't buy...
then again: a lacking paul...
is an otherwise over-eager pauline...
even if "we" were to become fully "integrated"...
like hell i was giving my mother tongue up
after that 1997 /1998 interlude...
i still wouldn't be able to teach my father the english
they speak: peppered with nuance from
the old mother grammar...
too bad... but the pronunciation is spot on...
i don't know why i should feel obliged to
the ******* on the cross to feel "circumcised"
for... his labyrinth...
i couldn't teach my father better english
than the english already spoken: among the natives,
for the natives...
at home... mother is the cue... tongue
and everything otherwise...
we'll sample with the natives their delight in
minority cuisines...
but come monday... esp. a monday...
after a lunchbox worth of food of a sunday
feeling lazy... well... it just tastes better when
it's not... predicated on a riposte of...
conventions and harangue of: past-participle
expectations...
that sentence is littered with misnomers...
to add to the... otherwise... bland... talk...
correct... talk...
but i really couldn't teach my father
better english...
i have made this language sacred in my own
right as... both parasite and host...
interchangeable... of course...
eh... master and slave dynamic doesn't really
get me all hot and bothered...
i much prefer the lessened hiararchical nuance...
the co-dependency the symbiosis...
of a parasite and a host...
after all... it would seem the head of the pyramid
is a... fungus infection of the brain...
or at worst... a placenta martriarch of
a family of tapeforms: where, otherwise...
a foetus should be...
i'm not into boot-licking...
but... if the anglo-saxons used these isles
as a spring-board to forever imitate the children
of zion...
i'm just the leftovers...
the anglo-slav among afro-saxons...
the "great replacement"...
woe'woe'woe... and that's a word that
should devolve into a calm down / halt insinuation...
who came after 2004... the people who didn't see loopholes
and wouldn't be seen gambling...
the sort of people that would most certainly
go back to the ***** and: the law & justice party
embrace...
the xenophobic extracts of:
the impossibilty of the red sea
parting story... since they would never be the ones
there...
that grey area...
like i am a grey area to them...
given... how many times did i want to spend
a summer at the ****** version of Woodstock...
Pol'and'Rock at Kustrin?
lack hell i am...
i'm confined to my little abode of folklore
anglo-saxony...
rather: not having played the boogie man
from an 1960s period piece of:
vaginal and viagral expectations...
or... that thing known as brit-pop in the 1990s...
or... i've passed through york...
on my way to edinburgh...
but yorkshire... beside the yorkies...
spuds? they call them?
maybe... i'm counting 7 x 5cl to leverage
me at half a 70cl... but... looking at
what 35cl looks like turned into dosage...
i'm seeing more... than half an empty bottle...
i'm seeing the bottle as half full...
i guess this "predicament" came from
alcoholic slang and... positivism...
it's hardly optimistic... given... it's only
a perspective on only one bottle...
and there's still that sea to drink!
well... that's that... it was a most
enthralling ride back toward a square-root of 0...
much appreciated...
now i'll just turn to the bed and the cushion
my head rests on...
and tell myself:
this person was never born...
nor will his words take to boast about...
a nativity play...
nor a pride in Shakespeare...
it's one thing's worth a good reading...
quiet another... to treat it as an enzyme for
the collective: a catalyst...
to "re-invent" the wheel... as it were...
i have given birth... to perhaps...
the greatest thing i could "steal"...
then again... i am very much...
exaggerating...
but this was not born from the ****** ethnicity
of some european island folk...
it was born on the continent...
and it was somehow lived in and with...
never allowed to exfoliate into a courtesan...
annoyance... i gave it a limbo cage
both the host and parasite could enjoy...
after all: this language is a parasite...
i acquired when integrating...
i am the host...
the parasite can dictate what it wants...
a blank page to exfoliate a boquet(t)e with / in...
it would most certainly appear more
orthographically sound: if boquete had an added T...
well... some will cite Shakespeare the first of and
the end of... what's defined as Ęglish...
i like to think of the... "subtle" master...
i somehow knew it was in him...
after watching the film-adaptations... not good enough...
not having read David Copperfield...
a brush with J. D. Salinger and all that
holden caulfield Son-of-Sam sort of crap...
i guess you just have to age a little...
a little is never greedy... and pounce on that great
big peacock playing: the pink elephant in the room!
that's me... Dickens wasn't impossible
to "unsee" or "not see"...
i just needed...
the right sort of hashbrown sort of nudge...
enough organic encounters with yorkies...
baked tatties... h.p. brown sauce and enough baked
beans...
yep... now i'm ready...
it's time to gently slide away from
Macbeth... and into Dickensian prose...
the Pickwick Papers is as any good place to start...
all the better: since it came highly
recommended why i was still in high-school...
all those... ****... 18 years later.
Michael R Burch
Feb 2020
Ech day me comëth tydinges thre
Middle English lyric, circa the 13th to 14th century AD
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Each day I’m plagued by three doles,
These gargantuan weights on my soul:
First, that I must somehow exit this fen.
Second, that I cannot know when.
And yet it’s the third that torments me so,
Because there’s no way to know where the hell I will go!
Ech day me comëth tydinges thre,
For wel swithë sore ben he:
The on is that Ich shal hennë,
That other that Ich not whennë,
The thriddë is my mestë carë,
That Ich not whider Ich shal farë.
These are Medieval poetry translations of poems written in Old English (i.e., Anglo-Saxon English) and Middle English.
Wulf and Eadwacer
(Old English poem circa 960-990 AD)
loose translation by Michael R. Burch
To my people, he's prey, a pariah.
They'll rip him apart if he approaches their pack.
We are so different!
Wulf's on one island; I'm on another.
His island's a fortress, surrounded by fens.
Here, bloodthirsty men roam this island.
They'll rip him apart if he approaches their pack.
We are so different!
My thoughts pursued Wulf like panting hounds.
Whenever it rained, while I wept,
the bold warrior came; he took me in his arms:
good feelings for him, but the end was loathsome!
Wulf, O, my Wulf, my ache for you
has made me sick; your infrequent visits
have left me famished, deprived of real meat!
Do you hear, Eadwacer? A wolf has borne
our wretched whelp to the woods.
One can easily sever what never was one:
our song together.
Cædmon's Hymn
(Old English poem circa 658-680 AD)
loose translation by Michael R. Burch
Now let us honour heaven-kingdom's Guardian,
the might of the Architect and his mind-plans,
the work of the Glory-Father.
First he, the Eternal Lord,
established the foundation of wonders.
Then he, the First Poet,
created heaven as a roof
for the sons of men, Holy Creator,
Maker of mankind.
Then he, the eternal Lord,
afterwards made men middle-earth: Master almighty!
How Long the Night
Middle English poem circa 13th century AD
loose translation by Michael R. Burch
It is pleasant, indeed, while the summer lasts
with the mild pheasants' song...
but now I feel the northern wind's blast—
its severe weather strong.
Alas! Alas! This night seems so long!
And I, because of my momentous wrong
now grieve, mourn and fast.
Pity Mary
Middle English Lyric, circa early 13th century AD
loose translation by Michael R. Burch
Now the sun passes under the wood:
I rue, Mary, thy face—fair, good.
Now the sun passes under the tree:
I rue, Mary, thy son and thee.
Fowles in the Frith
Medieval English Lyric, circa 13th-14th century AD
loose translation by Michael R. Burch
The fowls in the forest,
the fishes in the flood
and I must go mad:
such sorrow I've had
for beasts of bone and blood!
I am of Ireland
Medieval Irish Lyric, circa 13th-14th century AD
loose translation by Michael R. Burch
I am of Ireland,
and of the holy realm of Ireland.
Gentlefolk, I pray thee:
for the sake of holy charity,
come dance with me
in Ireland.
Sweet Rose of Virtue
by William Dunbar [1460-1525]
loose translation by Michael R. Burch
Sweet rose of virtue and of gentleness,
delightful lily of youthful wantonness,
richest in bounty and in beauty clear
and in every virtue that is held most dear―
except only that you are merciless.
Into your garden, today, I followed you;
there I saw flowers of freshest hue,
both white and red, delightful to see,
and wholesome herbs, waving resplendently―
yet everywhere, no odor but rue.
I fear that March with his last arctic blast
has slain my fair rose of pallid and gentle cast,
whose piteous death does my heart such pain
that, if I could, I would compose her roots again―
so comforting her bowering leaves have been.
Now skruketh rose and lylie flour
Medieval English Lyric, circa 11th century AD
loose translation by Michael R. Burch
Now skyward the rose and the lily flower,
That will bear for awhile that sweet savor:
In summer, that sweet tide;
There is no queen so stark in her power
Nor no lady so bright in her bower
That dead shall not glide by:
Whoever will forgo lust,
in heavenly bliss will abide
With his thoughts on Jesus anon,
thralled at his side.
IN LIBRARIOS
by Thomas Campion
Impressionum plurium librum laudat
Librarius; scortum nec non minus leno.
Novelties
loose translation by Michael R. Burch
Booksellers laud authors for novel editions
as pimps praise their ****** for exotic positions.
Brut
(circa 1100 AD, written by Layamon, an excerpt)
loose translation by Michael R. Burch
Now he stands on a hill overlooking the Avon,
seeing steel fishes girded with swords in the stream,
their swimming days done,
their scales a-gleam like gold-plated shields,
their fish-spines floating like shattered spears.
Layamon's Brut is a 32,000-line poem composed in Middle English that shows a strong Anglo-Saxon influence and contains the first known reference to King Arthur in English.
The Maiden's Song aka The Bridal Morn
anonymous Medieval lyric
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
The maidens came to my mother's bower.
I had all I would, that hour.
The bailey beareth the bell away;
The lily, the rose, the rose I lay.
Now silver is white, red is the gold;
The robes they lay in fold.
The bailey beareth the bell away;
The lily, the rose, the rose I lay.
Still through the window shines the sun.
How should I love, yet be so young?
The bailey beareth the bell away;
The lily, the rose, the rose I lay.
Westron Wynde
Middle English lyric, circa 1530 AD
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Western wind, when will you blow,
bringing the drizzling rain?
Christ, that my love were in my arms,
and I in my bed again!
The original poem has 'the smalle rayne down can rayne' which suggests a drizzle or mist.
This World's Joy
(Middle English lyric, circa early 14th century AD)
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Winter awakens all my care
as leafless trees grow bare.
For now my sighs are fraught
whenever it enters my thought:
regarding this world's joy,
how everything comes to naught.
I Have Labored Sore
(anonymous medieval lyric circa the fifteenth century)
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
I have labored sore and suffered death,
so now I rest and catch my breath.
But I shall come and call right soon
heaven and earth and hell to doom.
Then all shall know both devil and man
just who I was and what I am.
A Lyke-Wake Dirge
(anonymous medieval lyric circa the 16th century AD)
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
The Lie-Awake Dirge is 'the night watch kept over a corpse.'
This one night, this one night,
every night and all;
fire and sleet and candlelight,
and Christ receive thy soul.
When from this earthly life you pass
every night and all,
to confront your past you must come at last,
and Christ receive thy soul.
If you ever donated socks and shoes,
every night and all,
sit right down and slip yours on,
and Christ receive thy soul.
But if you never helped your brother,
every night and all,
walk barefoot through the flames of hell,
and Christ receive thy soul.
If ever you shared your food and drink,
every night and all,
the fire will never make you shrink,
and Christ receive thy soul.
But if you never helped your brother,
every night and all,
walk starving through the black abyss,
and Christ receive thy soul.
This one night, this one night,
every night and all;
fire and sleet and candlelight,
and Christ receive thy soul.
Excerpt from 'Ubi Sunt Qui Ante Nos Fuerunt? '
(anonymous Middle English poem, circa 1275)
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Where are the men who came before us,
who led hounds and hawks to the hunt,
who commanded fields and woods?
Where are the elegant ladies in their boudoirs
who braided gold through their hair
and had such fair complexions?
Once eating and drinking gladdened their hearts;
they enjoyed their games;
men bowed before them;
they bore themselves loftily …
But then, in an eye's twinkling,
they were gone.
Where now are their songs and their laughter,
the trains of their dresses,
the arrogance of their entrances and exits,
their hawks and their hounds?
All their joy has vanished;
their 'well' has come to 'oh, well'
and to many dark days …
Is this the oldest carpe diem poem in the English language?
Whan the turuf is thy tour
(anonymous Middle English lyric, circa the 13th century AD)
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
1.
When the turf is your tower
and the pit is your bower,
your pale white skin and throat
shall be sullen worms' to note.
What help to you, then,
was all your worldly hope?
2.
When the turf is your tower
and the grave is your bower,
your pale white throat and skin
worm-eaten from within …
what hope of my help then?
The second translation leans more to the 'lover's complaint' and carpe diem genres, with the poet pointing out to his prospective lover that by denying him her favors she make take her virtue to the grave where worms will end her virginity in macabre fashion. This poem may be an ancient precursor of poems like Andrew Marvell's 'To His Coy Mistress.'
Ich have y-don al myn youth
(Middle English lyric, circa the 13th century AD)
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
I have done it all my youth:
Often, often, and often!
I have loved long and yearned zealously …
And oh what grief it has brought me!
Ich have y-don al myn youth,
Oftë, ofte, and ofte;
Longe y-loved and yerne y-beden -
Ful dere it is y-bought!
GEOFFREY CHAUCER
Three Roundels by Geoffrey Chaucer
I. Merciles Beaute ('Merciless Beauty')
by Geoffrey Chaucer
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Your eyes slay me suddenly;
their beauty I cannot sustain,
they wound me so, through my heart keen.
Unless your words heal me hastily,
my heart's wound will remain green;
for your eyes slay me suddenly;
their beauty I cannot sustain.
By all truth, I tell you faithfully
that you are of life and death my queen;
for at my death this truth shall be seen:
your eyes slay me suddenly;
their beauty I cannot sustain,
they wound me so, through my heart keen.
II. Rejection
by Geoffrey Chaucer
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Your beauty from your heart has so erased
Pity, that it's useless to complain;
For Pride now holds your mercy by a chain.
I'm guiltless, yet my sentence has been cast.
I tell you truly, needless now to feign, —
Your beauty from your heart has so erased
Pity, that it's useless to complain.
Alas, that Nature in your face compassed
Such beauty, that no man may hope attain
To mercy, though he perish from the pain;
Your beauty from your heart has so erased
Pity, that it's useless to complain;
For Pride now holds your mercy by a chain.
III. Escape
by Geoffrey Chaucer
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Since I'm escaped from Love and yet still fat,
I never plan to be in his prison lean;
Since I am free, I count it not a bean.
He may question me and counter this and that;
I care not: I will answer just as I mean.
Since I'm escaped from Love and yet still fat,
I never plan to be in his prison lean.
Love strikes me from his roster, short and flat,
And he is struck from my books, just as clean,
Forevermore; there is no other mean.
Since I'm escaped from Love and yet still fat,
I never plan to be in his prison lean;
Since I am free, I count it not a bean.
Welcome, Summer
by Geoffrey Chaucer
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Now welcome, Summer, with your sun so soft,
since you've banished Winter with her icy weather
and driven away her long nights' frosts.
Saint Valentine, in the heavens aloft,
the songbirds sing your praises together!
Now welcome, Summer, with your sun so soft,
since you've banished Winter with her icy weather.
We have good cause to rejoice, not scoff,
since love's in the air, and also in the heather,
whenever we find such blissful warmth, together.
Now welcome, Summer, with your sun so soft,
since you've banished Winter with her icy weather
and driven away her long nights' frosts.
CHARLES D'ORLEANS
Rondel: Your Smiling Mouth
by Charles d'Orleans (c.1394-1465)
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Your smiling mouth and laughing eyes, bright gray,
Your ample ******* and slender arms' twin chains,
Your hands so smooth, each finger straight and plain,
Your little feet—please, what more can I say?
It is my fetish when you're far away
To muse on these and thus to soothe my pain—
Your smiling mouth and laughing eyes, bright gray,
Your ample ******* and slender arms' twin chains.
So would I beg you, if I only may,
To see such sights as I before have seen,
Because my fetish pleases me. Obscene?
I'll be obsessed until my dying day
By your sweet smiling mouth and eyes, bright gray,
Your ample ******* and slender arms' twin chains!
Spring
by Charles d'Orleans (c.1394-1465)
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Young lovers,
greeting the spring
fling themselves downhill,
making cobblestones ring
with their wild leaps and arcs,
like ecstatic sparks
struck from coal.
What is their brazen goal?
They grab at whatever passes,
so we can only hazard guesses.
But they rear like prancing steeds
raked by brilliant spurs of need,
Young lovers.
Oft in My Thought
by Charles d'Orleans (c.1394-1465)
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
So often in my busy mind I sought,
Around the advent of the fledgling year,
For something pretty that I really ought
To give my lady dear;
But that sweet thought's been wrested from me, clear,
Since death, alas, has sealed her under clay
And robbed the world of all that's precious here―
God keep her soul, I can no better say.
For me to keep my manner and my thought
Acceptable, as suits my age's hour?
While proving that I never once forgot
Her worth? It tests my power!
I serve her now with masses and with prayer;
For it would be a shame for me to stray
Far from my faith, when my time's drawing near—
God keep her soul, I can no better say.
Now earthly profits fail, since all is lost
And the cost of everything became so dear;
Therefore, O Lord, who rules the higher host,
Take my good deeds, as many as there are,
And crown her, Lord, above in your bright sphere,
As heaven's truest maid! And may I say:
Most good, most fair, most likely to bring cheer—
God keep her soul, I can no better say.
When I praise her, or hear her praises raised,
I recall how recently she brought me pleasure;
Then my heart floods like an overflowing bay
And makes me wish to dress for my own bier—
God keep her soul, I can no better say.
Winter has cast his cloak away
by Charles d'Orleans (c.1394-1465)
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Winter has cast his cloak away
of wind and cold and chilling rain
to dress in embroidered light again:
the light of day—bright, festive, gay!
Each bird and beast, without delay,
in its own tongue, sings this refrain:
'Winter has cast his cloak away! '
Brooks, fountains, rivers, streams at play,
wear, with their summer livery,
bright beads of silver jewelry.
All the Earth has a new and fresh display:
Winter has cast his cloak away!
This rondeau was set to music by Debussy in his Trois chansons de France.
The year lays down his mantle cold
by Charles d'Orleans (1394-1465)
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
The year lays down his mantle cold
of wind, chill rain and bitter air,
and now goes clad in clothes of gold
of smiling suns and seasons fair,
while birds and beasts of wood and fold
now with each cry and song declare:
'The year lays down his mantle cold! '
All brooks, springs, rivers, seaward rolled,
now pleasant summer livery wear
with silver beads embroidered where
the world puts off its raiment old.
The year lays down his mantle cold.
SIR THOMAS WYATT
Whoso List to Hunt ('Whoever Longs to Hunt')
by Sir Thomas Wyatt
loose translation/interpretation/modernization by Michael R. Burch
Whoever longs to hunt, I know the deer;
but as for me, alas! , I may no more.
This vain pursuit has left me so bone-sore
I'm one of those who falters, at the rear.
Yet friend, how can I draw my anguished mind
away from the doe?
Thus, as she flees before
me, fainting I follow.
I must leave off, therefore,
since in a net I seek to hold the wind.
Whoever seeks her out,
I relieve of any doubt,
that he, like me, must spend his time in vain.
For graven with diamonds, set in letters plain,
these words appear, her fair neck ringed about:
Touch me not, for Caesar's I am,
And wild to hold, though I seem tame.
In the next poem the Welsh 'dd' is pronounced 'th.'
Cynddylan is pronounced KahN-THIHL-aeN.
Stafell Gynddylan ('The Hall of Cynddylan')
Welsh englynion circa 1382-1410
translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
The hall of Cynddylan lies dark tonight.
Lacking fire and a bed,
I will weep awhile then lapse into silence.
The hall of Cynddylan lies dark tonight.
Lacking fire or a candle,
save God, who will preserve my sanity?
The hall of Cynddylan lies dark tonight.
Lacking fire, lacking light,
grief for you overwhelms me!
The hall of Cynddylan's roof is dark.
After the blessed assembly,
still little the good that comes of it.
Hall of Cynddylan, you have become shapeless, amorphous.
Your shield lies in the grave.
While he lived, no one breached these gates.
The hall of Cynddylan mourns tonight,
mourns for its lost protector.
Alas death, why did you spare me?
The hall of Cynddylan trembles tonight,
atop the shivering rock,
lacking lord, lacking liege, lacking protector.
The hall of Cynddylan lies dark tonight.
Lacking fire, lacking mirth, lacking songs.
My cheeks are eroded by tears.
The hall of Cynddylan lies dark tonight.
Lacking fire, lacking heroes, lacking a warband.
Abundant, my tears' rains.
The hall of Cynddylan offends my eyes,
lacking roof, lacking fire.
My lord lies dead, and yet I still live?
The hall of Cynddylan lies shattered tonight,
without her steadfast warriors,
Elfan, and gold-torqued Cynddylan.
The hall of Cynddylan lies desolate tonight,
no longer respected
without the men and women who maintained it.
The hall of Cynddylan lies quiet tonight,
stunned to silence by losing its lord.
Merciful God, what must I do?
The hall of Cynddylan's roof is dark,
after the Saxons destroyed
shining Cynddylan and Elfan of Powys.
The hall of Cynddylan lies dark tonight:
lost, the race of the Cyndrwyn,
of Cynon and Gwion and Gwyn.
Hall of Cynddylan, you wound me, hourly,
having lost that great company
who once warmed hands at your hearth.
A Proverb from Winfred's Time
anonymous Old English poem, circa 757-786 AD
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
1.
The procrastinator puts off purpose,
never initiates anything marvelous,
never succeeds, dies dead alone.
2.
The late-deed-doer delays glory-striving,
never indulges daring dreams,
never succeeds, dies dead alone.
3.
Often the deed-dodger avoids ventures,
never succeeds, dies dead alone.
Winfrid or Wynfrith is better known as Saint Boniface (c. 675-754 AD). This may be the second-oldest English poem, after 'Caedmon's Hymn.'
Franks Casket Runes
anonymous Old English poems, circa 700 AD
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
The fish flooded the shore-cliffs;
the sea-king wept when he swam onto the shingle:
whale's bone.
Romulus and Remus, twin brothers weaned in Rome
by a she-wolf, far from their native land.
'The Leiden Riddle' is an Old English translation of Aldhelm's Latin riddle Lorica ('Corselet') .
The Leiden Riddle
anonymous Old English riddle poem, circa 700 AD
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
The dank earth birthed me from her icy womb.
I know I was not fashioned from woolen fleeces;
nor was I skillfully spun from skeins;
I have neither warp nor weft;
no thread thrums through me in the thrashing loom;
nor do whirring shuttles rattle me;
nor does the weaver's rod assail me;
nor did silkworms spin me like skillfull fates
into curious golden embroidery.
And yet heroes still call me an excellent coat.
Nor do I fear the dread arrows' flights,
however eagerly they leap from their quivers.
Solution: a coat of mail.
If you see a busker singing for tips, you're seeing someone carrying on an Anglo-Saxon tradition that goes back to the days of Beowulf …
He sits with his harp at his thane's feet,
Earning his hire, his rewards of rings,
Sweeping the strings with his skillful nail;
Hall-thanes smile at the sweet song he sings.
—'Fortunes of Men' loose translation by Michael R. Burch
Here's one of the first Old English/Anglo-Saxon poems to employ a refrain:
Deor's Lament
(Anglo Saxon poem, circa 10th century AD)
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Weland knew the agony of exile.
That indomitable smith was wracked by grief.
He endured countless troubles:
sorrows were his only companions
in his frozen island dungeon
after Nithad had fettered him,
many strong-but-supple sinew-bonds
binding the better man.
That passed away; this also may.
Beadohild mourned her brothers' deaths
but even more, her own sad state
once she discovered herself with child.
She predicted nothing good could come of it.
That passed away; this also may.
We have heard that the Geat's moans for Matilda,
his lady, were limitless,
that his sorrowful love for her
robbed him of regretless sleep.
That passed away; this also may.
For thirty winters Theodric ruled
the Mæring stronghold with an iron hand;
many knew this and moaned.
That passed away; this also may.
We have also heard of Ermanaric's wolfish ways,
of how he held wide sway in the realm of the Goths.
He was a grim king! Many a warrior sat,
full of cares and maladies of the mind,
wishing constantly that his kingdom might be overthrown.
That passed away; this also may.
If a man sits long enough, sorrowful and anxious,
bereft of joy, his mind constantly darkening,
soon it seems to him that his troubles are endless.
Then he must consider that the wise Lord
often moves through the earth
granting some men honor, glory and fame,
but others only shame and hardship.
This I will say for myself:
that for awhile I was the Heodeninga's scop,
dear to my lord. My name was Deor.
For many winters I held a fine office,
faithfully serving a just lord. But now Heorrenda
a man skilful in songs, has received the estate
the protector of warriors gave me.
That passed away; this also may.
'The Wife's Lament' or 'The Wife's Complaint' is an Old English/Anglo Saxon poem found in the Exeter Book. It's generally considered to be an elegy in the manner of the German frauenlied, or 'woman's song, ' although there are other interpretations of the poem's genre and purpose. The Exeter Book has been dated to 960-990 AD, making it the oldest English poetry anthology, but of course the poem may have been written earlier.
The Wife's Lament
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
I draw these words from deep wells of my grief,
care-worn, unutterably sad.
I can recount woes I've borne since birth,
present and past, never more than now.
I have won, from my exile-paths, only pain.
First, my lord forsook his folk, left,
crossed the seas' tumult, far from our people.
Since then, I've known
wrenching dawn-griefs, dark mournings … oh where,
where can he be?
Then I, too, left—a lonely, lordless refugee,
full of unaccountable desires!
But the man's kinsmen schemed secretly
to estrange us, divide us, keep us apart,
across earth's wide kingdom, and my heart broke.
Then my lord spoke:
'Take up residence here.'
I had few friends in this unknown, cheerless
region, none close.
Christ, I felt lost!
Then I thought I had found a well-matched man -
one meant for me,
but unfortunately he
was ill-starred and blind, with a devious mind,
full of murderous intentions, plotting some crime!
Before God we
vowed never to part, not till kingdom come, never!
But now that's all changed, forever -
our friendship done, severed.
I must hear, far and near, contempt for my husband.
So other men bade me, 'Go, live in the grove,
beneath the great oaks, in an earth-cave, alone.'
In this ancient cave-dwelling I am lost and oppressed -
the valleys are dark, the hills immense,
and this cruel-briared enclosure—an arid abode!
The injustice assails me—my lord's absence!
On earth there are lovers who share the same bed
while I pass through life dead in this dark abscess
where I wilt, summer days unable to rest
or forget the sorrows of my life's hard lot.
A young woman must always be
stern, hard-of-heart, unmoved,
opposing breast-cares and her heartaches' legions.
She must appear cheerful
even in a tumult of grief.
Like a criminal exiled to a far-off land,
moaning beneath insurmountable cliffs,
my weary-minded love, drenched by wild storms
and caught in the clutches of anguish,
is reminded constantly of our former happiness.
Woe be it to them who abide in longing.
'The Husband's Message' is another poem from the Exeter Book. It may or may not be a reply to 'The Wife's Lament.' The poem is generally considered to be an Anglo-Saxon riddle (I will provide the solution) , but its primary focus is on persuading a wife or pledged fiancée to join her husband or betrothed and fulfill her promises to him.
The Husband's Message
anonymous Old English poem, circa 960-990 AD
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
See, I unseal myself for your eyes only!
I sprang from a seed to a sapling,
waxed great in a wood,
was given knowledge,
was ordered across saltstreams in ships
where I stiffened my spine, standing tall,
till, entering the halls of heroes,
I honored my manly Lord.
Now I stand here on this ship's deck,
an emissary ordered to inform you
of the love my Lord feels for you.
I have no fear forecasting his heart steadfast,
his honor bright, his word true.
He who bade me come carved this letter
and entreats you to recall, clad in your finery,
what you promised each other many years before,
mindful of his treasure-laden promises.
He reminds you how, in those distant days,
witty words were pledged by you both
in the mead-halls and homesteads:
how he would be Lord of the lands
you would inhabit together
while forging a lasting love.
Alas, a vendetta drove him far from his feuding tribe,
but now he instructs me to gladly give you notice
that when you hear the returning cuckoo's cry
cascading down warming coastal cliffs,
come over the sea! Let no man hinder your course.
He earnestly urges you: Out! To sea!
Away to the sea, when the circling gulls
hover over the ship that conveys you to him!
Board the ship that you meet there:
sail away seaward to seek your husband,
over the seagulls' range,
over the paths of foam.
For over the water, he awaits you.
He cannot conceive, he told me,
how any keener joy could comfort his heart,
nor any greater happiness gladden his soul,
than that a generous God should grant you both
to exchange rings, then give gifts to trusty liege-men,
golden armbands inlaid with gems to faithful followers.
The lands are his, his estates among strangers,
his new abode fair and his followers true,
all hardy heroes, since hence he was driven,
shoved off in his ship from these shore in distress,
steered straightway over the saltstreams, sped over the ocean,
a wave-tossed wanderer winging away.
But now the man has overcome his woes,
outpitted his perils, lives in plenty, lacks no luxury,
has a hoard and horses and friends in the mead-halls.
All the wealth of the earth's great earls
now belongs to my Lord …
He only lacks you.
He would have everything within an earl's having,
if only my Lady will come home to him now,
if only she will do as she swore and honor her vow.
Are these the oldest rhyming poems in the English language? Reginald of Durham recorded four verses of Saint Godric's: they are the oldest songs in English for which the original musical settings survive.
Led By Christ and Mary
by Saint Godric of Finchale (1065-1170)
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
By Christ and Saint Mary I was so graciously led
that the earth never felt my bare foot's tread!
In the second poem, Godric puns on his name: godes riche means 'God's kingdom' and sounds like 'God is rich' …
A Cry to Mary
by Saint Godric of Finchale (1065-1170)
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
I.
Saintë Marië Virginë,
Mother of Jesus Christ the Nazarenë,
Welcome, shield and help thin Godric,
Fly him off to God's kingdom rich!
II.
Saintë Marië, Christ's bower,
****** among Maidens, Motherhood's flower,
Blot out my sin, fix where I'm flawed,
Elevate me to Bliss with God!
Godric also wrote a prayer to St. Nicholas:
Prayer to St. Nicholas
by Saint Godric of Finchale (1065-1170)
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Saint Nicholas, beloved of God,
Build us a house that's bright and fair;
Watch over us from birth to bier,
Then, Saint Nicholas, bring us safely there!
Another candidate for the first rhyming English poem is actually called 'The Rhyming Poem' as well as 'The Riming Poem' and 'The Rhymed Poem.'
The Rhymed Poem aka The Rhyming Poem and The Riming Poem
anonymous Old English/Anglo-Saxon poem circa 990 AD
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
He who granted me life created this sun
and graciously provided its radiant engine.
I was gladdened with glees, bathed in bright hues,
deluged with joy's blossoms, sunshine-infused.
Men admired me, feted me with banquet-courses;
we rejoiced in the good life. Gaily bedecked horses
carried me swiftly across plains on joyful rides,
delighting me with their long limbs' thunderous strides.
That world was quickened by earth's fruits and their flavors!
I cantered under pleasant skies, attended by troops of advisers.
Guests came and went, amusing me with their chatter
as I listened with delight to their witty palaver.
Well-appointed ships glided by in the distance;
when I sailed myself, I was never without guidance.
I was of the highest rank; I lacked for nothing in the hall;
nor did I lack for brave companions; warriors, all,
we strode through castle halls weighed down with gold
won from our service to thanes. We were proud men, and bold.
Wise men praised me; I was omnipotent in battle;
Fate smiled on and protected me; foes fled before me like cattle.
Thus I lived with joy indwelling; faithful retainers surrounded me;
I possessed vast estates; I commanded all my eyes could see;
the earth lay subdued before me; I sat on a princely throne;
the words I sang were charmed; old friendships did not wane …
Those were years rich in gifts and the sounds of happy harp-strings,
when a lasting peace dammed shut the rivers' sorrowings.
My servants were keen, their harps resonant;
their songs pealed, the sound loud but pleasant;
the music they made melodious, a continual delight;
the castle hall trembled and towered bright.
Courage increased, wealth waxed with my talent;
I gave wise counsel to great lords and enriched the valiant.
My spirit enlarged; my heart rejoiced;
good faith flourished; glory abounded; abundance increased.
I was lavishly supplied with gold; bright gems were circulated …
Till treasure led to treachery and the bonds of friendship constricted.
I was bold in my bright array, noble in my equipage,
my joy princely, my home a happy hermitage.
I protected and led my people;
for many years my life among them was regal;
I was devoted to them and they to me.
But now my heart is troubled, fearful of the fates I see;
disaster seems unavoidable. Someone dear departs in flight by night
who once before was bold. His soul has lost its light.
A secret disease in full growth blooms within his breast,
spreads in different directions. Hostility blossoms in his chest,
in his mind. Bottomless grief assaults the mind's nature
and when penned in, erupts in rupture,
burns eagerly for calamity, runs bitterly about.
The weary man suffers, begins a journey into doubt;
his pain is ceaseless; pain increases his sorrows, destroys his bliss;
his glory ceases; he loses his happiness;
he loses his craft; he no longer burns with desires.
Thus joys here perish, lordships expire;
men lose faith and descend into vice;
infirm faith degenerates into evil's curse;
faith feebly abandons its high seat and every hour grows worse.
So now the world changes; Fate leaves men lame;
Death pursues hatred and brings men to shame.
The happy clan perishes; the spear rends the marrow;
the evildoer brawls and poisons the arrow;
sorrow devours the city; old age castrates courage;
misery flourishes; wrath desecrates the peerage;
the abyss of sin widens; the treacherous path snakes;
resentment burrows, digs in, wrinkles, engraves;
artificial beauty grows foul;
the summer heat cools;
earthly wealth fails;
enmity rages, cruel, bold;
the might of the world ages, courage grows cold.
Fate wove itself for me and my sentence was given:
that I should dig a grave and seek that grim cavern
men cannot avoid when death comes, arrow-swift,
to seize their lives in his inevitable grasp.
Now night comes at last,
and the way stand clear
for Death to dispossesses me of my my abode here.
When my corpse lies interred and the worms eat my limbs,
whom will Death delight then, with his dark feast and hymns?
Let men's bones become one,
and then finally, none,
till there's nothing left here of the evil ones.
But men of good faith will not be destroyed;
the good man will rise, far beyond the Void,
who chastened himself, more often than not,
to avoid bitter sins and that final black Blot.
The good man has hope of a far better end
and remembers the promise of Heaven,
where he'll experience the mercies of God for his saints,
freed from all sins, dark and depraved,
defended from vices, gloriously saved,
where, happy at last before their cheerful Lord,
men may rejoice in his love forevermore.
aaa
Exeter Book Gnomic Verses or Maxims
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
The dragon dwells under the dolmen,
wizened-wise, hoarding his treasure;
the fishes bring forth their finned kind;
the king in his halls distributes rings;
the bear stalks the heath, shaggy and malevolent.
Frost shall freeze,
fire feast on firs;
earth breed blizzards;
brazen ice bridge waters;
waters spawn shields;
oxen axe
frost's firm fetters,
freeing golden grain
from ice's imprisonment.
Winter shall wane,
warm weather return
as sun-warmed summer!
Kings shall win
wise queens with largesse,
with beakers and bracelets;
both must be
generous with their gifts.
Courage must create
war-lust in a lord
while his woman shows
kindness to her people,
delightful in dress,
interpreter of rune-words,
roomy-hearted
at hearth-sharing and horse-giving.
The deepest depths
hold seas' secrets the longest.
The ship must be neatly nailed,
the hull framed
from light linden.
But how loving
the Frisian wife's welcome
when, floating offshore,
the keel turns homeward!
She hymns homeward
her own husband,
till his hull lies at anchor!
Then she washes salt-stains
from his stiff shirt,
lays out new clothes
clean and fresh
for her exhausted sailor,
her beloved bread-winner,
love's needs well-met.
THE WANDERER
Please keep in mind that in ancient Anglo-Saxon poems like "The Ruin" and "The Wanderer" the Wyrdes function like the Fates of ancient Greek mythology, controlling men's destinies.
The Wanderer
ancient Anglo-Saxon poem, circa 990 AD
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
"The one who wanders alone
longs for mercy, longs for grace,
knowing he must yet traverse
the whale-path's rime-cold waters,
stirring the waves with his hands & oars,
heartsick & troubled in spirit,
always bending his back to his exile-ways."
"Fate is inexorable."
Thus spoke the wanderer, the ancient earth-roamer
mindful of life's hardships,
of its cruel slaughters & deaths of dear kinsmen.
"Often I am driven, departing alone at daybreak,
to give my griefs utterance,
the muffled songs of a sick heart
sung to no listeners, to no living lord,
for now there are none left alive
to debate my innermost doubts.
Custom considers it noble indeed for a man
to harbor his thought-hoard,
keep it close to his chest,
slam the doors of his doubts shut,
bind sorrow to silence & be still.
But the weary-minded man cannot withstand Wyrdes,
nor may his shipwrecked heart welcome solace, nor any hope of healing.
Therefore those eager for fame often bind dark thoughts
& unwailed woes in their breast-coffers.
Thus, miserably sad, overcome by cares & separated from my homeland,
far from my noble kinsmen, I was forced to bind my thoughts with iron fetters,
to confine my breast-hoard to its cage of bone.
Long ago the dark earth covered my gold-lord & I was left alone,
winter-weary & wretched, to cross these winding waves friendless.
Saddened, I sought the hall of some new gold-giver,
someone who might take heed of me, welcome me,
hoping to find some friendly mead-hall
offering comfort to men left friendless by Fate.
Anyone left lordless, kinless & friendless
knows how bitter-cruel life becomes
to one bereft of protectors,
pale sorrows his only companions.
No one waits to welcome the wanderer!
His only rewards, cold nights & the frigid sea.
Only exile-paths await him,
not torques of twisted gold,
warm hearths & his lord's trust.
Only cold hearts' frozen feelings, not earthly glory.
Then he longingly remembers retainers, feasts & the receiving of treasure,
how in his youth his gold-friend recognized him at the table.
But now all pleasure has vanished & his dreams taste like dust!
The wanderer knows what it means to do without:
without the wise counsels of his beloved lord, kinsmen & friends.
The lone outcast, wandering the headlands alone,
where solitariness & sorrow sleep together!
Then the wretched solitary vagabond
remembers in his heart how he embraced & kissed his lord
& laid his hands & head upon his knee,
in those former days of grace at the gift-stool.
But the wanderer always awakes without friends.
Awakening, the friendless man confronts the murky waves,
the seabirds bathing, broadening out their feathers,
the ****-frost, harrowing hail & snow eternally falling…
Then his heart's wounds seem all the heavier for the loss of his beloved lord.
Thus his sorrow is renewed,
remembrance of his lost kinsmen troubles his mind,
& he greets their ghosts with exclamations of joy, but they merely swim away.
The floating ones never tarry.
Thus care is renewed for the one whose weary spirit rides the waves.
Therefore I cannot think why, surveying this world,
my mind should not contemplate its darkness.
When I consider the lives of earls & their retainers,
how at a stroke they departed their halls, those mood-proud thanes! ,
then I see how this middle-earth fails & falls, day after day…
Therefore no man becomes wise without his share of winters.
A wise man must be patient,
not hot-hearted, nor over-eager to speak,
nor weak-willed in battles & yet not reckless,
not unwitting nor wanting in forethought,
nor too greedy for gold & goods,
nor too fearful, nor too cheerful,
nor too hot, nor too mild,
nor too eager to boast before he's thought things through.
A wise man forbears boastmaking
until, stout-hearted, his mind sure & his will strong,
he can read the road where his travels & travails take him.
The wise man grasps how ghastly life will be
when all the world's wealth becomes waste,
even as middle-earth already is, in so many places
where walls stand weather-beaten by the wind,
crusted with cold rime, ruined dwellings snowbound,
wine-halls crumbling, their dead lords deprived of joy,
the once-hale host all perished beyond the walls.
Some war took, carried them off from their courses;
a bird bore one across the salt sea;
another the gray wolf delivered to Death;
one a sallow-cheeked earl buried in a bleak barrow.
Thus mankind's Maker laid waste to Middle Earth,
until the works of the giants stood idle,
all eerily silenced, the former joys of their halls."
The wise man contemplates these ruins,
considers this dark life soberly,
remembers the blood spilled here
in multitudes of battles,
then says:
"Where is the horse now? Where, its riders?
Where, the givers of gifts & treasure, the gold-friend?
Where, the banquet-seats? Where, the mead-halls' friendly uproars?
Gone, the bright cup! Gone, the mailed warrior!
Gone, the glory of princes! Time has slipped down
the night-dome, as if it never were!
Now all that remains is this wall, wondrous-high,
decorated with strange serpentine shapes,
these unreadable wormlike runes!
The strength of spears defeated the earls,
lances lusting for slaughter, some glorious victory!
Now storms rage against these rock-cliffs,
as swirling snows & sleet entomb the earth,
while wild winter howls its wrath
as the pale night-shadow descends.
The frigid north sends hailstones to harry warriors.
Hardships & struggles beset the children of men.
The shape of fate is twisted under the heavens
as the Wyrdes decree.
Life is on loan, wealth transitory, friendships fleeting,
man himself fleeting, everything transitory,
& earth's entire foundation stands empty."
Thus spoke the wanderer, wise-hearted, as he sat apart in thought.
Good is the man who keeps his word to the end.
Nor should a man manifest his breast-pangs before he knows their cure,
how to accomplish the remedy with courage.
The Dream of the Rood
anonymous Anglo-Saxon poem, circa the tenth century
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Listen! A dream descended upon me at deep midnight
when sleepers have sought their beds and sweet rest:
the dream of dreams, I declare it!
It seemed I saw the most wondrous tree,
raised heaven-high, wound 'round with light,
with beams of the brightest wood. A beacon
covered in overlapping gold and precious gems,
it stood fair at the earth's foot, with five gemstones
brightening its cross-beam. All heaven's angels
beheld it with wonder, for it was no felon's gallows…
Beowulf
Old English/Anglo-Saxon poem, circa 8th-10th century AD
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
LO, praise the prowess of the Spear-Danes
whose clan-thanes ruled in days bygone,
possessed of dauntless courage and valor.
All have heard the honors the athelings won,
of Scyld Scefing, scourge of rebellious tribes,
wrecker of mead-benches, harrier of warriors,
awer of earls. He had come from afar,
first friendless, a foundling, till Fate intervened:
for he waxed under the welkin and persevered,
until folk, far and wide, on all coasts of the whale-path,
were forced to yield to him, bring him tribute.
A good king!
To him an heir was afterwards born,
a lad in his yards, a son in his halls,
sent by heaven to comfort the folk.
Knowing they'd lacked an earl a long while,
the Lord of Life, the Almighty, made him far-renowned.
Beowulf's fame flew far throughout the north,
the boast of him, this son of Scyld,
through Scandian lands.
…
Grendel was known of in Geatland, far-asea,
the horror of him.
…
Beowulf bade a seaworthy wave-cutter
be readied to bear him to Heorot,
over the swan's riding,
to defense of that good king, Hrothgar.
Wise men tried to dissuade him
because they held Beowulf dear,
but their warnings only whetted his war-lust.
Yet still he pondered the omens.
The resolute prince handpicked his men,
the fiercest of his folk, to assist him:
fourteen men sea-wise, stout-hearted,
battle-tested. Led them to the land's edge.
Hardened warriors hauled bright mail-coats,
well-wrought war gear, to the foot of her mast.
At high tide she rode the waves, hard in by headland,
as they waved their last farewells, then departed.
Away she broke like a sea-bird, skimming the waves,
wind-borne, her curved prow plowing the ocean,
till on the second day the skyline of Geatland loomed.
…
In the following poem Finnsburuh means 'Finn's stronghold' and Finn was a Frisian king. This battle between Danes and Frisians is also mentioned in the epic Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf. Hnaef and his 60 retainers were house-guests of Finn at the time of the battle.
The Finnesburg Fragment or The Fight at Finnsburg
Old English/Anglo-Saxon poem, circa 10th century AD
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Battle-bred Hnaef broke the silence:
'Are the eaves aflame, is there dawn in the east,
are there dragons aloft? No, only the flares of torches
borne on the night breeze. Evil is afoot. Soon the hoots of owls,
the weird wolf's howls, cries of the carrion crows, the arrow's screams,
and the shield's reply to the lance's shaft, shall be heard.
Heed the omens of the moon, that welkin-wanderer.
We shall soon feel in full this folk's fury for us.
Shake yourselves awake, soldiers! On your feet!
Who's with me? Grab your swords and shields. Loft your linden! '
'The Battle of Brunanburh' is the first poem to appear in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Aethelstan and Edmund were the grandsons of King Alfred the Great.
The Battle of Brunanburh or The Battle of Brunanburgh
anonymous Old English/Anglo-Saxon poem, circa 937 AD
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Her Aethelstan cyning, / Aethelstan the King,
eorla dryhten, / Lord over earls,
beorna beag-giefa, / bracelet-bestower,
and his brothor eac, / and with him his brother,
Eadmund aetheling, / Edmund the Atheling,
ealdor-lange tir / earned unending glory:
geslogon aet saecce / glory they gained in battle
sweorda ecgum / as they slew with the sword's edge
ymbe Brunanburh. / many near Brunanburgh…
The Battle of Maldon
anonymous Old English/Anglo-Saxon poem, circa 991 AD or later
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
…would be broken.
Then he bade each warrior unbridle his horse,
set it free, drive it away and advance onward afoot,
intent on deeds of arms and dauntless courage.
It was then that Offa's kinsman kenned
their Earl would not accept cowardice,
for he set his beloved falcon free, let it fly woods-ward,
then stepped forward to battle himself, nothing withheld.
By this his men understood their young Earl's will full well,
that he would not weaken when taking up weapons.
Eadric desired to serve his Earl,
his Captain in the battle to come; thus he also advanced forward,
his spear raised, his spirit strong,
boldly grasping buckler and broadsword,
ready to keep his vow to stand fast in the fight.
Byrhtnoth marshalled his men,
teaching each warrior his task:
how to stand, where to be stationed…
Adam Lay Ybounden
(anonymous Medieval English Lyric, circa early 15th century AD)
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Adam lay bound, bound in a bond;
Four thousand winters, he thought, were not too long.
And all was for an apple, an apple that he took,
As clerics now find written in their book.
But had the apple not been taken, or had it never been,
We'd never have had our Lady, heaven's queen.
So blesséd be the time the apple was taken thus;
Therefore we sing, 'God is gracious! '
The poem has also been rendered as 'Adam lay i-bounden' and 'Adam lay i-bowndyn.'
I Sing of a Maiden
(anonymous Medieval English Lyric, circa early 15th century AD)
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
I sing of a maiden
That is matchless.
The King of all Kings
For her son she chose.
He came also as still
To his mother's breast
As April dew
Falling on the grass.
He came also as still
To his mother's bower
As April dew
Falling on the flower.
He came also as still
To where his mother lay
As April dew
Falling on the spray.
Mother and maiden?
Never one, but she!
Well may such a lady
God's mother be!
WIDSITH
Widsith, the 'wide-wanderer' or 'far-traveler, ' was a fictional poet and harper who claimed to have sung for everyone from Alexander the Great, Caesar and Attila, to the various kings of the Angles, Saxons and Vikings! The poem that bears his name is a thula, or recited list of historical and legendary figures, and an ancient version of, 'I've Been Everywhere, Man.'
Widsith, the Far-Traveler
anonymous Old English/Anglo-Saxon poem, circa 680-950 AD
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Widsith the wide-wanderer began to speak,
unlocked his word-hoard, manifested his memories,
he who had travelled earth's roads furthest
among the races of men—their tribes, peoples and lands.
He had often prospered in the mead-halls,
competing for precious stones with his tale-trove.
His ancestors hailed from among the Myrgings,
whence his lineage sprung, a scion of Ealhhild,
the fair peace-weaver. On his first journey, east of the Angles,
he had sought out the home of Eormanric,
the angry oath-breaker and betrayer of men.
Widsith, rich in recollections, began to share his wisdom thus:
I have learned much from mighty men, their tribes' mages,
and every prince must live according to his people's customs,
acting honorably, if he wishes to prosper upon his throne.
Hwala was the best, for awhile,
Alexander the mightiest, beyond compare,
his empire the most prosperous and powerful of all,
among all the races of men, as far as I have heard tell.
Attila ruled the Huns, Eormanric the Goths,
Becca the Banings, Gifica the Burgundians,
Caesar the Greeks, Caelic the Finns,
Hagena the Holmrigs, Heoden the Glomms,
Witta the Swæfings, Wada the Hælsings,
Meaca the Myrgings, Mearchealf the Hundings,
Theodric the Franks, Thyle the Rondings,
Breoca the Brondings, Billing the Wærns,
Oswine the Eowan, Gefwulf the Jutes,
Finn Folcwalding the Frisians,
Sigehere ruled the Sea-Danes for decades,
Hnæf the Hockings, Helm the Wulfings,
Wald the Woings, Wod the Thuringians,
Sæferth the Secgan, Ongendtheow the Swedes,
Sceafthere the Ymbers, Sceafa the Lombards,
*** the Hætwera, Holen the Wrosnas,
Hringweald was king of the Herefara.
Offa ruled the Angles, Alewih the Danes,
the bravest and boldest of men,
yet he never outdid Offa.
For Offa, while still a boy, won in battle the broadest of kingdoms.
No one as young was ever a worthier Earl!
With his stout sword he struck the boundary of the Myrgings,
fixed it at Fifeldor, where afterwards the Angles and Swæfings held it.
Hrothulf and Hrothgar, uncle and nephew,
for a long time kept a careful peace together
after they had driven away the Vikings' kinsmen,
vanquished Ingeld's spear-hordes,
and hewed down at Heorot the host of the Heathobards.
Thus I have traveled among many foreign lands,
crossing the earth's breadth,
experiencing both goodness and wickedness,
cut off from my kinsfolk, far from my family.
Thus I can speak and sing these tidings in the mead-halls,
of how how I was received by the most excellent kings.
Many were magnanimous to me!
I was among the Huns and the glorious Ostrogoths,
among the Swedes, the Geats, and the South-Danes,
among the Vandals, the Wærnas, and the Vikings,
among the Gefthas, the Wends, and the Gefflas,
among the Angles, the Swabians, and the Ænenas,
among the Saxons, the Secgan, and the Swordsmen,
among the Hronas, the Danes, and the Heathoreams,
among the Thuringians and the Throndheims,
also among the Burgundians, where I received an arm-ring;
Guthhere gave me a gleaming gem in return for my song.
He was no gem-hoarding king, slow to give!
I was among the Franks, the Frisians, and the Frumtings,
among the Rugas, the Glomms, and the Romans.
I was likewise in Italy with Ælfwine,
who had, as I'd heard, commendable hands,
fast to reward fame-winning deeds,
a generous sharer of rings and torques,
the noble son of Eadwine.
I was among the Saracens and also the Serings,
among the Greeks, the Finns, and also with Caesar,
the ruler of wine-rich cities and formidable fortresses,
of riches and rings and Roman domains.
He also controlled the kingdom of Wales.
I was among the Scots, the Picts and the Scrid-Finns,
among the Leons and Bretons and Lombards,
among the heathens and heroes and Huns,
among the Israelites and Assyrians,
among the Hebrews and Jews and Egyptians,
among the Medes and Persians and Myrgings,
and with the Mofdings against the Myrgings,
among the Amothings and the East-Thuringians,
among the Eolas, the Ista and the Idumings.
I was also with Eormanric for many years,
as long as the Goth-King availed me well,
that ruler of cities, who gave me gifts:
six hundred shillings of pure gold
beaten into a beautiful neck-ring!
This I gave to Eadgils, overlord of the Myrgings
and my keeper-protector, when I returned home,
a precious adornment for my beloved prince,
after which he awarded me my father's estates.
Ealhhild gave me another gift,
that shining lady, that majestic queen,
the glorious daughter of Eadwine.
I sang her praises in many lands,
lauded her name, increased her fame,
the fairest of all beneath the heavens,
that gold-adorned queen, glad gift-sharer!
Later, Scilling and I created a song for our war-lord,
my shining speech swelling to the sound of his harp,
our voices in unison, so that many hardened men, too proud for tears,
called it the most moving song they'd ever heard.
Afterwards I wandered the Goths' homelands,
always seeking the halest and heartiest companions,
such as could be found within Eormanric's horde.
I sought Hethca, Beadeca and the Herelings,
Emerca, Fridlal and the Ostrogoths,
even the wise father of Unwen.
I sought Secca and Becca, Seafola and Theodric,
Heathoric and Sifeca, Hlithe and Ongentheow,
Eadwine and Elsa, Ægelmund and Hungar,
even the brave band of the Broad-Myrgings.
I sought Wulfhere and Wyrmhere where war seldom slackened,
when the forces of Hræda with hard-striking swords
had to defend their imperiled homestead
in the Wistla woods against Attila's hordes.
I sought Rædhere, Rondhere, Rumstan and Gislhere,
Withergield and Freotheric, Wudga and Hama,
never the worst companions although I named them last.
Often from this band flew shrill-whistling wooden shafts,
shrieking spears from this ferocious nation,
felling enemies because they wielded the wound gold,
those good leaders, Wudga and Hama.
I have always found this to be true in my far-venturing:
that the dearest man among earth-dwellers
is the one God gives to rule ably over others.
But the makar's weird is to be a wanderer. [maker's/minstrel's fate]
The minstrel travels far, from land to land,
singing his needs, speaking his grateful thanks,
whether in the sunny southlands or the frigid northlands,
measuring out his word-hoard to those unstingy of gifts,
to those rare elect rulers who understand art's effect on the multitudes,
to those open-handed lords who would have their fame spread,
via a new praise-verse, thus earning enduring reputations
under the heavens.
Lent is Come with Love to Town
anonymous Middle English poem, circa 1330
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Springtime comes with love to town,
With blossoms and with birdsong 'round,
Bringing all this bliss:
Daisies in the dales,
Sweet notes of nightingales.
Each bird contributes songs;
The thrush chides ancient wrongs.
Departed, winter's glowers;
The woodruff gayly flowers;
The birds create great noise
And warble of their joys,
Making all the woodlands ring!
'Cantus Troili' from Troilus and Criseide
by Petrarch
'If no love is, O God, what fele I so? ' translation by Geoffrey Chaucer
modernization by Michael R. Burch
If there's no love, O God, why then, so low?
And if love is, what thing, and which, is he?
If love is good, whence comes my dismal woe?
If wicked, love's a wonder unto me,
When every torment and adversity
That comes from him, persuades me not to think,
For the more I thirst, the more I itch to drink!
And if in my own lust I choose to burn,
From whence comes all my wailing and complaint?
If harm agrees with me, where can I turn?
I know not, all I do is feint and faint!
O quick death and sweet harm so pale and quaint,
How may there be in me such quantity
Of you, 'cept I consent to make us three?
And if I so consent, I wrongfully
Complain, I know. Thus pummeled to and fro,
All starless, lost and compassless, am I
Amidst the sea, between two rending winds,
That in diverse directions bid me, 'Go! '
Alas! What is this wondrous malady?
For heat of cold, for cold of heat, I die.
'Blow, northerne wind'
anonymous Middle English poem, circa late 13th century
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Blow, northern wind,
Send my love, my sweeting,
Blow, northern wind,
Blow, blow, blow,
Our love completing!
'What is he, this lordling, that cometh from the fight? '
by William Herebert, circa early 14th century
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Who is he, this lordling, who staggers from the fight,
with blood-red garb so grisly arrayed,
once appareled in lineaments white?
Once so seemly in sight?
Once so valiant a knight?
'It is I, it is I, who alone speaks right,
a champion to heal mankind in this fight.'
Why then are your clothes a ****** mess,
like one who has trod a winepress?
'I trod the winepress alone,
else mankind was done.'
'Thou wommon boute fere'
by William Herebert, circa early 14th century
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Woman without compare,
you bore your own father:
great the wonder
that one woman was mother
to her father and brother,
as no one else ever was.
'Marye, maide, milde and fre'
by William of Shoreham, circa early 14th century
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Mary, maid, mild and free,
Chamber of the Trinity,
This while, listen to me,
As I greet you with a song...
'My sang es in sihting'
by Richard Rolle, circa 14th century
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
My song is in sighing,
My life is in longing,
Till I see thee, my King,
So fair in thy shining,
So fair in thy beauty,
Leading me into your light...
To Rosemounde: A Ballade
by Geoffrey Chaucer
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Madame, you're a shrine to loveliness
And as world-encircling as trade's duties.
For your eyes shine like glorious crystals
And your round cheeks like rubies.
Therefore you're so merry and so jocund
That at a revel, when that I see you dance,
You become an ointment to my wound,
Though you offer me no dalliance.
For though I weep huge buckets of warm tears,
Still woe cannot confound my heart.
For your seemly voice, so delicately pronounced,
Make my thoughts abound with bliss, even apart.
So courteously I go, by your love bound,
So that I say to myself, in true penance,
'Suffer me to love you Rosemounde;
Though you offer me no dalliance.'
Never was a pike so sauce-immersed
As I, in love, am now emeshed and wounded.
For which I often, of myself, divine
That I am truly Tristam the Second.
My love may not grow cold, nor numb,
I burn in an amorous pleasance.
Do as you will, and I will be your thrall,
Though you offer me no dalliance.
A Lady without Paragon
by Geoffrey Chaucer
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Hide, Absalom, your shining tresses;
Esther, veil your meekness;
Retract, Jonathan, your friendly caresses;
Penelope and Marcia Catoun?
Other wives hold no comparison;
Hide your beauties, Isolde and Helen;
My lady comes, all stars to outshine.
Thy body fair? Let it not appear,
Lavinia and Lucretia of Rome;
Nor Polyxena, who found love's cost so dear;
Nor Cleopatra, with all her passion.
Hide the truth of love and your renown;
And thou, Thisbe, who felt such pain;
My lady comes, all stars to outshine.
Hero, Dido, Laodamia, all fair,
And Phyllis, hanging for Demophon;
And Canace, dead by love's cruel spear;
And Hypsipyle, betrayed along with Jason;
Make of your truth neither boast nor swoon,
Nor Hypermnestra nor Adriane, ye twain;
My lady comes, all stars to outshine.
A hymn to Jesus
by Richard of Caistre, circa 1400
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Jesu, Lord that madest me
and with thy blessed blood hath bought,
forgive that I have grieved thee,
in word, work, will and thought.
Jesu, for thy wounds' hurt
of body, feet and hands too,
make me meek and low in heart,
and thee to love, as I should do...
In Praise of his Ugly Lady
by Thomas Hoccleve, early 15th century
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Of my lady? Well rejoice, I may!
Her golden forehead is full narrow and small;
Her brows are like dim, reed coral;
And her jet-black eyes glisten, aye.
Her bulging cheeks are soft as clay
with large jowls and substantial.
Her nose, an overhanging shady wall:
no rain in that mouth on a stormy day!
Her mouth is nothing scant with lips gray;
Her chin can scarcely be seen at all.
Her comely body is shaped like a football,
and she sings like a cawing jay.
Lament for Chaucer
by Thomas Hoccleve, early 15th century
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Alas, my worthy master, honorable,
The very treasure and riches of this land!
Death, by your death, has done irreparable
harm to us: her cruel and vengeful hand
has robbed our country of sweet rhetoric...
Holly and Ivy
anonymous Middle English poem, circa 15th century
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Nay! Ivy, nay!
It shall not be, like this:
Let Holy have the mastery,
As the manner is.
Holy stood in the hall
Fair to behold;
Ivy stood outside the door,
Lonely and cold.
Holy and his merry men
Commenced to dance and sing;
Ivy and her maidens
Were left outside to weep and wring.
Ivy has a chilblain,
She caght it with the cold.
So must they all have, aye,
Whom with Ivy hold.
Holly has berries
As red as any rose:
The foresters and hunters
Keep them from the does.
Ivy has berries
As black as any ill:
There comes the owl
To eat them as she will.
Holly has birds,
A full fair flock:
The nightingale, the poppyinjay,
The gentle lark.
Good Ivy, good Ivy,
What birds cling to you?
None but the owl
Who cries, 'Who? Who? '
Unkindness Has Killed Me
anonymous Middle English poem,15th century
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Grievous is my sorrow:
Both evening and morow;
Unto myself alone
Thus do I moan,
That unkindness has killed me
And put me to this pain.
Alas! what remedy
That I cannot refrain?
from The Testament of John Lydgate
15th century
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Behold, o man! lift up your eyes and see
What mortal pain I suffer for your trespass.
With piteous voice I cry and say to thee:
Behold my wounds, behold my ****** face,
Behold the rebukes that do me such menace,
Behold my enemies that do me so despise,
And how that I, to reform thee to grace,
Was like a lamb offred in sacrifice.
Vox ultima Crucis
from The Testament of John Lydgate,15th century
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
TARRY no longer; toward thine heritage
Haste on thy way, and be of right good cheer.
Go each day onward on thy pilgrimage;
Think how short a time thou hast abided here.
Thy place is built above the stars clear,
No earthly palace wrought in such stately wise.
Come on, my friend, my brother must enter!
For thee I offered my blood in sacrifice.
Inordinate Love
anonymous Middle English poem, circa 15th century
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
I shall say what inordinate love is:
The ferocity and singleness of mind,
An inextinguishable burning devoid of bliss,
A great hunger, too insatiable to decline,
A dulcet ill, an evil sweetness, blind,
A right wonderful, sugared, sweet error,
Without any rest, contrary to kind,
Without quiet, a riot of useless labor.
Besse Bunting
anonymous Middle English poem, circa 15th century
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
In April and May
When hearts be all a-merry,
Bessie Bunting, the miller's girl,
With lips as red as cherries,
Cast aside remembrance
To pass her time in dalliance
And leave her misery to chance.
Right womanly arrayed
In petticoats of white,
She was undismayed
And her countenance was light.
The spring under a thorn
anonymous Middle English poem, circa 15th century
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
At a wellspring, under a thorn,
the remedy for an ill was born.
There stood beside a maid
Full of love bound,
And whoso seeks true love,
In her it will be found.
The Complaint of Cresseid against Fate
Robert Henryson,15th century
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
O sop of sorrow, sunken into care,
O wretched Cresseid, now and evermore
Gone is thy joy and all thy mirth on earth!
Stripped bare of blitheness and happiness,
No salve can save you from your sickness.
Fell is thy fortune, wicked thy fate.
All bliss banished and sorrow in bloom.
Would that I were buried under the earth
Where no one in Greece or Troy might hear it!
A lover left alone with his thoughts
anonymous Middle English poem, circa later 15th century
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Continuance
of remembrance,
without ending,
causes me penance
and great grievance,
for your parting.
You are so deeply
engraved in my heart,
God only knows
that always before me
I ever see you
in thoughts covert.
Though I do not explain
my woeful pain,
I bear it still,
although it seems vain
to speak against
Fortune's will.
Go, hert, hurt with adversity
anonymous Middle English poem, circa 15th century
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Go, heart, hurt with adversity,
and let my lady see thy wounds,
then say to her, as I say to thee:
'Farewell, my joy, and welcome pain,
till I see my lady again.'
I love a flower
by Thomas Phillipps, circa 1500
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
'I love, I love, and whom love ye? '
'I love a flower of fresh beauty.'
'I love another as well as ye.'
'That shall be proved here, anon,
If we three
together can agree
thereon.'
'I love a flower of sweet odour.'
'Marigolds or lavender? '
'Columbine, golds of sweet flavor? '
'Nay! Nay! Let be:
It is none of them
that liketh me.'
(The argument continues...)
'I love the rose, both red and white.'
'Is that your perfect appetite? '
'To talk of them is my delight.'
'Joyed may we be,
our Prince to see
and roses three.'
'Now we have loved and love will we,
this fair, fresh flower, full of beauty.'
'Most worthy it is, so thinketh me.'
'Then may it be proved here, anon,
that we three
did agree
as one.'
The sleeper hood-winked
by John Skelton, circa late 15th century
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
With 'Lullay! Lullay! ' like a child,
Thou sleepest too long, thou art beguiled.
'My darling dear, my daisy flower,
let me, quoth he, 'lie in your lap.'
'Lie still, ' quoth she, 'my paramour, '
'Lie still, of course, and take a nap.'
His head was heavy, such was his hap!
All drowsy, dreaming, drowned in sleep,
That of his love he took no keep. [paid no notice]
The Corpus Christi Carol
anonymous Middle English poem, circa early 16th century
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
He bore him up, he bore him down,
He bore him into an orchard brown.
Lully, lullay, lully, lullay!
The falcon has borne my mate away.
In that orchard there stood a hall
Hanged all over with purple and pall.
Lully, lullay, lully, lullay!
The falcon has borne my mate away.
And in that hall there stood a bed
hanged all over with gold so red.
Lully, lullay, lully, lullay!
The falcon has borne my mate away.
And in that bed there lies a knight,
His wounds all bleeding both day and night.
Lully, lullay, lully, lullay!
The falcon has borne my mate away.
By that bed's side there kneels a maid,
And she weeps both night and day.
Lully, lullay, lully, lullay!
The falcon has borne my mate away.
And by that bedside stands a stone,
'Corpus Christi' written thereon.
Lully, lullay, lully, lullay!
The falcon has borne my mate away.
Love ever green
attributed to King Henry VIII, circa 1515
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
If Henry VIII wrote the poem, he didn't quite live up to it! - MRB
Green groweth the holly,
so doth the ivy.
Though winter's blasts blow never so high,
green groweth the holly.
As the holly groweth green
and never changeth hue,
so am I, and ever have been,
unto my lady true.
Adew! Mine own lady.
Adew! My special.
Who hath my heart truly,
Be sure, and ever shall.
Pleasure it is
by William Cornish, early 16th century
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Pleasure it is,
to her, indeed.
The birds sing;
the deer in the dale,
the sheep in the vale,
the new corn springing.
God's allowance
for sustenance,
his gifts to man.
Thus we always give him praise
and thank him, then.
And thank him, then.
My lute and I
by Sir Thomas Wyatt, circa early 16th century
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
At most mischief
I suffer grief
Without relief
Since I have none;
My lute and I
Continually
Shall both apply
To sigh and moan.
Nought may prevail
To weep or wail;
Pity doth fail
In you, alas!
Mourning or moan,
Complaint, or none,
It is all one,
As in this case.
For cruelty,
Most that can be,
Hath sovereignty
Within your heart;
Which maketh bare
All my welfare:
Nought do you care
How sore I smart.
No tiger's heart
Is so perverse
Without desert
To wreak his ire;
And me? You ****
For my goodwill;
Lo, how I spill
For my desire!
There is no love
Your heart to move,
And I can prove
No other way;
Therefore I must
Restrain my lust,
Banish my trust
And wealth away.
Thus in mischief
I suffer grief,
Without relief
Since I have none,
My lute and I
Continually
Shall both apply
To sigh and moan.
What menethe this?
by Sir Thomas Wyatt, circa early 16th century
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
WHAT meaneth this! when I lie alone
I toss, I turn, I sigh, I groan;
My bed seems near as hard as stone:
What means this?
I sigh, I plain continually;
The clothes that on my bed do lie,
Always, methinks, they lie awry;
What means this?
In slumbers oft for fear I quake;
For heat and cold I burn and shake;
For lack of sleep my head doth ache;
What means this?
At mornings then when I do rise,
I turn unto my wonted guise,
All day thereafter, muse and devise;
What means this?
And if perchance by me there pass,
She, unto whom I sue for grace,
The cold blood forsaketh my face;
What means this?
But if I sit with her nearby,
With a loud voice my heart doth cry,
And yet my mouth is dumb and dry;
What means this?
To ask for help, no heart I have;
My tongue doth fail what I should crave;
Yet inwardly I rage and rave;
What means this?
Thus I have passed many a year,
And many a day, though nought appear,
But most of that which I most I fear;
What means this?
Yet ons I was
by Sir Thomas Wyatt, circa early 16th century
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Once in your grace I know I was,
Even as well as now is he;
Though Fortune hath so turned my case
That I am down and he full high;
Yet once I was.
Once I was he that did you please
So well that nothing did I doubt,
And though today ye think it ease
To take him in and throw me out;
Yet once I was.
Once I was he, in times past.
That as your own ye did retain:
And though ye have me now out-cast,
Showing untruth in you to reign;
Yet once I was.
Once I was he that knit the knot
The which ye swore not to unknit,
And though ye feign it now forgot,
In using your newfangled wit;
Yet once I was.
Once I was he to whom ye said,
'Welcome, my joy, my whole delight! '
And though ye are now well repaid
Of me, your own, your claim seems slight;
Yet once I was.
Once I was he to whom ye spake,
'Have here my heart! It is thy own.'
And though these words ye now forsake,
Saying thereof my part is none;
Yet once I was.
Once I was he that led the cast,
But now am he that must needs die.
And though I die, yet, at the last,
In your remembrance let it lie,
That once I was.
The Vision of Piers Plowman
by William Langland, circa 1330-1400
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Incipit liber de Petro Plowman prologus
In a summer season when the sun shone soft,
I clothed myself in a cloak like a shepherd's,
In a habit like a hermit's unholy in works,
And went out into the wide world, wonders to hear.
Then on a May morning on Malvern hills,
A marvel befell me, of fairies, methought.
I was weary with wandering and went to rest
Under a broad bank, by a brook's side,
And as I lay, leaned over and looked on the waters,
I fell into a slumber, for it sounded so merry.
Soon I began to dream a marvellous dream:
That I was in a wilderness, I wist not where.
As I looked to the east, right into the sun,
I saw a tower on a knoll, worthily built,
With a deep dale beneath and a dungeon therein,
Full of deep, dark ditches and and dreadful to behold.
Then a fair field full of fond folk, I espied between,
Of all manner of men, both rich and poor,
Working and wandering, as the world demands.
Some put themselves to the plow, seldom playing,
But setting and sowing they sweated copiously
And won that which wasters destroyed by gluttony...
Pearl
anonymous Middle English poem, circa 1400
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Pearl, the pleasant prize of princes,
Chastely set in clear gold and cherished,
Out of the Orient, unequaled,
Precious jewel without peer,
So round, so rare, so radiant,
So small, so smooth, so seductive,
That whenever I judged glimmering gems,
I set her apart, unimpeachable, priceless.
Alas, I lost her in earth's green grass!
Long I searched for her in vain!
Now I languish alone, my heart gone cold.
For I lost my precious pearl without stain.
Johann Scheffler (1624-1677) , also known as Johann Angelus Silesius, was a German Catholic priest, physician, mystic and religious poet. He's a bit later than most of the other poets on this page, but seems to fit in …
Unholy Trinity
by Angelus Silesius
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Man has three enemies:
himself, the world, and the devil.
Of these the first is, by far,
the most irresistible evil.
True Wealth
by Angelus Silesius
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
There is more to being rich
than merely having;
the wealthiest man can lose
everything not worth saving.
The Rose
by Angelus Silesius
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
The rose merely blossoms
and never asks why:
heedless of her beauty,
careless of every eye.
The Rose
by Angelus Silesius
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
The rose lack 'reasons'
and merely sways with the seasons;
she has no ego
but whoever put on such a show?
Eternal Time
by Angelus Silesius
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Eternity is time,
time eternity,
except when we
are determined to 'see.'
Visions
by Angelus Silesius
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Our souls possess two eyes:
one examines time,
the other visions
eternal and sublime.
Godless
by Angelus Silesius
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
God is absolute Nothingness
beyond our sense of time and place;
the more we try to grasp Him,
The more He flees from our embrace.
The Source
by Angelus Silesius
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Water is pure and clean
when taken at the well-head:
but drink too far from the Source
and you may well end up dead.
Ceaseless Peace
by Angelus Silesius
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Unceasingly you seek
life's ceaseless wavelike motion;
I seek perpetual peace, all storms calmed.
Whose is the wiser notion?
Well Written
by Angelus Silesius
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Friend, cease!
Abandon all pretense!
You must yourself become
the Writing and the Sense.
Worm Food
by Angelus Silesius
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
No worm is buried
so deep within the soil
that God denies it food
as reward for its toil.
Mature Love
by Angelus Silesius
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
New love, like a sparkling wine, soon fizzes.
Mature love, calm and serene, abides.
God's Predicament
by Angelus Silesius
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
God cannot condemn those with whom he would dwell,
or He would have to join them in hell!
Clods
by Angelus Silesius
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
A ruby
is not lovelier
than a dirt clod,
nor an angel
more glorious
than a frog.
The original poem below is based on my teenage misinterpretation of a Latin prayer …
Elegy for a little girl, lost
by Michael R. Burch
… qui laetificat juventutem meam …
She was the joy of my youth,
and now she is gone.
… requiescat in pace …
May she rest in peace.
… amen …
Amen.
I was touched by this Latin prayer, which I discovered in a novel I read as a teenager. I later decided to incorporate it into a poem. From what I now understand, 'ad deum qui laetificat juventutem meam' means 'to the God who gives joy to my youth, ' but I am sticking with my original interpretation: a lament for a little girl at her funeral. The phrase can be traced back to Saint Jerome's translation of Psalm 42 in the Vulgate Latin Bible (circa 385 AD) .
Keywords/Tags: Middle English, rhyme, medieval, epigram, lament, complaint, weight, soul, burden, burdened, heaviness, plague, plagued, exit, death, manner, fen, torment, hell, when, where, how, why
Middle English lyric, circa the 13th to 14th century AD
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Each day I’m plagued by three doles,
These gargantuan weights on my soul:
First, that I must somehow exit this fen.
Second, that I cannot know when.
And yet it’s the third that torments me so,
Because there’s no way to know where the hell I will go!
Ech day me comëth tydinges thre,
For wel swithë sore ben he:
The on is that Ich shal hennë,
That other that Ich not whennë,
The thriddë is my mestë carë,
That Ich not whider Ich shal farë.
These are Medieval poetry translations of poems written in Old English (i.e., Anglo-Saxon English) and Middle English.
Wulf and Eadwacer
(Old English poem circa 960-990 AD)
loose translation by Michael R. Burch
To my people, he's prey, a pariah.
They'll rip him apart if he approaches their pack.
We are so different!
Wulf's on one island; I'm on another.
His island's a fortress, surrounded by fens.
Here, bloodthirsty men roam this island.
They'll rip him apart if he approaches their pack.
We are so different!
My thoughts pursued Wulf like panting hounds.
Whenever it rained, while I wept,
the bold warrior came; he took me in his arms:
good feelings for him, but the end was loathsome!
Wulf, O, my Wulf, my ache for you
has made me sick; your infrequent visits
have left me famished, deprived of real meat!
Do you hear, Eadwacer? A wolf has borne
our wretched whelp to the woods.
One can easily sever what never was one:
our song together.
Cædmon's Hymn
(Old English poem circa 658-680 AD)
loose translation by Michael R. Burch
Now let us honour heaven-kingdom's Guardian,
the might of the Architect and his mind-plans,
the work of the Glory-Father.
First he, the Eternal Lord,
established the foundation of wonders.
Then he, the First Poet,
created heaven as a roof
for the sons of men, Holy Creator,
Maker of mankind.
Then he, the eternal Lord,
afterwards made men middle-earth: Master almighty!
How Long the Night
Middle English poem circa 13th century AD
loose translation by Michael R. Burch
It is pleasant, indeed, while the summer lasts
with the mild pheasants' song...
but now I feel the northern wind's blast—
its severe weather strong.
Alas! Alas! This night seems so long!
And I, because of my momentous wrong
now grieve, mourn and fast.
Pity Mary
Middle English Lyric, circa early 13th century AD
loose translation by Michael R. Burch
Now the sun passes under the wood:
I rue, Mary, thy face—fair, good.
Now the sun passes under the tree:
I rue, Mary, thy son and thee.
Fowles in the Frith
Medieval English Lyric, circa 13th-14th century AD
loose translation by Michael R. Burch
The fowls in the forest,
the fishes in the flood
and I must go mad:
such sorrow I've had
for beasts of bone and blood!
I am of Ireland
Medieval Irish Lyric, circa 13th-14th century AD
loose translation by Michael R. Burch
I am of Ireland,
and of the holy realm of Ireland.
Gentlefolk, I pray thee:
for the sake of holy charity,
come dance with me
in Ireland.
Sweet Rose of Virtue
by William Dunbar [1460-1525]
loose translation by Michael R. Burch
Sweet rose of virtue and of gentleness,
delightful lily of youthful wantonness,
richest in bounty and in beauty clear
and in every virtue that is held most dear―
except only that you are merciless.
Into your garden, today, I followed you;
there I saw flowers of freshest hue,
both white and red, delightful to see,
and wholesome herbs, waving resplendently―
yet everywhere, no odor but rue.
I fear that March with his last arctic blast
has slain my fair rose of pallid and gentle cast,
whose piteous death does my heart such pain
that, if I could, I would compose her roots again―
so comforting her bowering leaves have been.
Now skruketh rose and lylie flour
Medieval English Lyric, circa 11th century AD
loose translation by Michael R. Burch
Now skyward the rose and the lily flower,
That will bear for awhile that sweet savor:
In summer, that sweet tide;
There is no queen so stark in her power
Nor no lady so bright in her bower
That dead shall not glide by:
Whoever will forgo lust,
in heavenly bliss will abide
With his thoughts on Jesus anon,
thralled at his side.
IN LIBRARIOS
by Thomas Campion
Impressionum plurium librum laudat
Librarius; scortum nec non minus leno.
Novelties
loose translation by Michael R. Burch
Booksellers laud authors for novel editions
as pimps praise their ****** for exotic positions.
Brut
(circa 1100 AD, written by Layamon, an excerpt)
loose translation by Michael R. Burch
Now he stands on a hill overlooking the Avon,
seeing steel fishes girded with swords in the stream,
their swimming days done,
their scales a-gleam like gold-plated shields,
their fish-spines floating like shattered spears.
Layamon's Brut is a 32,000-line poem composed in Middle English that shows a strong Anglo-Saxon influence and contains the first known reference to King Arthur in English.
The Maiden's Song aka The Bridal Morn
anonymous Medieval lyric
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
The maidens came to my mother's bower.
I had all I would, that hour.
The bailey beareth the bell away;
The lily, the rose, the rose I lay.
Now silver is white, red is the gold;
The robes they lay in fold.
The bailey beareth the bell away;
The lily, the rose, the rose I lay.
Still through the window shines the sun.
How should I love, yet be so young?
The bailey beareth the bell away;
The lily, the rose, the rose I lay.
Westron Wynde
Middle English lyric, circa 1530 AD
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Western wind, when will you blow,
bringing the drizzling rain?
Christ, that my love were in my arms,
and I in my bed again!
The original poem has 'the smalle rayne down can rayne' which suggests a drizzle or mist.
This World's Joy
(Middle English lyric, circa early 14th century AD)
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Winter awakens all my care
as leafless trees grow bare.
For now my sighs are fraught
whenever it enters my thought:
regarding this world's joy,
how everything comes to naught.
I Have Labored Sore
(anonymous medieval lyric circa the fifteenth century)
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
I have labored sore and suffered death,
so now I rest and catch my breath.
But I shall come and call right soon
heaven and earth and hell to doom.
Then all shall know both devil and man
just who I was and what I am.
A Lyke-Wake Dirge
(anonymous medieval lyric circa the 16th century AD)
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
The Lie-Awake Dirge is 'the night watch kept over a corpse.'
This one night, this one night,
every night and all;
fire and sleet and candlelight,
and Christ receive thy soul.
When from this earthly life you pass
every night and all,
to confront your past you must come at last,
and Christ receive thy soul.
If you ever donated socks and shoes,
every night and all,
sit right down and slip yours on,
and Christ receive thy soul.
But if you never helped your brother,
every night and all,
walk barefoot through the flames of hell,
and Christ receive thy soul.
If ever you shared your food and drink,
every night and all,
the fire will never make you shrink,
and Christ receive thy soul.
But if you never helped your brother,
every night and all,
walk starving through the black abyss,
and Christ receive thy soul.
This one night, this one night,
every night and all;
fire and sleet and candlelight,
and Christ receive thy soul.
Excerpt from 'Ubi Sunt Qui Ante Nos Fuerunt? '
(anonymous Middle English poem, circa 1275)
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Where are the men who came before us,
who led hounds and hawks to the hunt,
who commanded fields and woods?
Where are the elegant ladies in their boudoirs
who braided gold through their hair
and had such fair complexions?
Once eating and drinking gladdened their hearts;
they enjoyed their games;
men bowed before them;
they bore themselves loftily …
But then, in an eye's twinkling,
they were gone.
Where now are their songs and their laughter,
the trains of their dresses,
the arrogance of their entrances and exits,
their hawks and their hounds?
All their joy has vanished;
their 'well' has come to 'oh, well'
and to many dark days …
Is this the oldest carpe diem poem in the English language?
Whan the turuf is thy tour
(anonymous Middle English lyric, circa the 13th century AD)
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
1.
When the turf is your tower
and the pit is your bower,
your pale white skin and throat
shall be sullen worms' to note.
What help to you, then,
was all your worldly hope?
2.
When the turf is your tower
and the grave is your bower,
your pale white throat and skin
worm-eaten from within …
what hope of my help then?
The second translation leans more to the 'lover's complaint' and carpe diem genres, with the poet pointing out to his prospective lover that by denying him her favors she make take her virtue to the grave where worms will end her virginity in macabre fashion. This poem may be an ancient precursor of poems like Andrew Marvell's 'To His Coy Mistress.'
Ich have y-don al myn youth
(Middle English lyric, circa the 13th century AD)
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
I have done it all my youth:
Often, often, and often!
I have loved long and yearned zealously …
And oh what grief it has brought me!
Ich have y-don al myn youth,
Oftë, ofte, and ofte;
Longe y-loved and yerne y-beden -
Ful dere it is y-bought!
GEOFFREY CHAUCER
Three Roundels by Geoffrey Chaucer
I. Merciles Beaute ('Merciless Beauty')
by Geoffrey Chaucer
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Your eyes slay me suddenly;
their beauty I cannot sustain,
they wound me so, through my heart keen.
Unless your words heal me hastily,
my heart's wound will remain green;
for your eyes slay me suddenly;
their beauty I cannot sustain.
By all truth, I tell you faithfully
that you are of life and death my queen;
for at my death this truth shall be seen:
your eyes slay me suddenly;
their beauty I cannot sustain,
they wound me so, through my heart keen.
II. Rejection
by Geoffrey Chaucer
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Your beauty from your heart has so erased
Pity, that it's useless to complain;
For Pride now holds your mercy by a chain.
I'm guiltless, yet my sentence has been cast.
I tell you truly, needless now to feign, —
Your beauty from your heart has so erased
Pity, that it's useless to complain.
Alas, that Nature in your face compassed
Such beauty, that no man may hope attain
To mercy, though he perish from the pain;
Your beauty from your heart has so erased
Pity, that it's useless to complain;
For Pride now holds your mercy by a chain.
III. Escape
by Geoffrey Chaucer
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Since I'm escaped from Love and yet still fat,
I never plan to be in his prison lean;
Since I am free, I count it not a bean.
He may question me and counter this and that;
I care not: I will answer just as I mean.
Since I'm escaped from Love and yet still fat,
I never plan to be in his prison lean.
Love strikes me from his roster, short and flat,
And he is struck from my books, just as clean,
Forevermore; there is no other mean.
Since I'm escaped from Love and yet still fat,
I never plan to be in his prison lean;
Since I am free, I count it not a bean.
Welcome, Summer
by Geoffrey Chaucer
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Now welcome, Summer, with your sun so soft,
since you've banished Winter with her icy weather
and driven away her long nights' frosts.
Saint Valentine, in the heavens aloft,
the songbirds sing your praises together!
Now welcome, Summer, with your sun so soft,
since you've banished Winter with her icy weather.
We have good cause to rejoice, not scoff,
since love's in the air, and also in the heather,
whenever we find such blissful warmth, together.
Now welcome, Summer, with your sun so soft,
since you've banished Winter with her icy weather
and driven away her long nights' frosts.
CHARLES D'ORLEANS
Rondel: Your Smiling Mouth
by Charles d'Orleans (c.1394-1465)
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Your smiling mouth and laughing eyes, bright gray,
Your ample ******* and slender arms' twin chains,
Your hands so smooth, each finger straight and plain,
Your little feet—please, what more can I say?
It is my fetish when you're far away
To muse on these and thus to soothe my pain—
Your smiling mouth and laughing eyes, bright gray,
Your ample ******* and slender arms' twin chains.
So would I beg you, if I only may,
To see such sights as I before have seen,
Because my fetish pleases me. Obscene?
I'll be obsessed until my dying day
By your sweet smiling mouth and eyes, bright gray,
Your ample ******* and slender arms' twin chains!
Spring
by Charles d'Orleans (c.1394-1465)
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Young lovers,
greeting the spring
fling themselves downhill,
making cobblestones ring
with their wild leaps and arcs,
like ecstatic sparks
struck from coal.
What is their brazen goal?
They grab at whatever passes,
so we can only hazard guesses.
But they rear like prancing steeds
raked by brilliant spurs of need,
Young lovers.
Oft in My Thought
by Charles d'Orleans (c.1394-1465)
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
So often in my busy mind I sought,
Around the advent of the fledgling year,
For something pretty that I really ought
To give my lady dear;
But that sweet thought's been wrested from me, clear,
Since death, alas, has sealed her under clay
And robbed the world of all that's precious here―
God keep her soul, I can no better say.
For me to keep my manner and my thought
Acceptable, as suits my age's hour?
While proving that I never once forgot
Her worth? It tests my power!
I serve her now with masses and with prayer;
For it would be a shame for me to stray
Far from my faith, when my time's drawing near—
God keep her soul, I can no better say.
Now earthly profits fail, since all is lost
And the cost of everything became so dear;
Therefore, O Lord, who rules the higher host,
Take my good deeds, as many as there are,
And crown her, Lord, above in your bright sphere,
As heaven's truest maid! And may I say:
Most good, most fair, most likely to bring cheer—
God keep her soul, I can no better say.
When I praise her, or hear her praises raised,
I recall how recently she brought me pleasure;
Then my heart floods like an overflowing bay
And makes me wish to dress for my own bier—
God keep her soul, I can no better say.
Winter has cast his cloak away
by Charles d'Orleans (c.1394-1465)
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Winter has cast his cloak away
of wind and cold and chilling rain
to dress in embroidered light again:
the light of day—bright, festive, gay!
Each bird and beast, without delay,
in its own tongue, sings this refrain:
'Winter has cast his cloak away! '
Brooks, fountains, rivers, streams at play,
wear, with their summer livery,
bright beads of silver jewelry.
All the Earth has a new and fresh display:
Winter has cast his cloak away!
This rondeau was set to music by Debussy in his Trois chansons de France.
The year lays down his mantle cold
by Charles d'Orleans (1394-1465)
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
The year lays down his mantle cold
of wind, chill rain and bitter air,
and now goes clad in clothes of gold
of smiling suns and seasons fair,
while birds and beasts of wood and fold
now with each cry and song declare:
'The year lays down his mantle cold! '
All brooks, springs, rivers, seaward rolled,
now pleasant summer livery wear
with silver beads embroidered where
the world puts off its raiment old.
The year lays down his mantle cold.
SIR THOMAS WYATT
Whoso List to Hunt ('Whoever Longs to Hunt')
by Sir Thomas Wyatt
loose translation/interpretation/modernization by Michael R. Burch
Whoever longs to hunt, I know the deer;
but as for me, alas! , I may no more.
This vain pursuit has left me so bone-sore
I'm one of those who falters, at the rear.
Yet friend, how can I draw my anguished mind
away from the doe?
Thus, as she flees before
me, fainting I follow.
I must leave off, therefore,
since in a net I seek to hold the wind.
Whoever seeks her out,
I relieve of any doubt,
that he, like me, must spend his time in vain.
For graven with diamonds, set in letters plain,
these words appear, her fair neck ringed about:
Touch me not, for Caesar's I am,
And wild to hold, though I seem tame.
In the next poem the Welsh 'dd' is pronounced 'th.'
Cynddylan is pronounced KahN-THIHL-aeN.
Stafell Gynddylan ('The Hall of Cynddylan')
Welsh englynion circa 1382-1410
translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
The hall of Cynddylan lies dark tonight.
Lacking fire and a bed,
I will weep awhile then lapse into silence.
The hall of Cynddylan lies dark tonight.
Lacking fire or a candle,
save God, who will preserve my sanity?
The hall of Cynddylan lies dark tonight.
Lacking fire, lacking light,
grief for you overwhelms me!
The hall of Cynddylan's roof is dark.
After the blessed assembly,
still little the good that comes of it.
Hall of Cynddylan, you have become shapeless, amorphous.
Your shield lies in the grave.
While he lived, no one breached these gates.
The hall of Cynddylan mourns tonight,
mourns for its lost protector.
Alas death, why did you spare me?
The hall of Cynddylan trembles tonight,
atop the shivering rock,
lacking lord, lacking liege, lacking protector.
The hall of Cynddylan lies dark tonight.
Lacking fire, lacking mirth, lacking songs.
My cheeks are eroded by tears.
The hall of Cynddylan lies dark tonight.
Lacking fire, lacking heroes, lacking a warband.
Abundant, my tears' rains.
The hall of Cynddylan offends my eyes,
lacking roof, lacking fire.
My lord lies dead, and yet I still live?
The hall of Cynddylan lies shattered tonight,
without her steadfast warriors,
Elfan, and gold-torqued Cynddylan.
The hall of Cynddylan lies desolate tonight,
no longer respected
without the men and women who maintained it.
The hall of Cynddylan lies quiet tonight,
stunned to silence by losing its lord.
Merciful God, what must I do?
The hall of Cynddylan's roof is dark,
after the Saxons destroyed
shining Cynddylan and Elfan of Powys.
The hall of Cynddylan lies dark tonight:
lost, the race of the Cyndrwyn,
of Cynon and Gwion and Gwyn.
Hall of Cynddylan, you wound me, hourly,
having lost that great company
who once warmed hands at your hearth.
A Proverb from Winfred's Time
anonymous Old English poem, circa 757-786 AD
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
1.
The procrastinator puts off purpose,
never initiates anything marvelous,
never succeeds, dies dead alone.
2.
The late-deed-doer delays glory-striving,
never indulges daring dreams,
never succeeds, dies dead alone.
3.
Often the deed-dodger avoids ventures,
never succeeds, dies dead alone.
Winfrid or Wynfrith is better known as Saint Boniface (c. 675-754 AD). This may be the second-oldest English poem, after 'Caedmon's Hymn.'
Franks Casket Runes
anonymous Old English poems, circa 700 AD
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
The fish flooded the shore-cliffs;
the sea-king wept when he swam onto the shingle:
whale's bone.
Romulus and Remus, twin brothers weaned in Rome
by a she-wolf, far from their native land.
'The Leiden Riddle' is an Old English translation of Aldhelm's Latin riddle Lorica ('Corselet') .
The Leiden Riddle
anonymous Old English riddle poem, circa 700 AD
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
The dank earth birthed me from her icy womb.
I know I was not fashioned from woolen fleeces;
nor was I skillfully spun from skeins;
I have neither warp nor weft;
no thread thrums through me in the thrashing loom;
nor do whirring shuttles rattle me;
nor does the weaver's rod assail me;
nor did silkworms spin me like skillfull fates
into curious golden embroidery.
And yet heroes still call me an excellent coat.
Nor do I fear the dread arrows' flights,
however eagerly they leap from their quivers.
Solution: a coat of mail.
If you see a busker singing for tips, you're seeing someone carrying on an Anglo-Saxon tradition that goes back to the days of Beowulf …
He sits with his harp at his thane's feet,
Earning his hire, his rewards of rings,
Sweeping the strings with his skillful nail;
Hall-thanes smile at the sweet song he sings.
—'Fortunes of Men' loose translation by Michael R. Burch
Here's one of the first Old English/Anglo-Saxon poems to employ a refrain:
Deor's Lament
(Anglo Saxon poem, circa 10th century AD)
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Weland knew the agony of exile.
That indomitable smith was wracked by grief.
He endured countless troubles:
sorrows were his only companions
in his frozen island dungeon
after Nithad had fettered him,
many strong-but-supple sinew-bonds
binding the better man.
That passed away; this also may.
Beadohild mourned her brothers' deaths
but even more, her own sad state
once she discovered herself with child.
She predicted nothing good could come of it.
That passed away; this also may.
We have heard that the Geat's moans for Matilda,
his lady, were limitless,
that his sorrowful love for her
robbed him of regretless sleep.
That passed away; this also may.
For thirty winters Theodric ruled
the Mæring stronghold with an iron hand;
many knew this and moaned.
That passed away; this also may.
We have also heard of Ermanaric's wolfish ways,
of how he held wide sway in the realm of the Goths.
He was a grim king! Many a warrior sat,
full of cares and maladies of the mind,
wishing constantly that his kingdom might be overthrown.
That passed away; this also may.
If a man sits long enough, sorrowful and anxious,
bereft of joy, his mind constantly darkening,
soon it seems to him that his troubles are endless.
Then he must consider that the wise Lord
often moves through the earth
granting some men honor, glory and fame,
but others only shame and hardship.
This I will say for myself:
that for awhile I was the Heodeninga's scop,
dear to my lord. My name was Deor.
For many winters I held a fine office,
faithfully serving a just lord. But now Heorrenda
a man skilful in songs, has received the estate
the protector of warriors gave me.
That passed away; this also may.
'The Wife's Lament' or 'The Wife's Complaint' is an Old English/Anglo Saxon poem found in the Exeter Book. It's generally considered to be an elegy in the manner of the German frauenlied, or 'woman's song, ' although there are other interpretations of the poem's genre and purpose. The Exeter Book has been dated to 960-990 AD, making it the oldest English poetry anthology, but of course the poem may have been written earlier.
The Wife's Lament
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
I draw these words from deep wells of my grief,
care-worn, unutterably sad.
I can recount woes I've borne since birth,
present and past, never more than now.
I have won, from my exile-paths, only pain.
First, my lord forsook his folk, left,
crossed the seas' tumult, far from our people.
Since then, I've known
wrenching dawn-griefs, dark mournings … oh where,
where can he be?
Then I, too, left—a lonely, lordless refugee,
full of unaccountable desires!
But the man's kinsmen schemed secretly
to estrange us, divide us, keep us apart,
across earth's wide kingdom, and my heart broke.
Then my lord spoke:
'Take up residence here.'
I had few friends in this unknown, cheerless
region, none close.
Christ, I felt lost!
Then I thought I had found a well-matched man -
one meant for me,
but unfortunately he
was ill-starred and blind, with a devious mind,
full of murderous intentions, plotting some crime!
Before God we
vowed never to part, not till kingdom come, never!
But now that's all changed, forever -
our friendship done, severed.
I must hear, far and near, contempt for my husband.
So other men bade me, 'Go, live in the grove,
beneath the great oaks, in an earth-cave, alone.'
In this ancient cave-dwelling I am lost and oppressed -
the valleys are dark, the hills immense,
and this cruel-briared enclosure—an arid abode!
The injustice assails me—my lord's absence!
On earth there are lovers who share the same bed
while I pass through life dead in this dark abscess
where I wilt, summer days unable to rest
or forget the sorrows of my life's hard lot.
A young woman must always be
stern, hard-of-heart, unmoved,
opposing breast-cares and her heartaches' legions.
She must appear cheerful
even in a tumult of grief.
Like a criminal exiled to a far-off land,
moaning beneath insurmountable cliffs,
my weary-minded love, drenched by wild storms
and caught in the clutches of anguish,
is reminded constantly of our former happiness.
Woe be it to them who abide in longing.
'The Husband's Message' is another poem from the Exeter Book. It may or may not be a reply to 'The Wife's Lament.' The poem is generally considered to be an Anglo-Saxon riddle (I will provide the solution) , but its primary focus is on persuading a wife or pledged fiancée to join her husband or betrothed and fulfill her promises to him.
The Husband's Message
anonymous Old English poem, circa 960-990 AD
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
See, I unseal myself for your eyes only!
I sprang from a seed to a sapling,
waxed great in a wood,
was given knowledge,
was ordered across saltstreams in ships
where I stiffened my spine, standing tall,
till, entering the halls of heroes,
I honored my manly Lord.
Now I stand here on this ship's deck,
an emissary ordered to inform you
of the love my Lord feels for you.
I have no fear forecasting his heart steadfast,
his honor bright, his word true.
He who bade me come carved this letter
and entreats you to recall, clad in your finery,
what you promised each other many years before,
mindful of his treasure-laden promises.
He reminds you how, in those distant days,
witty words were pledged by you both
in the mead-halls and homesteads:
how he would be Lord of the lands
you would inhabit together
while forging a lasting love.
Alas, a vendetta drove him far from his feuding tribe,
but now he instructs me to gladly give you notice
that when you hear the returning cuckoo's cry
cascading down warming coastal cliffs,
come over the sea! Let no man hinder your course.
He earnestly urges you: Out! To sea!
Away to the sea, when the circling gulls
hover over the ship that conveys you to him!
Board the ship that you meet there:
sail away seaward to seek your husband,
over the seagulls' range,
over the paths of foam.
For over the water, he awaits you.
He cannot conceive, he told me,
how any keener joy could comfort his heart,
nor any greater happiness gladden his soul,
than that a generous God should grant you both
to exchange rings, then give gifts to trusty liege-men,
golden armbands inlaid with gems to faithful followers.
The lands are his, his estates among strangers,
his new abode fair and his followers true,
all hardy heroes, since hence he was driven,
shoved off in his ship from these shore in distress,
steered straightway over the saltstreams, sped over the ocean,
a wave-tossed wanderer winging away.
But now the man has overcome his woes,
outpitted his perils, lives in plenty, lacks no luxury,
has a hoard and horses and friends in the mead-halls.
All the wealth of the earth's great earls
now belongs to my Lord …
He only lacks you.
He would have everything within an earl's having,
if only my Lady will come home to him now,
if only she will do as she swore and honor her vow.
Are these the oldest rhyming poems in the English language? Reginald of Durham recorded four verses of Saint Godric's: they are the oldest songs in English for which the original musical settings survive.
Led By Christ and Mary
by Saint Godric of Finchale (1065-1170)
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
By Christ and Saint Mary I was so graciously led
that the earth never felt my bare foot's tread!
In the second poem, Godric puns on his name: godes riche means 'God's kingdom' and sounds like 'God is rich' …
A Cry to Mary
by Saint Godric of Finchale (1065-1170)
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
I.
Saintë Marië Virginë,
Mother of Jesus Christ the Nazarenë,
Welcome, shield and help thin Godric,
Fly him off to God's kingdom rich!
II.
Saintë Marië, Christ's bower,
****** among Maidens, Motherhood's flower,
Blot out my sin, fix where I'm flawed,
Elevate me to Bliss with God!
Godric also wrote a prayer to St. Nicholas:
Prayer to St. Nicholas
by Saint Godric of Finchale (1065-1170)
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Saint Nicholas, beloved of God,
Build us a house that's bright and fair;
Watch over us from birth to bier,
Then, Saint Nicholas, bring us safely there!
Another candidate for the first rhyming English poem is actually called 'The Rhyming Poem' as well as 'The Riming Poem' and 'The Rhymed Poem.'
The Rhymed Poem aka The Rhyming Poem and The Riming Poem
anonymous Old English/Anglo-Saxon poem circa 990 AD
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
He who granted me life created this sun
and graciously provided its radiant engine.
I was gladdened with glees, bathed in bright hues,
deluged with joy's blossoms, sunshine-infused.
Men admired me, feted me with banquet-courses;
we rejoiced in the good life. Gaily bedecked horses
carried me swiftly across plains on joyful rides,
delighting me with their long limbs' thunderous strides.
That world was quickened by earth's fruits and their flavors!
I cantered under pleasant skies, attended by troops of advisers.
Guests came and went, amusing me with their chatter
as I listened with delight to their witty palaver.
Well-appointed ships glided by in the distance;
when I sailed myself, I was never without guidance.
I was of the highest rank; I lacked for nothing in the hall;
nor did I lack for brave companions; warriors, all,
we strode through castle halls weighed down with gold
won from our service to thanes. We were proud men, and bold.
Wise men praised me; I was omnipotent in battle;
Fate smiled on and protected me; foes fled before me like cattle.
Thus I lived with joy indwelling; faithful retainers surrounded me;
I possessed vast estates; I commanded all my eyes could see;
the earth lay subdued before me; I sat on a princely throne;
the words I sang were charmed; old friendships did not wane …
Those were years rich in gifts and the sounds of happy harp-strings,
when a lasting peace dammed shut the rivers' sorrowings.
My servants were keen, their harps resonant;
their songs pealed, the sound loud but pleasant;
the music they made melodious, a continual delight;
the castle hall trembled and towered bright.
Courage increased, wealth waxed with my talent;
I gave wise counsel to great lords and enriched the valiant.
My spirit enlarged; my heart rejoiced;
good faith flourished; glory abounded; abundance increased.
I was lavishly supplied with gold; bright gems were circulated …
Till treasure led to treachery and the bonds of friendship constricted.
I was bold in my bright array, noble in my equipage,
my joy princely, my home a happy hermitage.
I protected and led my people;
for many years my life among them was regal;
I was devoted to them and they to me.
But now my heart is troubled, fearful of the fates I see;
disaster seems unavoidable. Someone dear departs in flight by night
who once before was bold. His soul has lost its light.
A secret disease in full growth blooms within his breast,
spreads in different directions. Hostility blossoms in his chest,
in his mind. Bottomless grief assaults the mind's nature
and when penned in, erupts in rupture,
burns eagerly for calamity, runs bitterly about.
The weary man suffers, begins a journey into doubt;
his pain is ceaseless; pain increases his sorrows, destroys his bliss;
his glory ceases; he loses his happiness;
he loses his craft; he no longer burns with desires.
Thus joys here perish, lordships expire;
men lose faith and descend into vice;
infirm faith degenerates into evil's curse;
faith feebly abandons its high seat and every hour grows worse.
So now the world changes; Fate leaves men lame;
Death pursues hatred and brings men to shame.
The happy clan perishes; the spear rends the marrow;
the evildoer brawls and poisons the arrow;
sorrow devours the city; old age castrates courage;
misery flourishes; wrath desecrates the peerage;
the abyss of sin widens; the treacherous path snakes;
resentment burrows, digs in, wrinkles, engraves;
artificial beauty grows foul;
the summer heat cools;
earthly wealth fails;
enmity rages, cruel, bold;
the might of the world ages, courage grows cold.
Fate wove itself for me and my sentence was given:
that I should dig a grave and seek that grim cavern
men cannot avoid when death comes, arrow-swift,
to seize their lives in his inevitable grasp.
Now night comes at last,
and the way stand clear
for Death to dispossesses me of my my abode here.
When my corpse lies interred and the worms eat my limbs,
whom will Death delight then, with his dark feast and hymns?
Let men's bones become one,
and then finally, none,
till there's nothing left here of the evil ones.
But men of good faith will not be destroyed;
the good man will rise, far beyond the Void,
who chastened himself, more often than not,
to avoid bitter sins and that final black Blot.
The good man has hope of a far better end
and remembers the promise of Heaven,
where he'll experience the mercies of God for his saints,
freed from all sins, dark and depraved,
defended from vices, gloriously saved,
where, happy at last before their cheerful Lord,
men may rejoice in his love forevermore.
aaa
Exeter Book Gnomic Verses or Maxims
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
The dragon dwells under the dolmen,
wizened-wise, hoarding his treasure;
the fishes bring forth their finned kind;
the king in his halls distributes rings;
the bear stalks the heath, shaggy and malevolent.
Frost shall freeze,
fire feast on firs;
earth breed blizzards;
brazen ice bridge waters;
waters spawn shields;
oxen axe
frost's firm fetters,
freeing golden grain
from ice's imprisonment.
Winter shall wane,
warm weather return
as sun-warmed summer!
Kings shall win
wise queens with largesse,
with beakers and bracelets;
both must be
generous with their gifts.
Courage must create
war-lust in a lord
while his woman shows
kindness to her people,
delightful in dress,
interpreter of rune-words,
roomy-hearted
at hearth-sharing and horse-giving.
The deepest depths
hold seas' secrets the longest.
The ship must be neatly nailed,
the hull framed
from light linden.
But how loving
the Frisian wife's welcome
when, floating offshore,
the keel turns homeward!
She hymns homeward
her own husband,
till his hull lies at anchor!
Then she washes salt-stains
from his stiff shirt,
lays out new clothes
clean and fresh
for her exhausted sailor,
her beloved bread-winner,
love's needs well-met.
THE WANDERER
Please keep in mind that in ancient Anglo-Saxon poems like "The Ruin" and "The Wanderer" the Wyrdes function like the Fates of ancient Greek mythology, controlling men's destinies.
The Wanderer
ancient Anglo-Saxon poem, circa 990 AD
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
"The one who wanders alone
longs for mercy, longs for grace,
knowing he must yet traverse
the whale-path's rime-cold waters,
stirring the waves with his hands & oars,
heartsick & troubled in spirit,
always bending his back to his exile-ways."
"Fate is inexorable."
Thus spoke the wanderer, the ancient earth-roamer
mindful of life's hardships,
of its cruel slaughters & deaths of dear kinsmen.
"Often I am driven, departing alone at daybreak,
to give my griefs utterance,
the muffled songs of a sick heart
sung to no listeners, to no living lord,
for now there are none left alive
to debate my innermost doubts.
Custom considers it noble indeed for a man
to harbor his thought-hoard,
keep it close to his chest,
slam the doors of his doubts shut,
bind sorrow to silence & be still.
But the weary-minded man cannot withstand Wyrdes,
nor may his shipwrecked heart welcome solace, nor any hope of healing.
Therefore those eager for fame often bind dark thoughts
& unwailed woes in their breast-coffers.
Thus, miserably sad, overcome by cares & separated from my homeland,
far from my noble kinsmen, I was forced to bind my thoughts with iron fetters,
to confine my breast-hoard to its cage of bone.
Long ago the dark earth covered my gold-lord & I was left alone,
winter-weary & wretched, to cross these winding waves friendless.
Saddened, I sought the hall of some new gold-giver,
someone who might take heed of me, welcome me,
hoping to find some friendly mead-hall
offering comfort to men left friendless by Fate.
Anyone left lordless, kinless & friendless
knows how bitter-cruel life becomes
to one bereft of protectors,
pale sorrows his only companions.
No one waits to welcome the wanderer!
His only rewards, cold nights & the frigid sea.
Only exile-paths await him,
not torques of twisted gold,
warm hearths & his lord's trust.
Only cold hearts' frozen feelings, not earthly glory.
Then he longingly remembers retainers, feasts & the receiving of treasure,
how in his youth his gold-friend recognized him at the table.
But now all pleasure has vanished & his dreams taste like dust!
The wanderer knows what it means to do without:
without the wise counsels of his beloved lord, kinsmen & friends.
The lone outcast, wandering the headlands alone,
where solitariness & sorrow sleep together!
Then the wretched solitary vagabond
remembers in his heart how he embraced & kissed his lord
& laid his hands & head upon his knee,
in those former days of grace at the gift-stool.
But the wanderer always awakes without friends.
Awakening, the friendless man confronts the murky waves,
the seabirds bathing, broadening out their feathers,
the ****-frost, harrowing hail & snow eternally falling…
Then his heart's wounds seem all the heavier for the loss of his beloved lord.
Thus his sorrow is renewed,
remembrance of his lost kinsmen troubles his mind,
& he greets their ghosts with exclamations of joy, but they merely swim away.
The floating ones never tarry.
Thus care is renewed for the one whose weary spirit rides the waves.
Therefore I cannot think why, surveying this world,
my mind should not contemplate its darkness.
When I consider the lives of earls & their retainers,
how at a stroke they departed their halls, those mood-proud thanes! ,
then I see how this middle-earth fails & falls, day after day…
Therefore no man becomes wise without his share of winters.
A wise man must be patient,
not hot-hearted, nor over-eager to speak,
nor weak-willed in battles & yet not reckless,
not unwitting nor wanting in forethought,
nor too greedy for gold & goods,
nor too fearful, nor too cheerful,
nor too hot, nor too mild,
nor too eager to boast before he's thought things through.
A wise man forbears boastmaking
until, stout-hearted, his mind sure & his will strong,
he can read the road where his travels & travails take him.
The wise man grasps how ghastly life will be
when all the world's wealth becomes waste,
even as middle-earth already is, in so many places
where walls stand weather-beaten by the wind,
crusted with cold rime, ruined dwellings snowbound,
wine-halls crumbling, their dead lords deprived of joy,
the once-hale host all perished beyond the walls.
Some war took, carried them off from their courses;
a bird bore one across the salt sea;
another the gray wolf delivered to Death;
one a sallow-cheeked earl buried in a bleak barrow.
Thus mankind's Maker laid waste to Middle Earth,
until the works of the giants stood idle,
all eerily silenced, the former joys of their halls."
The wise man contemplates these ruins,
considers this dark life soberly,
remembers the blood spilled here
in multitudes of battles,
then says:
"Where is the horse now? Where, its riders?
Where, the givers of gifts & treasure, the gold-friend?
Where, the banquet-seats? Where, the mead-halls' friendly uproars?
Gone, the bright cup! Gone, the mailed warrior!
Gone, the glory of princes! Time has slipped down
the night-dome, as if it never were!
Now all that remains is this wall, wondrous-high,
decorated with strange serpentine shapes,
these unreadable wormlike runes!
The strength of spears defeated the earls,
lances lusting for slaughter, some glorious victory!
Now storms rage against these rock-cliffs,
as swirling snows & sleet entomb the earth,
while wild winter howls its wrath
as the pale night-shadow descends.
The frigid north sends hailstones to harry warriors.
Hardships & struggles beset the children of men.
The shape of fate is twisted under the heavens
as the Wyrdes decree.
Life is on loan, wealth transitory, friendships fleeting,
man himself fleeting, everything transitory,
& earth's entire foundation stands empty."
Thus spoke the wanderer, wise-hearted, as he sat apart in thought.
Good is the man who keeps his word to the end.
Nor should a man manifest his breast-pangs before he knows their cure,
how to accomplish the remedy with courage.
The Dream of the Rood
anonymous Anglo-Saxon poem, circa the tenth century
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Listen! A dream descended upon me at deep midnight
when sleepers have sought their beds and sweet rest:
the dream of dreams, I declare it!
It seemed I saw the most wondrous tree,
raised heaven-high, wound 'round with light,
with beams of the brightest wood. A beacon
covered in overlapping gold and precious gems,
it stood fair at the earth's foot, with five gemstones
brightening its cross-beam. All heaven's angels
beheld it with wonder, for it was no felon's gallows…
Beowulf
Old English/Anglo-Saxon poem, circa 8th-10th century AD
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
LO, praise the prowess of the Spear-Danes
whose clan-thanes ruled in days bygone,
possessed of dauntless courage and valor.
All have heard the honors the athelings won,
of Scyld Scefing, scourge of rebellious tribes,
wrecker of mead-benches, harrier of warriors,
awer of earls. He had come from afar,
first friendless, a foundling, till Fate intervened:
for he waxed under the welkin and persevered,
until folk, far and wide, on all coasts of the whale-path,
were forced to yield to him, bring him tribute.
A good king!
To him an heir was afterwards born,
a lad in his yards, a son in his halls,
sent by heaven to comfort the folk.
Knowing they'd lacked an earl a long while,
the Lord of Life, the Almighty, made him far-renowned.
Beowulf's fame flew far throughout the north,
the boast of him, this son of Scyld,
through Scandian lands.
…
Grendel was known of in Geatland, far-asea,
the horror of him.
…
Beowulf bade a seaworthy wave-cutter
be readied to bear him to Heorot,
over the swan's riding,
to defense of that good king, Hrothgar.
Wise men tried to dissuade him
because they held Beowulf dear,
but their warnings only whetted his war-lust.
Yet still he pondered the omens.
The resolute prince handpicked his men,
the fiercest of his folk, to assist him:
fourteen men sea-wise, stout-hearted,
battle-tested. Led them to the land's edge.
Hardened warriors hauled bright mail-coats,
well-wrought war gear, to the foot of her mast.
At high tide she rode the waves, hard in by headland,
as they waved their last farewells, then departed.
Away she broke like a sea-bird, skimming the waves,
wind-borne, her curved prow plowing the ocean,
till on the second day the skyline of Geatland loomed.
…
In the following poem Finnsburuh means 'Finn's stronghold' and Finn was a Frisian king. This battle between Danes and Frisians is also mentioned in the epic Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf. Hnaef and his 60 retainers were house-guests of Finn at the time of the battle.
The Finnesburg Fragment or The Fight at Finnsburg
Old English/Anglo-Saxon poem, circa 10th century AD
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Battle-bred Hnaef broke the silence:
'Are the eaves aflame, is there dawn in the east,
are there dragons aloft? No, only the flares of torches
borne on the night breeze. Evil is afoot. Soon the hoots of owls,
the weird wolf's howls, cries of the carrion crows, the arrow's screams,
and the shield's reply to the lance's shaft, shall be heard.
Heed the omens of the moon, that welkin-wanderer.
We shall soon feel in full this folk's fury for us.
Shake yourselves awake, soldiers! On your feet!
Who's with me? Grab your swords and shields. Loft your linden! '
'The Battle of Brunanburh' is the first poem to appear in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Aethelstan and Edmund were the grandsons of King Alfred the Great.
The Battle of Brunanburh or The Battle of Brunanburgh
anonymous Old English/Anglo-Saxon poem, circa 937 AD
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Her Aethelstan cyning, / Aethelstan the King,
eorla dryhten, / Lord over earls,
beorna beag-giefa, / bracelet-bestower,
and his brothor eac, / and with him his brother,
Eadmund aetheling, / Edmund the Atheling,
ealdor-lange tir / earned unending glory:
geslogon aet saecce / glory they gained in battle
sweorda ecgum / as they slew with the sword's edge
ymbe Brunanburh. / many near Brunanburgh…
The Battle of Maldon
anonymous Old English/Anglo-Saxon poem, circa 991 AD or later
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
…would be broken.
Then he bade each warrior unbridle his horse,
set it free, drive it away and advance onward afoot,
intent on deeds of arms and dauntless courage.
It was then that Offa's kinsman kenned
their Earl would not accept cowardice,
for he set his beloved falcon free, let it fly woods-ward,
then stepped forward to battle himself, nothing withheld.
By this his men understood their young Earl's will full well,
that he would not weaken when taking up weapons.
Eadric desired to serve his Earl,
his Captain in the battle to come; thus he also advanced forward,
his spear raised, his spirit strong,
boldly grasping buckler and broadsword,
ready to keep his vow to stand fast in the fight.
Byrhtnoth marshalled his men,
teaching each warrior his task:
how to stand, where to be stationed…
Adam Lay Ybounden
(anonymous Medieval English Lyric, circa early 15th century AD)
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Adam lay bound, bound in a bond;
Four thousand winters, he thought, were not too long.
And all was for an apple, an apple that he took,
As clerics now find written in their book.
But had the apple not been taken, or had it never been,
We'd never have had our Lady, heaven's queen.
So blesséd be the time the apple was taken thus;
Therefore we sing, 'God is gracious! '
The poem has also been rendered as 'Adam lay i-bounden' and 'Adam lay i-bowndyn.'
I Sing of a Maiden
(anonymous Medieval English Lyric, circa early 15th century AD)
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
I sing of a maiden
That is matchless.
The King of all Kings
For her son she chose.
He came also as still
To his mother's breast
As April dew
Falling on the grass.
He came also as still
To his mother's bower
As April dew
Falling on the flower.
He came also as still
To where his mother lay
As April dew
Falling on the spray.
Mother and maiden?
Never one, but she!
Well may such a lady
God's mother be!
WIDSITH
Widsith, the 'wide-wanderer' or 'far-traveler, ' was a fictional poet and harper who claimed to have sung for everyone from Alexander the Great, Caesar and Attila, to the various kings of the Angles, Saxons and Vikings! The poem that bears his name is a thula, or recited list of historical and legendary figures, and an ancient version of, 'I've Been Everywhere, Man.'
Widsith, the Far-Traveler
anonymous Old English/Anglo-Saxon poem, circa 680-950 AD
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Widsith the wide-wanderer began to speak,
unlocked his word-hoard, manifested his memories,
he who had travelled earth's roads furthest
among the races of men—their tribes, peoples and lands.
He had often prospered in the mead-halls,
competing for precious stones with his tale-trove.
His ancestors hailed from among the Myrgings,
whence his lineage sprung, a scion of Ealhhild,
the fair peace-weaver. On his first journey, east of the Angles,
he had sought out the home of Eormanric,
the angry oath-breaker and betrayer of men.
Widsith, rich in recollections, began to share his wisdom thus:
I have learned much from mighty men, their tribes' mages,
and every prince must live according to his people's customs,
acting honorably, if he wishes to prosper upon his throne.
Hwala was the best, for awhile,
Alexander the mightiest, beyond compare,
his empire the most prosperous and powerful of all,
among all the races of men, as far as I have heard tell.
Attila ruled the Huns, Eormanric the Goths,
Becca the Banings, Gifica the Burgundians,
Caesar the Greeks, Caelic the Finns,
Hagena the Holmrigs, Heoden the Glomms,
Witta the Swæfings, Wada the Hælsings,
Meaca the Myrgings, Mearchealf the Hundings,
Theodric the Franks, Thyle the Rondings,
Breoca the Brondings, Billing the Wærns,
Oswine the Eowan, Gefwulf the Jutes,
Finn Folcwalding the Frisians,
Sigehere ruled the Sea-Danes for decades,
Hnæf the Hockings, Helm the Wulfings,
Wald the Woings, Wod the Thuringians,
Sæferth the Secgan, Ongendtheow the Swedes,
Sceafthere the Ymbers, Sceafa the Lombards,
*** the Hætwera, Holen the Wrosnas,
Hringweald was king of the Herefara.
Offa ruled the Angles, Alewih the Danes,
the bravest and boldest of men,
yet he never outdid Offa.
For Offa, while still a boy, won in battle the broadest of kingdoms.
No one as young was ever a worthier Earl!
With his stout sword he struck the boundary of the Myrgings,
fixed it at Fifeldor, where afterwards the Angles and Swæfings held it.
Hrothulf and Hrothgar, uncle and nephew,
for a long time kept a careful peace together
after they had driven away the Vikings' kinsmen,
vanquished Ingeld's spear-hordes,
and hewed down at Heorot the host of the Heathobards.
Thus I have traveled among many foreign lands,
crossing the earth's breadth,
experiencing both goodness and wickedness,
cut off from my kinsfolk, far from my family.
Thus I can speak and sing these tidings in the mead-halls,
of how how I was received by the most excellent kings.
Many were magnanimous to me!
I was among the Huns and the glorious Ostrogoths,
among the Swedes, the Geats, and the South-Danes,
among the Vandals, the Wærnas, and the Vikings,
among the Gefthas, the Wends, and the Gefflas,
among the Angles, the Swabians, and the Ænenas,
among the Saxons, the Secgan, and the Swordsmen,
among the Hronas, the Danes, and the Heathoreams,
among the Thuringians and the Throndheims,
also among the Burgundians, where I received an arm-ring;
Guthhere gave me a gleaming gem in return for my song.
He was no gem-hoarding king, slow to give!
I was among the Franks, the Frisians, and the Frumtings,
among the Rugas, the Glomms, and the Romans.
I was likewise in Italy with Ælfwine,
who had, as I'd heard, commendable hands,
fast to reward fame-winning deeds,
a generous sharer of rings and torques,
the noble son of Eadwine.
I was among the Saracens and also the Serings,
among the Greeks, the Finns, and also with Caesar,
the ruler of wine-rich cities and formidable fortresses,
of riches and rings and Roman domains.
He also controlled the kingdom of Wales.
I was among the Scots, the Picts and the Scrid-Finns,
among the Leons and Bretons and Lombards,
among the heathens and heroes and Huns,
among the Israelites and Assyrians,
among the Hebrews and Jews and Egyptians,
among the Medes and Persians and Myrgings,
and with the Mofdings against the Myrgings,
among the Amothings and the East-Thuringians,
among the Eolas, the Ista and the Idumings.
I was also with Eormanric for many years,
as long as the Goth-King availed me well,
that ruler of cities, who gave me gifts:
six hundred shillings of pure gold
beaten into a beautiful neck-ring!
This I gave to Eadgils, overlord of the Myrgings
and my keeper-protector, when I returned home,
a precious adornment for my beloved prince,
after which he awarded me my father's estates.
Ealhhild gave me another gift,
that shining lady, that majestic queen,
the glorious daughter of Eadwine.
I sang her praises in many lands,
lauded her name, increased her fame,
the fairest of all beneath the heavens,
that gold-adorned queen, glad gift-sharer!
Later, Scilling and I created a song for our war-lord,
my shining speech swelling to the sound of his harp,
our voices in unison, so that many hardened men, too proud for tears,
called it the most moving song they'd ever heard.
Afterwards I wandered the Goths' homelands,
always seeking the halest and heartiest companions,
such as could be found within Eormanric's horde.
I sought Hethca, Beadeca and the Herelings,
Emerca, Fridlal and the Ostrogoths,
even the wise father of Unwen.
I sought Secca and Becca, Seafola and Theodric,
Heathoric and Sifeca, Hlithe and Ongentheow,
Eadwine and Elsa, Ægelmund and Hungar,
even the brave band of the Broad-Myrgings.
I sought Wulfhere and Wyrmhere where war seldom slackened,
when the forces of Hræda with hard-striking swords
had to defend their imperiled homestead
in the Wistla woods against Attila's hordes.
I sought Rædhere, Rondhere, Rumstan and Gislhere,
Withergield and Freotheric, Wudga and Hama,
never the worst companions although I named them last.
Often from this band flew shrill-whistling wooden shafts,
shrieking spears from this ferocious nation,
felling enemies because they wielded the wound gold,
those good leaders, Wudga and Hama.
I have always found this to be true in my far-venturing:
that the dearest man among earth-dwellers
is the one God gives to rule ably over others.
But the makar's weird is to be a wanderer. [maker's/minstrel's fate]
The minstrel travels far, from land to land,
singing his needs, speaking his grateful thanks,
whether in the sunny southlands or the frigid northlands,
measuring out his word-hoard to those unstingy of gifts,
to those rare elect rulers who understand art's effect on the multitudes,
to those open-handed lords who would have their fame spread,
via a new praise-verse, thus earning enduring reputations
under the heavens.
Lent is Come with Love to Town
anonymous Middle English poem, circa 1330
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Springtime comes with love to town,
With blossoms and with birdsong 'round,
Bringing all this bliss:
Daisies in the dales,
Sweet notes of nightingales.
Each bird contributes songs;
The thrush chides ancient wrongs.
Departed, winter's glowers;
The woodruff gayly flowers;
The birds create great noise
And warble of their joys,
Making all the woodlands ring!
'Cantus Troili' from Troilus and Criseide
by Petrarch
'If no love is, O God, what fele I so? ' translation by Geoffrey Chaucer
modernization by Michael R. Burch
If there's no love, O God, why then, so low?
And if love is, what thing, and which, is he?
If love is good, whence comes my dismal woe?
If wicked, love's a wonder unto me,
When every torment and adversity
That comes from him, persuades me not to think,
For the more I thirst, the more I itch to drink!
And if in my own lust I choose to burn,
From whence comes all my wailing and complaint?
If harm agrees with me, where can I turn?
I know not, all I do is feint and faint!
O quick death and sweet harm so pale and quaint,
How may there be in me such quantity
Of you, 'cept I consent to make us three?
And if I so consent, I wrongfully
Complain, I know. Thus pummeled to and fro,
All starless, lost and compassless, am I
Amidst the sea, between two rending winds,
That in diverse directions bid me, 'Go! '
Alas! What is this wondrous malady?
For heat of cold, for cold of heat, I die.
'Blow, northerne wind'
anonymous Middle English poem, circa late 13th century
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Blow, northern wind,
Send my love, my sweeting,
Blow, northern wind,
Blow, blow, blow,
Our love completing!
'What is he, this lordling, that cometh from the fight? '
by William Herebert, circa early 14th century
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Who is he, this lordling, who staggers from the fight,
with blood-red garb so grisly arrayed,
once appareled in lineaments white?
Once so seemly in sight?
Once so valiant a knight?
'It is I, it is I, who alone speaks right,
a champion to heal mankind in this fight.'
Why then are your clothes a ****** mess,
like one who has trod a winepress?
'I trod the winepress alone,
else mankind was done.'
'Thou wommon boute fere'
by William Herebert, circa early 14th century
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Woman without compare,
you bore your own father:
great the wonder
that one woman was mother
to her father and brother,
as no one else ever was.
'Marye, maide, milde and fre'
by William of Shoreham, circa early 14th century
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Mary, maid, mild and free,
Chamber of the Trinity,
This while, listen to me,
As I greet you with a song...
'My sang es in sihting'
by Richard Rolle, circa 14th century
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
My song is in sighing,
My life is in longing,
Till I see thee, my King,
So fair in thy shining,
So fair in thy beauty,
Leading me into your light...
To Rosemounde: A Ballade
by Geoffrey Chaucer
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Madame, you're a shrine to loveliness
And as world-encircling as trade's duties.
For your eyes shine like glorious crystals
And your round cheeks like rubies.
Therefore you're so merry and so jocund
That at a revel, when that I see you dance,
You become an ointment to my wound,
Though you offer me no dalliance.
For though I weep huge buckets of warm tears,
Still woe cannot confound my heart.
For your seemly voice, so delicately pronounced,
Make my thoughts abound with bliss, even apart.
So courteously I go, by your love bound,
So that I say to myself, in true penance,
'Suffer me to love you Rosemounde;
Though you offer me no dalliance.'
Never was a pike so sauce-immersed
As I, in love, am now emeshed and wounded.
For which I often, of myself, divine
That I am truly Tristam the Second.
My love may not grow cold, nor numb,
I burn in an amorous pleasance.
Do as you will, and I will be your thrall,
Though you offer me no dalliance.
A Lady without Paragon
by Geoffrey Chaucer
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Hide, Absalom, your shining tresses;
Esther, veil your meekness;
Retract, Jonathan, your friendly caresses;
Penelope and Marcia Catoun?
Other wives hold no comparison;
Hide your beauties, Isolde and Helen;
My lady comes, all stars to outshine.
Thy body fair? Let it not appear,
Lavinia and Lucretia of Rome;
Nor Polyxena, who found love's cost so dear;
Nor Cleopatra, with all her passion.
Hide the truth of love and your renown;
And thou, Thisbe, who felt such pain;
My lady comes, all stars to outshine.
Hero, Dido, Laodamia, all fair,
And Phyllis, hanging for Demophon;
And Canace, dead by love's cruel spear;
And Hypsipyle, betrayed along with Jason;
Make of your truth neither boast nor swoon,
Nor Hypermnestra nor Adriane, ye twain;
My lady comes, all stars to outshine.
A hymn to Jesus
by Richard of Caistre, circa 1400
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Jesu, Lord that madest me
and with thy blessed blood hath bought,
forgive that I have grieved thee,
in word, work, will and thought.
Jesu, for thy wounds' hurt
of body, feet and hands too,
make me meek and low in heart,
and thee to love, as I should do...
In Praise of his Ugly Lady
by Thomas Hoccleve, early 15th century
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Of my lady? Well rejoice, I may!
Her golden forehead is full narrow and small;
Her brows are like dim, reed coral;
And her jet-black eyes glisten, aye.
Her bulging cheeks are soft as clay
with large jowls and substantial.
Her nose, an overhanging shady wall:
no rain in that mouth on a stormy day!
Her mouth is nothing scant with lips gray;
Her chin can scarcely be seen at all.
Her comely body is shaped like a football,
and she sings like a cawing jay.
Lament for Chaucer
by Thomas Hoccleve, early 15th century
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Alas, my worthy master, honorable,
The very treasure and riches of this land!
Death, by your death, has done irreparable
harm to us: her cruel and vengeful hand
has robbed our country of sweet rhetoric...
Holly and Ivy
anonymous Middle English poem, circa 15th century
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Nay! Ivy, nay!
It shall not be, like this:
Let Holy have the mastery,
As the manner is.
Holy stood in the hall
Fair to behold;
Ivy stood outside the door,
Lonely and cold.
Holy and his merry men
Commenced to dance and sing;
Ivy and her maidens
Were left outside to weep and wring.
Ivy has a chilblain,
She caght it with the cold.
So must they all have, aye,
Whom with Ivy hold.
Holly has berries
As red as any rose:
The foresters and hunters
Keep them from the does.
Ivy has berries
As black as any ill:
There comes the owl
To eat them as she will.
Holly has birds,
A full fair flock:
The nightingale, the poppyinjay,
The gentle lark.
Good Ivy, good Ivy,
What birds cling to you?
None but the owl
Who cries, 'Who? Who? '
Unkindness Has Killed Me
anonymous Middle English poem,15th century
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Grievous is my sorrow:
Both evening and morow;
Unto myself alone
Thus do I moan,
That unkindness has killed me
And put me to this pain.
Alas! what remedy
That I cannot refrain?
from The Testament of John Lydgate
15th century
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Behold, o man! lift up your eyes and see
What mortal pain I suffer for your trespass.
With piteous voice I cry and say to thee:
Behold my wounds, behold my ****** face,
Behold the rebukes that do me such menace,
Behold my enemies that do me so despise,
And how that I, to reform thee to grace,
Was like a lamb offred in sacrifice.
Vox ultima Crucis
from The Testament of John Lydgate,15th century
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
TARRY no longer; toward thine heritage
Haste on thy way, and be of right good cheer.
Go each day onward on thy pilgrimage;
Think how short a time thou hast abided here.
Thy place is built above the stars clear,
No earthly palace wrought in such stately wise.
Come on, my friend, my brother must enter!
For thee I offered my blood in sacrifice.
Inordinate Love
anonymous Middle English poem, circa 15th century
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
I shall say what inordinate love is:
The ferocity and singleness of mind,
An inextinguishable burning devoid of bliss,
A great hunger, too insatiable to decline,
A dulcet ill, an evil sweetness, blind,
A right wonderful, sugared, sweet error,
Without any rest, contrary to kind,
Without quiet, a riot of useless labor.
Besse Bunting
anonymous Middle English poem, circa 15th century
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
In April and May
When hearts be all a-merry,
Bessie Bunting, the miller's girl,
With lips as red as cherries,
Cast aside remembrance
To pass her time in dalliance
And leave her misery to chance.
Right womanly arrayed
In petticoats of white,
She was undismayed
And her countenance was light.
The spring under a thorn
anonymous Middle English poem, circa 15th century
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
At a wellspring, under a thorn,
the remedy for an ill was born.
There stood beside a maid
Full of love bound,
And whoso seeks true love,
In her it will be found.
The Complaint of Cresseid against Fate
Robert Henryson,15th century
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
O sop of sorrow, sunken into care,
O wretched Cresseid, now and evermore
Gone is thy joy and all thy mirth on earth!
Stripped bare of blitheness and happiness,
No salve can save you from your sickness.
Fell is thy fortune, wicked thy fate.
All bliss banished and sorrow in bloom.
Would that I were buried under the earth
Where no one in Greece or Troy might hear it!
A lover left alone with his thoughts
anonymous Middle English poem, circa later 15th century
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Continuance
of remembrance,
without ending,
causes me penance
and great grievance,
for your parting.
You are so deeply
engraved in my heart,
God only knows
that always before me
I ever see you
in thoughts covert.
Though I do not explain
my woeful pain,
I bear it still,
although it seems vain
to speak against
Fortune's will.
Go, hert, hurt with adversity
anonymous Middle English poem, circa 15th century
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Go, heart, hurt with adversity,
and let my lady see thy wounds,
then say to her, as I say to thee:
'Farewell, my joy, and welcome pain,
till I see my lady again.'
I love a flower
by Thomas Phillipps, circa 1500
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
'I love, I love, and whom love ye? '
'I love a flower of fresh beauty.'
'I love another as well as ye.'
'That shall be proved here, anon,
If we three
together can agree
thereon.'
'I love a flower of sweet odour.'
'Marigolds or lavender? '
'Columbine, golds of sweet flavor? '
'Nay! Nay! Let be:
It is none of them
that liketh me.'
(The argument continues...)
'I love the rose, both red and white.'
'Is that your perfect appetite? '
'To talk of them is my delight.'
'Joyed may we be,
our Prince to see
and roses three.'
'Now we have loved and love will we,
this fair, fresh flower, full of beauty.'
'Most worthy it is, so thinketh me.'
'Then may it be proved here, anon,
that we three
did agree
as one.'
The sleeper hood-winked
by John Skelton, circa late 15th century
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
With 'Lullay! Lullay! ' like a child,
Thou sleepest too long, thou art beguiled.
'My darling dear, my daisy flower,
let me, quoth he, 'lie in your lap.'
'Lie still, ' quoth she, 'my paramour, '
'Lie still, of course, and take a nap.'
His head was heavy, such was his hap!
All drowsy, dreaming, drowned in sleep,
That of his love he took no keep. [paid no notice]
The Corpus Christi Carol
anonymous Middle English poem, circa early 16th century
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
He bore him up, he bore him down,
He bore him into an orchard brown.
Lully, lullay, lully, lullay!
The falcon has borne my mate away.
In that orchard there stood a hall
Hanged all over with purple and pall.
Lully, lullay, lully, lullay!
The falcon has borne my mate away.
And in that hall there stood a bed
hanged all over with gold so red.
Lully, lullay, lully, lullay!
The falcon has borne my mate away.
And in that bed there lies a knight,
His wounds all bleeding both day and night.
Lully, lullay, lully, lullay!
The falcon has borne my mate away.
By that bed's side there kneels a maid,
And she weeps both night and day.
Lully, lullay, lully, lullay!
The falcon has borne my mate away.
And by that bedside stands a stone,
'Corpus Christi' written thereon.
Lully, lullay, lully, lullay!
The falcon has borne my mate away.
Love ever green
attributed to King Henry VIII, circa 1515
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
If Henry VIII wrote the poem, he didn't quite live up to it! - MRB
Green groweth the holly,
so doth the ivy.
Though winter's blasts blow never so high,
green groweth the holly.
As the holly groweth green
and never changeth hue,
so am I, and ever have been,
unto my lady true.
Adew! Mine own lady.
Adew! My special.
Who hath my heart truly,
Be sure, and ever shall.
Pleasure it is
by William Cornish, early 16th century
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Pleasure it is,
to her, indeed.
The birds sing;
the deer in the dale,
the sheep in the vale,
the new corn springing.
God's allowance
for sustenance,
his gifts to man.
Thus we always give him praise
and thank him, then.
And thank him, then.
My lute and I
by Sir Thomas Wyatt, circa early 16th century
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
At most mischief
I suffer grief
Without relief
Since I have none;
My lute and I
Continually
Shall both apply
To sigh and moan.
Nought may prevail
To weep or wail;
Pity doth fail
In you, alas!
Mourning or moan,
Complaint, or none,
It is all one,
As in this case.
For cruelty,
Most that can be,
Hath sovereignty
Within your heart;
Which maketh bare
All my welfare:
Nought do you care
How sore I smart.
No tiger's heart
Is so perverse
Without desert
To wreak his ire;
And me? You ****
For my goodwill;
Lo, how I spill
For my desire!
There is no love
Your heart to move,
And I can prove
No other way;
Therefore I must
Restrain my lust,
Banish my trust
And wealth away.
Thus in mischief
I suffer grief,
Without relief
Since I have none,
My lute and I
Continually
Shall both apply
To sigh and moan.
What menethe this?
by Sir Thomas Wyatt, circa early 16th century
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
WHAT meaneth this! when I lie alone
I toss, I turn, I sigh, I groan;
My bed seems near as hard as stone:
What means this?
I sigh, I plain continually;
The clothes that on my bed do lie,
Always, methinks, they lie awry;
What means this?
In slumbers oft for fear I quake;
For heat and cold I burn and shake;
For lack of sleep my head doth ache;
What means this?
At mornings then when I do rise,
I turn unto my wonted guise,
All day thereafter, muse and devise;
What means this?
And if perchance by me there pass,
She, unto whom I sue for grace,
The cold blood forsaketh my face;
What means this?
But if I sit with her nearby,
With a loud voice my heart doth cry,
And yet my mouth is dumb and dry;
What means this?
To ask for help, no heart I have;
My tongue doth fail what I should crave;
Yet inwardly I rage and rave;
What means this?
Thus I have passed many a year,
And many a day, though nought appear,
But most of that which I most I fear;
What means this?
Yet ons I was
by Sir Thomas Wyatt, circa early 16th century
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Once in your grace I know I was,
Even as well as now is he;
Though Fortune hath so turned my case
That I am down and he full high;
Yet once I was.
Once I was he that did you please
So well that nothing did I doubt,
And though today ye think it ease
To take him in and throw me out;
Yet once I was.
Once I was he, in times past.
That as your own ye did retain:
And though ye have me now out-cast,
Showing untruth in you to reign;
Yet once I was.
Once I was he that knit the knot
The which ye swore not to unknit,
And though ye feign it now forgot,
In using your newfangled wit;
Yet once I was.
Once I was he to whom ye said,
'Welcome, my joy, my whole delight! '
And though ye are now well repaid
Of me, your own, your claim seems slight;
Yet once I was.
Once I was he to whom ye spake,
'Have here my heart! It is thy own.'
And though these words ye now forsake,
Saying thereof my part is none;
Yet once I was.
Once I was he that led the cast,
But now am he that must needs die.
And though I die, yet, at the last,
In your remembrance let it lie,
That once I was.
The Vision of Piers Plowman
by William Langland, circa 1330-1400
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Incipit liber de Petro Plowman prologus
In a summer season when the sun shone soft,
I clothed myself in a cloak like a shepherd's,
In a habit like a hermit's unholy in works,
And went out into the wide world, wonders to hear.
Then on a May morning on Malvern hills,
A marvel befell me, of fairies, methought.
I was weary with wandering and went to rest
Under a broad bank, by a brook's side,
And as I lay, leaned over and looked on the waters,
I fell into a slumber, for it sounded so merry.
Soon I began to dream a marvellous dream:
That I was in a wilderness, I wist not where.
As I looked to the east, right into the sun,
I saw a tower on a knoll, worthily built,
With a deep dale beneath and a dungeon therein,
Full of deep, dark ditches and and dreadful to behold.
Then a fair field full of fond folk, I espied between,
Of all manner of men, both rich and poor,
Working and wandering, as the world demands.
Some put themselves to the plow, seldom playing,
But setting and sowing they sweated copiously
And won that which wasters destroyed by gluttony...
Pearl
anonymous Middle English poem, circa 1400
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Pearl, the pleasant prize of princes,
Chastely set in clear gold and cherished,
Out of the Orient, unequaled,
Precious jewel without peer,
So round, so rare, so radiant,
So small, so smooth, so seductive,
That whenever I judged glimmering gems,
I set her apart, unimpeachable, priceless.
Alas, I lost her in earth's green grass!
Long I searched for her in vain!
Now I languish alone, my heart gone cold.
For I lost my precious pearl without stain.
Johann Scheffler (1624-1677) , also known as Johann Angelus Silesius, was a German Catholic priest, physician, mystic and religious poet. He's a bit later than most of the other poets on this page, but seems to fit in …
Unholy Trinity
by Angelus Silesius
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Man has three enemies:
himself, the world, and the devil.
Of these the first is, by far,
the most irresistible evil.
True Wealth
by Angelus Silesius
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
There is more to being rich
than merely having;
the wealthiest man can lose
everything not worth saving.
The Rose
by Angelus Silesius
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
The rose merely blossoms
and never asks why:
heedless of her beauty,
careless of every eye.
The Rose
by Angelus Silesius
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
The rose lack 'reasons'
and merely sways with the seasons;
she has no ego
but whoever put on such a show?
Eternal Time
by Angelus Silesius
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Eternity is time,
time eternity,
except when we
are determined to 'see.'
Visions
by Angelus Silesius
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Our souls possess two eyes:
one examines time,
the other visions
eternal and sublime.
Godless
by Angelus Silesius
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
God is absolute Nothingness
beyond our sense of time and place;
the more we try to grasp Him,
The more He flees from our embrace.
The Source
by Angelus Silesius
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Water is pure and clean
when taken at the well-head:
but drink too far from the Source
and you may well end up dead.
Ceaseless Peace
by Angelus Silesius
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Unceasingly you seek
life's ceaseless wavelike motion;
I seek perpetual peace, all storms calmed.
Whose is the wiser notion?
Well Written
by Angelus Silesius
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Friend, cease!
Abandon all pretense!
You must yourself become
the Writing and the Sense.
Worm Food
by Angelus Silesius
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
No worm is buried
so deep within the soil
that God denies it food
as reward for its toil.
Mature Love
by Angelus Silesius
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
New love, like a sparkling wine, soon fizzes.
Mature love, calm and serene, abides.
God's Predicament
by Angelus Silesius
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
God cannot condemn those with whom he would dwell,
or He would have to join them in hell!
Clods
by Angelus Silesius
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
A ruby
is not lovelier
than a dirt clod,
nor an angel
more glorious
than a frog.
The original poem below is based on my teenage misinterpretation of a Latin prayer …
Elegy for a little girl, lost
by Michael R. Burch
… qui laetificat juventutem meam …
She was the joy of my youth,
and now she is gone.
… requiescat in pace …
May she rest in peace.
… amen …
Amen.
I was touched by this Latin prayer, which I discovered in a novel I read as a teenager. I later decided to incorporate it into a poem. From what I now understand, 'ad deum qui laetificat juventutem meam' means 'to the God who gives joy to my youth, ' but I am sticking with my original interpretation: a lament for a little girl at her funeral. The phrase can be traced back to Saint Jerome's translation of Psalm 42 in the Vulgate Latin Bible (circa 385 AD) .
Keywords/Tags: Middle English, rhyme, medieval, epigram, lament, complaint, weight, soul, burden, burdened, heaviness, plague, plagued, exit, death, manner, fen, torment, hell, when, where, how, why
These are Medieval poetry translations of poems written in Old English (i.e., Anglo-Saxon English) and Middle English.