poetry

[J3FF3R00]

Lyric Of Love To Leah - Aleister Crowley

Come, my darling, let us dance 
To the moon that beckons us 
To dissolve our love in trance 
Heedless of the hideous 
Heat & hate of Sirius- 
Shun his baneful brilliance! 

Let us dance beneath the palm 
Moving in the moonlight, frond 
Wooing frond above the calm

Of the ocean diamond 
Sparkling to the sky beyond 
The enchantment of our psalm. 

Let us dance, my mirror of 
Perfect passion won to peace, 
Let us dance, my treasure trove, 
On the marble terraces 
Carven in pallid embroeideries 
For the vestal veil of Love.

Heaven awakes to encompass us, 
Hell awakes its jubilance 
In our hearts mysterious 
Marriage of the azure expanse, 
With the scarlet brilliance 
Of the Moon with Sirius. 

Velvet swatches our lissome limbs 
Languid lapped by sky & sea 
Soul through sense & spirit swims 
Through the pregnant porphyry 
Dome of lapiz-lazuli:- 
Heart of silence, hush our hymns. 

Come my darling; let us dance 
Through the golden galaxies 
Rythmic swell of circumstance 
Beaming passion’s argosies: 
Ecstacy entwined with ease, 
Terrene joy transcending trance! 

Thou my scarlet concubine 
Draining heart’s blood to the lees 
To empurple those divine 
Lips with living luxuries 
Life importunate to appease 
Drought insatiable of wine! 

Tunis in the tremendous trance 
Rests from day’s incestuous 
Traffic with the radiance 
Of her sire-& over us 
Gleams the intoxicating glance 
Of the Moon & Sirius. 

Take the ardour of my impearled 
Essence that my shoulders seek 
To intensify the curled 
Candour of the eyes oblique, 
Eyes that see the seraphic sleek 
Lust bewitch the wanton world. 

Come, my love, my dove, & pour 
From thy cup the serpent wine 
Brimmed & breathless -secret store 
Of my crimson concubine 
Surfeit spirit in the shrine- 
Devil -Godess -Virgin -Whore. 

Afric sands ensorcel us, 
Afric seas & skies entrance 
Velvet, lewd & luminous 
Night surveys our soul askance! 
Come my love, & let us dance 
To the Moon and Sirius!

 

 

(re: David Bowie’s “Let’s Dance”) “Serious moonlight,” according to Nile Rodgers, was Bowie referencing Rodgers’ habit of calling a particularly good groove or track “serious.” Bowie once called the phrase as his attempt at an “Americanism.” However, Nicholas Pegg offered the mad and quite possibly accurate theory that Bowie was referencing an Aleister Crowley poem, “Lyric of Love to Leah,” whose lines include “let us dance beneath the palm/moving in the moonlight” and later “come my love, let us dance/to the moon and Sirius!” I.e., the Sirius Moonlight.

 

[prdctvsm]

The Painter & the Fish  by Raymond Carver

All day he’d been working like a locomotive.
I mean he was painting, the brush strokes
coming like clockwork. Then he called
home. And that was that. That was all she
wrote. He shook like a leaf. He started
smoking again. He lay down and got back
up. Who could sleep if your woman sneered
and said time was running out? He drove
into town. But he didn’t go drinking.
No, he went walking. He walked past a mill
called “the mill”. Smell of fresh-cut
lumber, lights everywhere, men driving
jitneys and forklifts, driving themselves.
Lumber piled to the top of the warehouse,
the whine and groan of machinery. Easy
enough to recollect, he thought. He went
on, rain falling now, a soft rain that wants
to do its level best not to interfere
with anything and in return asks only
that it not be forgotten. The painter
turned up his collar and said to himself
he wouldn’t forget. He came to a lighted
building where, inside a room, men played
cards at a big table. A man wearing
a cap stood at the window and looked
out through the rain as he smoked
a pipe. That was an image he didn’t
want to forget either, but then
with his next thought he
shrugged. What was the point ?

He walked on until he reached the jetty
with its rotten pilings. Rain fell
harder now. It hissed as it struck
the water. Lightning came and went.
Lightning broke across the sky
like memory, like revelation. Just
when he was at the point of despair,
a fish came up out of the dark
water under the jetty and then fell back
and then rose again in a flash
to stand on its tail and shake itself !
The painter could hardly credit
his eyes, or his ears ! He’d just
had a sign – faith didn’t enter
into it. The painter’s mouth flew
open. By the time he’d reached home
he’d quit smoking and vowed never
to talk on the telephone again.
He put on his smock and picked up
his brush. He was ready to begin
again, but he didn’t know if one
canvas could hold it all. Never
mind. He’d carry it over
onto another canvas if he had to.
It was all or nothing. Lightning, water,
fish, cigarettes, cards, machinery,
the human heart, that old port.
Even the woman’s lips against
the receiver, even that.
The curl of her lip.

Edited September 26, 2022 by prdctvsm
tide

[beerwolf]

Back in the day (before I was a beer guzzling, cocaine snorting werewolf) and I was an eager English student this was my favourite poem. And remains to this day. 
 

‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller,   

   Knocking on the moonlit door; 

And his horse in the silence champed the grasses   

   Of the forest’s ferny floor: 

And a bird flew up out of the turret,   

   Above the Traveller’s head: 

And he smote upon the door again a second time;   

   ‘Is there anybody there?’ he said. 

But no one descended to the Traveller;   

   No head from the leaf-fringed sill 

Leaned over and looked into his grey eyes,   

   Where he stood perplexed and still. 

But only a host of phantom listeners   

   That dwelt in the lone house then 

Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight   

   To that voice from the world of men: 

Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair,   

   That goes down to the empty hall, 

Hearkening in an air stirred and shaken   

   By the lonely Traveller’s call. 

And he felt in his heart their strangeness,   

   Their stillness answering his cry, 

While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf,   

   ’Neath the starred and leafy sky; 

For he suddenly smote on the door, even   

   Louder, and lifted his head:— 

‘Tell them I came, and no one answered,   

   That I kept my word,’ he said. 

Never the least stir made the listeners,   

   Though every word he spake 

Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house   

   From the one man left awake: 

Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,   

   And the sound of iron on stone, 

And how the silence surged softly backward,   

   When the plunging hoofs were gone.

 

The Listeners by Walter De La Mare

Edited September 27, 2022 by beerwolf

[ManjuShri]

On the London Blitz.

 

[prdctvsm]

All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace

I like to think (and
the sooner the better!)
of a cybernetic meadow
where mammals and computers
live together in mutually
programming harmony
like pure water
touching clear sky. 

I like to think
(right now, please!)
of a cybernetic forest
filled with pines and electronics
where deer stroll peacefully
past computers
as if they were flowers
with spinning blossoms. 

I like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.

Richard Brautigan  

[auxien]

attributed to Charles Simic

stolen from someone on Mastodon