Luis Soares's Blog, page 381

Paixão nos Proms (e logo na Gulbenkian)

Johann Sebastian Bach
Johannes-Passion BWV 245 (St John Passion)
English Baroque Soloists & Monteverdi Choir
Sir John Eliot Gardiner, conductor
Mark Padmore, tenor, Evangelist; Peter Harvey, bass, Christus; Katherine Fuge, soprano; Robin Blaze, counter-tenor; Nicholas Mulroy, tenor; Jeremy Budd, tenor; Matthew Brook bass

Matthew Zapruder - Poem for Bill Cassidy

I wish I would
like a ship
that all night carries
its beloved captain
sleeping through
no weather
slip past dawn
and wake with nothing
but strange things
that did not happen
to report
but I get up
in the dark
and parachute
quietly down
to the kitchen
to begin
the purely mental
ritual plugging
in of the useless
worry machine
above me
she sleeps
like the innocent
still dreaming older
sister to all
gentle things
the white screen
impassively asks
me to say what
does not matter
does so I shut
it down and think
about the lake
near...

Joseph Brodsky - A Song

I wish you were here, dear, I wish you were here.
I wish you sat on the sofa
and I sat near.
the handkerchief could be yours,
the tear could be mine, chin-bound.
Though it could be, of course,
the other way around.

I wish you were here, dear,
I wish you were here.
I wish we were in my car,
and you'd shift the gear.
we'd find ourselves elsewhere,
on an unknown shore.
Or else we'd repair
To where we've been before.

I wish you were here, dear,
I wish you were here.
I wish I knew no astronomy
when stars appear...

EE Cummings - Spring is like a perhaps hand

III

Spring is like a perhaps hand
(which comes carefully
out of Nowhere)arranging
a window,into which people look(while
people stare
arranging and changing placing
carefully there a strange
thing and a known thing here) and

changing everything carefully

spring is like a perhaps
Hand in a window
(carefully to
and fro moving New and
Old things,while
people stare carefully
moving a perhaps
fraction of flower here placing
an inch of air there) and

without breaking anything.

W.H. Auden - Musée des Beaux Arts

About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where...

Ross Gay - Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude

Friends, will you bear with me today,

for I have awakened

from a dream in which a robin

made with its shabby wings a kind of veil

behind which it shimmied and stomped something from the south

of Spain, its breast aflare,

looking me dead in the eye

from the branch that grew into my window,

coochie-cooing my chin,

the bird shuffling its little talons left, then right,

while the leaves bristled

against the plaster wall, two of them drifting

onto my blanket while the bird

opened and closed its wi...

Adam Fitzgerald - Poem with Accidental Memory

That we go back to life one day, the next,
Some other century where we were alive,

When music spelled itself out to us, often
Incomplete, and nothing was more vague

Than the banality of whom to love and lose
In line, the doppelgangers in rimless snow,

Or even now, in summer, at day, by night,
When something oblivious, replete, turns

Back at us in idolatrous quiet, so we see
Who in nullified particulars we really are

At a desk of our own making, filling in for
Someone else’s life sentence, blot...

Adília Lopes - Na Ilha de If

Resta-me
correr
célula a célula
e assim
percorrer
no sentido contrário
ao dos ponteiros do relógio
a velha prisão
da Ilha de If

Há uma lápide
que assinala
protestantes
mortos

A cadeia
do ser
a grande
cadeia
do ser
elo a elo
cela a cela
célula a célula
degrau a degrau

Deus circula

O imóvel
castelo de If
onde outrora
tremia o teixo

Em francês
If
é teixo
nome de árvore

Enquanto a guia local
debita histórias
eu corro
pelo local
cela a cela
degrau a degrau
sem nunca
por nunca
me desequilibrar

Adília Lopes, 'Capilé', Lisbo...

Seamus Heaney - Death of a Naturalist

All year the flax-dam festered in the heart
Of the townland; green and heavy headed
Flax had rotted there, weighted down by huge sods.
Daily it sweltered in the punishing sun.
Bubbles gargled delicately, bluebottles
Wove a strong gauze of sound around the smell.
There were dragonflies, spotted butterflies,
But best of all was the warm thick slobber
Of frogspawn that grew like clotted water
In the shade of the banks. Here, every spring
I would fill jampotfuls of the jellied
Specks to range on window si...

Claudia Rankine - Sound & Fury

Dispossessed despair, depression, despondent
dejection, the doom is the off-white of white. But wait,
white can’t know what white feels. Where’s the life in that?
Where’s the right in that? Where’s the white in that?

At the bone of bone white breathes the fear of seeing,
the frustration of being unequal to white. White-male portraits
on white walls were intended to mean ownership of all,
the privilege of all, even as white walls white in.

And this is understandable, yes,
understandable because the...