Poetry Thursday: The End, My Friends
About a year ago I started this blog. Even if I don't end it outright (I might; for the real world beckons to me now better than it did last year), still, the end of a year is an ending of sorts.As I was trying to select a poem for today (and possibly for a while), I found the one below. I'd already mapped out the post and its allusion to Lebanon when, later in the evening, I stumbled across the same poem, used in May, by my bliend baraka. It's here. I love that she prefaced the poem with two identical phrases of wisdom from the trees of Islam and Judaism.
Could it be, finally, that the Internet is a technology capable of saving us all? Peace-loving bloggers agree: words, spoken with care, are still capable of being beautiful.
So in honor of endings and endurance, this:
A Song On the End of the World
by Czeslaw Milosz
Translated by Anthony Milosz
On the day the world ends
A bee circles a clover,
A fisherman mends a glimmering net.
Happy porpoises jump in the sea,
By the rainspout young sparrows are playing
And the snake is gold-skinned as it should always be.
On the day the world ends
Women walk through the fields under their umbrellas,
A drunkard grows sleepy at the edge of a lawn,
Vegetable peddlers shout in the street
And a yellow-sailed boat comes nearer the island,
The voice of a violin lasts in the air
And leads into a starry night.
And those who expected lightning and thunder
Are disappointed.
And those who expected signs and archangels' trumps
Do not believe it is happening now.
As long as the sun and the moon are above,
As long as the bumblebee visits a rose,
As long as rosy infants are born
No one believes it is happening now.
Only a white-haired old man, who would be a prophetYet is not a prophet, for he's much too busy,
Repeats while he binds his tomatoes:
No other end of the world will there be,
No other end of the world will there be.
Copyright © 2006 The Czeslaw Milosz Estate. Printed here for personal and educational purposes only.
[image of ancient Temple of Jupiter, Baalbek, Lebanon. Via the exquisite photoblog carte blanche pedicure]
posted by lisa schamess @ 10:04
5 Comments:
FWIW, I hope you don't stop blogging altogether.
Lisa, I hope it is not the end. Maybe a new beginning.
As I approach a year myself, I realize you are right. It is a stopping point, if you are looking for one. I hope to rush pell-mell right through it and keep on going, though sometimes it is hard. But you keep in touch, in a way, with friends you might otherwise lose track of. Small price to drop us a small post now and then...
Why does the one year point so often mean an end? It was the same for my first blog. But I could not stay away. Hopefully all you need is a little rest.
Salaam, shalom, & greetings of peace my friend,
Thank you so much for your sweet words over my way. I feel so blessed to have a cyber window open to the world through which wisdom and love pours through to my thirsty heart.
In all ends lie fertile, imaginative new beginnings...I hope you will still be here, perhaps in a different way, but if not, thank you for the joy you have given me.
Bless you,
Baraka
It's harder to really quit than you'd expect - Though a break feels REAL GOOD!
At least that's how I felt... and look at me now - I'm sorta' back in the game again...
"Don't leve me this way..."
WV: uyssyo = you wish you could (but you can't)
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