WYSIWYG

What You See Is What You Get. This is a journal blog, an explore-blog, a bit of this and that blog. Sharing where the mood takes me. Perhaps it will take you too.

"Nohchh" NIGHT

As promised (threatened?) yesterday, a poem.

Boris Pasternak


Night runs with no hitches,
melting. A pilot
makes for the clouds
above a sleeping world; 

Drowns in a whirlpool
of vapour, dwindles 
to a cross-stitch;
a mark on linen.

Below are foreign cities,
all-night bars, 
barracks, boilermen,
stations, trains.

the shadow of wings
lies flat on clouds,
The stars
cluster, drift.

Sickeningly
the Milky Way
heels over to other 
and unknown worlds.


In limitless spaces
continents burn,
boilermen watch
in basement boiler rooms.

Under Paris eves
Mars or Venus
Peers at the posters
That name the new farce,

While, sleeples, a man
in the splendid distance
Peers from his ancient
and tile-roofed attic

at Venus or Mars, 
as if the heavens 
touched on the theme
of his nightly worries.

Work; watch;
don't waver; work.
Wrestle with sleep 
like planet and pilot.

There's no surrender
to sleep, artist, 
eternity's hostage,
captive to time.



5 comments:

  1. Ah, yes, the way it should be read. The way it is. Thank you.

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  2. Our Brains have difficulty with most poems.... We usually miss the point.

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  3. I like writing poetry. It's a good challenge to match metre and rhyme!

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  4. Poetry to me is a song without written music but a song just the same. The melody comes from the mind of the reader.

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  5. Definitely an improvement.
    But translating poetry must be an all but impossible challenge.
    Cheers,
    Gail (safely in Nottingham now).

    ReplyDelete

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