Just a reminder — if you happen to enjoy any of my poetry readings here at the blog, then you can find more over at my Youtube channel. There is a playlist for me reading the work of other poets, and another short playlist for me reading my own work.
I hope that all you guys have had a wonderful weekend!
When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
(Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven’s gate;
For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.
William Shakespeare’s Sonnet 30
(For Emily) 🙂
When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear time’s waste:
Then can I drown an eye, unus’d to flow,
For precious friends hid in death’s dateless night,
And weep afresh love’s long since cancell’d woe,
And moan th’ expense of many a vanish’d sight;
Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,
And heavily from woe to woe tell o’er
The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan,
Which I new pay as if not paid before.
But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
All losses are restor’d, and sorrows end.
Sharon lies,
a sylph amid the sheets
in our room in the hills,
drawn up around her –
are waves of fabric.
Her warmth is the same
as that of green hills:
gentle, blessed by the sun,
fertile with promise.
Her dark eyes
are as thickets.
“Serving breakfasts, luncheons and dinners, with practice in different styles of table service; soups, entrees, sauces, salads and desserts, with various methods of preparation and garnishings. An opportunity for review of principles learned in Cookery 51-52 is given. One single and one double period per week for the session for non-teaching Seniors.”
— from the Bulletin of the State Normal School, Fredericksburg, Virginia, June, 1917
By University of Mary Washington [No restrictions], via Wikimedia Commons
When I have seen by Time’s fell hand defac’d
The rich proud cost of outworn buried age;
When sometime lofty towers I see down-ras’d
And brass eternal slave to mortal rage;
When I have seen the hungry ocean gain
Advantage on the kingdom of the shore,
And the firm soil win of the wat’ry main,
Increasing store with loss and loss with store;
When I have seen such interchange of state,
Or state itself confounded to decay;
Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate,
That Time will come and take my love away.
This thought is as a death, which cannot choose
But weep to have that which it fears to lose.
I know that I shall meet my fate
Somewhere among the clouds above;
Those that I fight I do not hate
Those that I guard I do not love;
My country is Kiltartan Cross,
My countrymen Kiltartan’s poor,
No likely end could bring them loss
Or leave them happier than before.
Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,
Nor public man, nor cheering crowds,
A lonely impulse of delight
Drove to this tumult in the clouds;
I balanced all, brought all to mind,
The years to come seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind
In balance with this life, this death.
A selection from “The Sea and the Mirror.”
The first dog you see here actually does have eyes that are different colors. You can find more of Steve’s work right here: http://www.virtualsilkscreens.com/.
“Not of Byzantium”
Awakening at one AM after dreaming
not of Byzantium,
not of Babylon, but better —
Not Shangri-La, but shaded limb —
The pine I climbed when I was nine.
No Acropolis, only
fallow farm and rising sun.
Across, a distant treeline
ascends to render Athens’
Parthenon prosaic.
Exceeding empires, exceeding
even Elysium, is
This slumber’s ordinary boyhood field.
(c) Eric Robert Nolan 2015
Originally published in Dead Snakes.
Photo credit: kallerna [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons
Eric Robert Nolan, Author 