Strange Fortune VI

More luck from China Garden.

WYCE Poetry Reading - 10/30/2012

I've been mostly silent lately when it comes to blogging. The demands and duties of life have kept me from posting. But it's not only that. I can feel myself holding my words in, keeping them for myself, saving them for a time when I might need them, mulling them over and holding them back. It's like tensing a muscle for action. There is, I read, a season and time to every purpose, for speaking and silence. And so this seasons goes. But here, to break the silence between us, Dear Reader, my annual reading on the radio. Some old poems re-read, and some new poems - immigration, epitaphs, foggy mornings of sipping tea, walks in the park. In speaking, something is staked (in every sense of the word). So here is a wager, my landclaim, my issue, and my point of execution.

A hand raised in greeting to you across the electronic gulf between us,

M

 

The Clod and the Pebble

In one respect, there are many types of love - philia, agape, eros, caritas, xenia. In another, there are only two - love of self and love of another. I think of these Blake lines often and try for non-pebblishness:

"Love seeketh not itself to please,
Nor for itself hath any care,
But for another gives its ease,
And builds a heaven in hell's despair."

So sung a little Clod of Clay,
Trodden with the cattle's feet,
But a Pebble of the brook
Warbled out these metres meet:

"Love seeketh only Self to please,
To bind another to its delight,
Joys in another's loss of ease,
And builds a hell in heaven's despite."