Books ...Rabanus Maurus, Archbishop of Mainz....

Modernly known as In honorem sanctae crucis, this work on the holy cross by Rabanus Maurus (a.k.a. Hrabanus Maurus) was completed by 814 and through the manuscript and early printing era it was known under the title of De Laudibus sancte Crucis. The New Westminster Dictionary of Church History says that “with this work Hrabanus paved the way to fill the theoretical gap left open by the previous debates in the East and West about the legitimacy of visual images.”

And visual this work certainly is: It contains 30 carmina figurata (2 unnumbered and 28 numbered) glorifying the holy cross and two xylographic illustrations. The cataloguer at the Pierpont Morgan Library writes that the “Illustrations (pattern or figure poems) are in red and black, sometimes complete woodcuts, sometimes woodcut with letterpress. Various poetic texts can be derived from the resulting configurations. Explanatory text and a transcript of the poem complements each illustration.” The archbishop's work ranks among the earliest examples of printed concrete poetry. And, because his poems are encrypted in a grid of 36 lines each containing 36 letters, this also is an early work in the field of cryptology.

Edith Stein... poem...

And I Remain With You

Who are you, sweet light, that fills me
And illumines the darkness of my heart?
You lead me like a mother's hand,
And should you let go of me,

I would not know how to take another step.
You are the space
That embraces my being and buries it in yourself.
Away from you it sinks into the abyss
Of nothingness, from which you raised it to the light.
You, nearer to me than I to myself
And more interior than my most interior
And still impalpable and intangible
And beyond any name...

Louise Bogan... poems

Words for Departure

Nothing was remembered, nothing forgotten.
When we awoke, wagons were passing on the warm summer pavements,
The window-sills were wet from rain in the night,
Birds scattered and settled over chimneypots
As among grotesque trees.

Nothing was accepted, nothing looked beyond.
Slight-voiced bells separated hour from hour,
The afternoon sifted coolness
And people drew together in streets becoming deserted.
There was a moon, and light in a shop-front,
And dusk falling like precipitous water.

Hand clasped hand
Forehead still bowed to forehead--
Nothing was lost, nothing possessed
There was no gift nor denial.

2
I have remembered you.
You were not the town visited once,
Nor the road falling behind running feet.

You were as awkward as flesh
And lighter than frost or ashes.

You were the rind,
And the white-juiced apple,
The song, and the words waiting for music.

3
You have learned the beginning;
Go from mine to the other.

Be together; eat, dance, despair,
Sleep, be threatened, endure.
You will know the way of that.

But at the end, be insolent;
Be absurd--strike the thing short off;
Be mad--only do not let talk
Wear the bloom from silence.

And go away without fire or lantern
Let there be some uncertainty about your departure.

from Body of this Death: Poems (1923)




Betrothed

You have put your two hands upon me, and your mouth,
You have said my name as a prayer.
Here where trees are planted by the water
I have watched your eyes, cleansed from regret,
And your lips, closed over all that love cannot say,

My mother remembers the agony of her womb
And long years that seemed to promise more than this.
She says, "You do not love me,
You do not want me,
You will go away."

In the country whereto I go
I shall not see the face of my friend
Nor her hair the color of sunburnt grasses;
Together we shall not find
The land on whose hills bends the new moon
In air traversed of birds.

What have I thought of love?
I have said, "It is beauty and sorrow."
I have thought that it would bring me lost delights, and splendor
As a wind out of old time . . .

But there is only the evening here,
And the sound of willows
Now and again dipping their long oval leaves in the water.

from Body of this Death: Poems (1923)



Knowledge

Now that I know
How passion warms little
Of flesh in the mould,
And treasure is brittle,--

I'll lie here and learn
How, over their ground
Trees make a long shadow
And a light sound.

from Body of this Death: Poems (1923)

Paul Holman...Tara Morgana IV

Tara Morgana IV

1

The memory of a bewildering romance:
her tongue had turned white, the
ugly flight jacket bought the day
before had suffered a three cornered
tear. Her eye imposed the spectre
of a building upon a gap
in the city, but I found
nothing better to do than sketch
the map of mountains, fissures and
interconnected lakes which the action of
heat and sudden rain had developed
upon the path.

2

She gazed into the mirror treated
with seven excretions: ophidian skin, mottled
breasts and shoulders. The fumes settled
into the handsome animal mask of
my father, not as he was
in life, but as it had
proved convenient for me to represent
him to myself. By this time,
she was delusional, ransacking the house
in search of the one object
that caused her damage. I marked
a cross upon the tablecloth, then
added four dots at the intercardinal
points, connecting them with the looping
walls of that labyrinth through which
I follow him now.

3

She vanished among men of unguessable
temper, always older, who made no
remark about the tremble of the
skeleton at the foot of her
mattress.


From V

The transmission I failed to
summon again, as if it could
be recovered by walking in a
stupor beside that same river,
stinking of beer and mud,
above which I had glimpsed a
moth patterned city, my hand
upon the waist of the first
girl I tricked into performing
an action significant to me
(game to accept the hazard of
my company, the boredom).

María Sabina: Mujer Espíritu

Ah, Jesu Kri
I am a woman who shouts
I am a woman who whistles
I am a woman who lightnings, says
...
Woman who resounds
Woman torn up out of the ground
Woman who resounds
Woman torn up out of the ground
Woman of the principal berries, says
Woman of the sacred berries, says
...
Book woman
Book woman
Morning Star woman
Cross Star woman
God Star woman
...
Because I can swim in the immense
Because I can swim in all forms
Because I am the launch woman
Because I am the sacred opposum
Because I am the Lord opposum

I am the woman Book that is beneath the water, says
I am the woman of the populous town, says
I am the shepherdess who is beneath the water, says
I am the woman who shepherds the immense, says
I am a shepherdess and I come with my shepherd, says

Because everything has its origin
And I come going from place to place from the origin...


My space for Maria Sabina >>
www.myspace.com/mariasabinaamor

Henriette Hardenberg ...

from the German poet Henriette Hardenberg (Margarete Rosenberg) 1894-1993






 An image of fear     


Evil pond surrounded by full lips
Angry ruby glass bursting off the bottom.
Secret tiger paths, sandy,
Drawn around golden almond flowers,
Labyrinth passages.
And hot rain pouring down
Among a spark dance of bodies.
Mangling through and through,
Sound from the top of the tower of need.



Spring

Birch-white leg,
Love landscape,
Hips,
Her flower balcony,
Tender and gone to seed,
Full fragrance of narcissus,
You, man
I love!


Hands

Like rare animals they move up and down
And lie deep at the bottom of the sea;
Moon-colored is the stone, like a wound
Set in flowering plumage.

I fear this hidden motion,
Like wind held up in branches;
So few fingers, in figures,
Will excite thoughts in me.

The sea divides so that I can reach it -
In swaying underbrush of crystal night -
This hand, extended flat yet softly sunk,
There before my pallid face.

I don't know whether the little bones,
Rinsed by the sea, will drift and mingle,
Or if, wrapped in clouds,
They will reach up for music and dance.

I know that dreams without fragrance,
Like dead fingers rigid in the joints,
Do not give shrouded magic
For which the living call in sleep.



White and red

Clouds tumble from the skies,
Impenetrable hedges of white roses grow,
The heart, of marble, lies slain.
Snow stars float
In whitewashed time space.

A human being, resurrected, screams,
Blood sprays from the fountains of the heart,
Roses burn in arms,
Dusk shed by a lamp brightens the tears.


Longing

The houses wished for the moon;
unable to stand the edges, the hardness any longer,
they had to bend.
I lay in my room and felt
how they were shaking with longing,
how sick they were, how they swayed.
And the moon came,
and my heart grew along with it,
and its loneliness grew.
The houses held on to each other tight that night.
I kissed the moon and cried.