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| Alyosha's Thread
Posted: 5/12/2009 11:15:47 PM | Open the door
Ivan or was it Iwanka
Place the dish..food..backstep.
As you bend, then you gently straighten
Close the door...food
for the beggars, the isolates, the defeated.
remark no further, climb into your bed.
Life is Russian, the stinging arc
leaves a valuable mark. | |
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| Alyosha's Thread
Posted: 5/13/2009 4:00:39 AM |
Open the door
Ivan or was it Iwanka
Place the dish..food..backstep.
As you bend, then you gently straighten
Close the door...food
for the beggars, the isolates, the defeated.
remark no further, climb into your bed.
Life is Russian, the stinging arc
leaves a valuable mark.
I love such off-the-cuff, impromptu messages. Thanks | |
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| Alyosha's Thread
Posted: 5/27/2009 8:42:58 AM | Sapphire
I don’t often think of myself as “blessed.”
I mean, the word schleps after it
the hyper-vivid vocabulary
of the three great desert religions
but
the other day I sent my 7-year old grand-daughter
a children’s poem I’d written
and in reply she wrote
“I like your rhyming skills.”
My “rhyming skills”! I mean who is this
Ms Jr. Helen Vendler?
“It's like thing are driving some where, the car or truck or whatever they're driving in, it's so bumpy. I know you'd expect me to say smooth, but I'll say bumpy. Because if it's smooth, it'd just be 'la, la, la,' and more la la las. But It really rhymed. I gotta say it's truthfully so good.”
May I say, then,
may I say that I am blessed? | |
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| Alyosha's Thread
Posted: 6/1/2009 9:41:01 PM | | Ah, Jer -- you are indeed blessed. You rhyme purty good, too. | |
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| Alyosha's Thread
Posted: 6/2/2009 4:06:04 PM |
Ah, Jer -- you are indeed blessed. You rhyme purty good, too.
She really IS something, isn't she, my darling little literary critic?
By the way, when she was 4ish, she was sitting across the table from a contemporary of hers and said:
"John, let's have a conversation."
"Ok," he said: "what should we talk about? Oh, I know, let's talk about airplanes."
"No," she said: "let's talk about you and me." | |
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| Alyosha's Thread
Posted: 6/2/2009 6:10:51 PM | Lol! Ah, the bebes. . . . You seem blessed with quite a set.  | |
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| Alyosha's Thread
Posted: 6/2/2009 6:35:36 PM |
Lol! Ah, the bebes. . . . You seem blessed with quite a set.
E.g., Gabe, when he was around 4 or 5 , turned to his 2-years younger sister, Lucy, in their father’s presence, and said:
I love you more than a fish;
I love you more than a cornstalk;
I love you more than a willow
floating on a mud pool
(I’ve put it in the form of a quatrain, because it did seem naturally to fall into that form.)
When my son Adam reported this to his wife, Maggie, and she expressed her appreciation of it to Gabe, he said, with evident pride:
"And I told Papa, 'I love you more than I love you.'"
(Meaning he loved his father more than he loved him!!! Figure that one out, if you can. I've spent years with my own interpretation, marveling at this revelation of his interesting mind. | |
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| Alyosha's Thread
Posted: 6/3/2009 11:10:07 PM | I think the imagine of the mirror is a very good one. It is the image of the
soul, and in Plato's Alcibides it is said that it is necessary to find
vision in life. That vision in life is found by looking inside the soul and
finding the region which is most divine.
By natural and correct inference, then, the soul must resemble a mirror, in order for there to be any 'reflection'. If this inference is not, then the soul is opaque, and requires symbols written on pages, and witnesses, aural witness, with memory, or uncertain others.
This is the place where the sense of Virtue itself is located. What is remarkable about this passage in Alcibides is that what is determined be of ultimate good and value is
something that is innately present, something that is beautiful and good, since only the beautiful can be good.
The important and therapeutic value of this is that unless the self
knows what is good and beautiful, the soul and the intellect cannot see it
in another soul. This is referred to as divination by Socrates and this is what
is the object of all love for another. So the eye acts like a spiritual
mirror in reflecting one's intrinsic sense of self worth, and esteem because
it was always there: this sense of the Good itself which is not knowledge,
but is experienced as desire for the Good itself.
That is what is reflection, saying that "I act for you more than you know." | |
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| Alyosha's Thread
Posted: 6/4/2009 9:44:21 PM | | There are many ways to express love. The way this child expressed is one of the more poignant and accurate expression. How is it ever possible to express love in a dry and barren manner??? | |
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| Alyosha's Thread
Posted: 6/4/2009 9:54:08 PM | That right. A child must express love, since a child usually receives much love. However, I have been watching numerous episodes on Global TV, Plan, which show children who are unable to express love due to dire sickness, malnutruition, and disease, in many countries. Plan as you may know was formerly "Foster Parents Plan", but now takes a more global approach to saving children and incidentally ecosystems.
You are right, there are many ways to love, and express love. For some people it is an expression of love to use tax moneys to fund the purchase of huge weapons of mass destruction and use them on innocent families in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Congo.
cheers | |
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| Alyosha's Thread
Posted: 6/4/2009 10:46:21 PM | Let me take you here.
Silence, until the wind sings.
Let me take you here.
Island , Superior lake.
Walk quietly over this splendid granite.
Shh...over here..look in the spirit of loving,
View...one lone, wild, ethereal tiger lily.
You then will know that thugs dispensing and trading in weapons are NOT ever, ever about love. (and the the ignorant who choose to ignore how their tax monies are spent) And that includes all of the rest. And many children are momentarily unable to love, but only momentarily. If you cannot love, you are one of the walking dead. | |
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| Alyosha's Thread
Posted: 6/5/2009 4:41:24 AM |
There are many ways to express love. The way this child expressed is one of the more poignant and accurate expression. How is it ever possible to express love in a dry and barren manner???
Than.k you. Several years later I recounted this to Gabriel & asked him what he meant by that. He blushed and shrugged his shoulders.
I thought the most logical interpretation was: "I love you more than I can say," but if that was it, or something other, I was fascinated to have that glimpse both into his love for his father and also into the workings of a most interesting mind . | |
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| Alyosha's Thread
Posted: 6/6/2009 12:59:33 PM | Wasn't there also a poem about a lion or leopard -- one of those burning bright jungle cats, by a granddaughter at a Swiss school? Or do I misremember? WHAT grand grands you have, my friend!!
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| Alyosha's Thread
Posted: 6/6/2009 1:32:29 PM | Wasn't there also a poem about a lion or leopard -- one of those burning bright jungle cats, by a granddaughter at a Swiss school? Or do I misremember? WHAT grand grands you have, my friend!!
Oh yes - God bless you! As I began reading the above I got ready to freak out because I didn't recognize what you were referring to until you mentioned the Swiss school... That poem was by Hella Mocherie Berlin Wiedmer-Newman, now 14.
When my other “senior grand-daughter," Lucy, was 10 or 11, her mother overheard her volunteer “I love you” to someone on the phone. Lucy said this so regularly that Maggie, her mother, asked:
“Lucy, do you love everybody?”
“No,” Lucy answered: “only the people I know.” | |
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| Alyosha's Thread
Posted: 6/7/2009 9:12:17 PM | In 1966 black, white, capped ... nose and face open to the world.
Nun...sister of the order of, I think St. Joseph, or was it Mary?
Stepped carefully over sun-strewn gray,cracked concrete
Met Father Devine, from the parish, can concrete ever reflect sunlight?
On the corner that is always forever they chatted Greek definitions of love.
agape....oh.....mother, father, lover, Greek words are hard.
Fini. Sister walks slowly, Father Devine roars as always.
Back to the business of loving humankind. Somebody has to. | |
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| Alyosha's Thread
Posted: 6/10/2009 9:22:52 PM | | So, are you going to give us Hella's poem? | |
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| Alyosha's Thread
Posted: 6/11/2009 6:41:28 AM | At your command, dear Woobs:
Der Gepard
Hella Wiedmer-Newman
Der Gepard schleicht in Todesstille
Dem düsteren Zoopfad entlang.
Entfliehen will er
Doch des Käfigs Rillen
Machen ihm Angst und Bang.
Alle Eulenaugen starren ihn an
Doch er geht weiter.
Längst verfallen dem hübschen Pfau
Schmiegt sich die Pfauenfrau an ihn ran.
Doch dem Gepard fehlt es an Scheitern.
The Cheetah
English by Rafaël Newman
The cheetah slips as still as death
Along the gloomy trail.
He wants to flee the zoo and yet
He fears his fluted jail.
Observed by every owlish eye
He carries on his way.
The peahen, long since smitten by
Her handsome mate, won't stray;
But still the cheetah walks the path:
He knows not how to fail. | |
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| Alyosha's Thread
Posted: 6/11/2009 11:19:16 AM | Just as remarkable as I remembered! (I thought I'd saved it before, but couldn't find it -- I now *know* where I'm keeping it. . . .)
I think it must be wonderfully nourishing to small souls to be raised where poetry is part of the matrix.
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| Alyosha's Thread
Posted: 6/11/2009 12:32:26 PM |
I think it must be wonderfully nourishing to small souls to be raised where poetry is part of the matrix.
Sometimes it may be TOO much a part of the matrix, e.g. per this exchange between Raf and me:
I sent him a poem about which he responded with the one word: "Pretty," so when I sent him another, I wrote:
PLEASE don't tell me this is "pretty"!
Love
Dad
to which he responded:
From: Rafaël Newman
To: Jerry Newman
Well, if you don't like "pretty", how do you feel about "trite"?
to which he added a recollection. And I responed:
Frankly, I would have preferred "masterful" or "spare but deep," but "trite" is okay, too.
Love,
Dad
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| Alyosha's Thread
Posted: 6/11/2009 3:51:25 PM | Ah, Jer ~~ how easy to feel the love there. And how wonderful!!  | |
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| Alyosha's Thread
Posted: 6/11/2009 7:31:26 PM |
From: Rafaël Newman
To: Jerry Newman
Well, if you don't like "pretty", how do you feel about "trite"?
uhoh....tell him to skip my thread..... | |
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| Alyosha's Thread
Posted: 6/12/2009 12:09:36 PM |
uhoh....tell him to skip my thread.....
Tell you what I'm going to do. I'm going to post that very poem on your site so if he happens to look there he'll have what to call "trite"! | |
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| W.S. Merwin
Posted: 6/29/2009 8:57:11 AM | The elderly poet, unburdened
by the prizes he has won, the hundreds
of poems in which he strived to say
Here, now, this moment, me,
you, looks up from reading
one of his most recent poems
at the request of his admiring host,
looks up, his eyes slightly moist,
seeming to ask:
Did you get it?
Did I deliver it?
Am I a poet?
I mean, really? | |
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| W.S. Merwin
Posted: 7/1/2009 12:24:36 AM | His question is not the answer.
What I received comes closer
(Poetry is either good, neither, never in between)
Pause. What haunts you? What relieves existence?
What speaks? Assures, confirms beauty in between
the dross, the dull, the very ordinary
shoots sparks, fires your heart, eases blankt??? no, no, angst.
Poetry, the prayer, that finally works. | |
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| W.S. Merwin
Posted: 7/6/2009 6:46:05 AM |
His question is not the answer.
What I received comes closer
(Poetry is either good, neither, never in between)
Pause. What haunts you? What relieves existence?
What speaks? Assures, confirms beauty in between
the dross, the dull, the very ordinary
shoots sparks, fires your heart, eases blankt??? no, no, angst.
Poetry, the prayer, that finally works.
In this case, inspired as it appears to be by my preceding poem, and in many of your other posts to one of my threads, this has the feeling of a spontaneous, inspired conversation between the two of us. Thank you! | |
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