Larry’s Pretty Good Journal

For Poetry Monday, dipping back a few millenia:

A love song of Shu-Sin, Unknown

Man of my heart, my beloved man, your allure is a sweet thing, as sweet as honey. Lad of my heart, my beloved man, your allure is a sweet thing, as sweet as honey.

You have captivated me (?), of my own free will I will come to you. Man, let me flee with you — into the bedroom. You have captivated me (?); of my own free will I shall come to you. Lad, let me flee with you — into the bedroom.

Man, let me do the sweetest things to you. My precious sweet, let me bring you honey. In the bedchamber dripping with honey let us enjoy over and over your allure, the sweet thing. Lad, let me do the sweetest things to you. My precious sweet, let me bring you honey.

Man, you have become attracted to me. Speak to my mother and I will give myself to you; speak to my father and he will make a gift of me. I know where to give physical pleasure to your body — sleep, man, in our house till morning. I know how to bring heart’s delight to your heart — sleep, lad, in our house till morning.

Since you have fallen in love with me, lad, if only you would do your sweet thing to me.

My lord and god, my lord and guardian angel, my Cu-Suen who cheers Enlil’s heart, if only you would handle your sweet place, if only you would grasp your place that is sweet as honey.

Put your hand there for me like the cover (?) on a measuring cup. Spread (?) your hand there for me like the cover (?) on a cup of wood shavings.

Original text:


Thanks, WikiMedia!

Hat tip. One of the world’s oldest surviving lyric poems, written presumably during the reign of Shu-Sin / Šu-Suen, king of Sumer and Akkad from circa* 2037-2028 BCE. The tablet identifies the speaker as Inana, and it’s generally read as relating to the sacred marriage of the fertility goddess** and the land’s king. That said, it reads to me as a straight-up (i.e. non-ritual) erotic poem — a smoking hot one.*** The translation from Sumerian is a composite created by Graham Cunningham from ones by Krecher & Jagersma and Sefati (source, credits).


* While relative times in Middle Bronze Age Mesopotamia are relatively solid, absolute timestamps have error bars of ±60 years. For context, he ruled two and a half centuries after the death of Sargon of Akkad, the father of Enheduanna.

** Possibly, though this is highly debated, embodied as her high priestess. Not debated: she almost certainly didn’t wear little red panties.

*** I hope those wood shavings (?) don’t catch on fire.

---L.

Subject quote from Semi-Charmed Life, Third Eye Blind.

For Poetry Monday:

“The evening darkens over,” Robert Bridges

The evening darkens over
After a day so bright
The windcapt waves discover
That wild will be the night.
There’s sound of distant thunder.

The latest sea-birds hover
Along the cliff’s sheer height;
As in the memory wander
Last flutterings of delight,
White wings lost on the white.

There’s not a ship in sight;
And as the sun goes under
Thick clouds conspire to cover
The moon that should rise yonder.
Thou art alone, fond lover.


While Bridges was Poet Laureate 1913-30, I confess I mostly think of him as Hopkins’s university friend and literary executor.

---L.

Subject quote from The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face, written by Ewan MacColl, sung by Peggy Seeger. (Roberta Flack covered it later.)

For Poetry Monday:

The Llano Estacado, John Poch

How much soil do you plow to soothe a conscience?
If you’re a staked plains, dry-land, long view man:
a sky’s worth. Some even sow the dry playa
mid-summer with sorghum, the cotton plowed under
after early hail. Thus, not every farmer keeps
an old broken homestead sacred as a graveyard.
Today, no Sharpshin on a pivot for an omen,
no stoic farmer on a turn-row changing water.

Among a little wind grit, in a grid on a grid, somewhere
like the crossroads of outer space and Earth, Texas,
a handful of ragged elms withstand a long sway
of heat and wind. These old guards of a home haunt
the field but wither even as ghosts must. Honor them
with a walk among homesick bricks, and prophesy good.


First published in Poetry issue July/August 2009. The Llano Estacado is a large mesa/plateau in west Texas and easternmost New Mexico, extending from Amarillo through Lubbock and down to Odessa. The name is often translated as “staked plain,” with a folk etymologies explaining that its dry grassland is so featureless that Native Americans supposedly put up markers to guide their way (and Coronado famously did find it confusing), but the actual origin is probably “stockaded/palisaded plain,” referring to the escarpments of its eastern and western edges. The sharp-shinned hawk is a common small hawk of the region. The elms, which are not native, would have been grown by a former homesteader by irrigation from wells.

---L.

Subject quote from Dreams, Fleetwood Mac.

For Poetry Monday:

The Night Sky, Mary Webb

The moon, beyond her violet bars,
From towering heights of thunder-cloud,
Sheds calm upon our scarlet wars,
To soothe a world so small, so loud.
And little clouds like feathered spray,
Like rounded waves on summer seas,
Or frosted panes on a winter day,
Float in the dark blue silences.
Within their foam, transparent, white,
Like flashing fish the stars go by
Without a sound across the night.
In quietude and secrecy
The white, soft lightnings feel their way
To the boundless dark and back again,
With less stir than a gnat makes
In its little joy, its little pain.


(Hat tip to cmcmck.) Webb was a novelist and poet best known today as one of the authors parodied by Cold Comfort Farm.

---L.

Subject quote from Someone You Loved, Lewis Capaldi.

For Poetry Monday:

No Such Thing As the Innocent Bystander, Andrea Gibson

Silence rides shotgun
wherever hate goes.


---L.

Subject quote from The Sounds of Silence, Simon & Garfunkel.

For Poetry Monday Tuesday (because spent yesterday hiking in the mountains), another Francis:

Hallelujah: A Sestina, Robert Francis

A wind’s word, the Hebrew Hallelujah.
I wonder they never gave it to a boy
(Hal for short) boy with wind-wild hair.
It means Praise God, as well it should since praise
Is what God’s for. Why didn’t they call my father
Hallelujah instead of Ebenezer?

Eben, of course, but christened Ebenezer,
Product of Nova Scotia (hallelujah).
Daniel, a country doctor, was his father
And my father his tenth and final boy.
A baby and last, he had a baby’s praise:
Red petticoats, red cheeks, and crow-black hair.

A boy has little to say about his hair
And little about a name like Ebenezer
Except that you can shorten either. Praise
God for that, for that shout Hallelujah.
Shout Hallelujah for everything a boy
Can be that is not his father or grandfather.

But then, before you know it, he is a father
Too and passing on his brand of hair
To one more perfectly defenseless boy,
Dubbing him John or James or Ebenezer
But never, so far as I know, Hallelujah,
As if God didn’t need quite that much praise.

But what I’m coming to; Could I ever praise
My father half enough for being a father
Who let me be myself? Sing Hallelujah.
Preacher he was with a prophet’s head of hair
And what but a prophet’s name was Ebenezer,
However little I guessed it as a boy?

Outlandish names of course are never a boy’s
Choice. And it takes some time to learn to praise.
Stone of Help is the meaning of Ebenezer.
Stone of Help; what fitter name for my father?
Always the Stone of Help however his hair
Might graduate from black to Hallelujah.

Such is the old drama of boy and father.
Praise from a grayhead now with thinning hair.
Sing Ebenezer, Robert, sing Hallelujah!

---L.

Subject quote from Don't You (Forget About Me), Simple Minds.

For Poetry Monday, something I think is a repeat but can handle a repost:

Ancient Music, Ezra Pound

Winter is icummen in,
Lhude sing Goddamm,
Raineth drop and staineth slop,
And how the wind doth ramm!
              Sing: Goddamm.
Skiddeth bus and sloppeth us,
An ague hath my ham.
Freezeth river, turneth liver,
              Damn you, sing: Goddamm.
Goddamm, Goddamm, ’tis why I am, Goddamm,
              So ’gainst the winter’s balm.
Sing goddamm, damm, sing goddamm.
Sing goddamm, sing goddamm, DAMM.


Parody ofc of the Middle English round “Sumer is icumen in.”

---L.

Subject quote from Baker Street, Gerry Rafferty.

This has been a Yuletide of abundance — five gifts in three fandoms, including a surprising amount of poetry. My matched gift was appropriately titled:

Gifts (1212 words) by Anonymous
Fandom: Flower Fairies - Cicely Mary Barker
Additional Tags: Fae & Fairies, Bargains With Fae & Fairies, Unwise bargains With Fae & Fairies, Becoming a real boy, or otherwise - Freeform
Summary: Humans, give a little something. Give me something, get a present. Humans, give me, just a small gift —

A fae of dubious credibility asks the human models of several flowers (in alphabetical order) each for a gift, just a little thing, to help it become real. The tag “unwise bargains with fae & fairies” is accurate. Beautiful, seductive, and more than a little dangerous.

I also got a Flower Fairy treat, in this case a poem:

Flower Fairies of the Gone Woods (193 words) by Anonymous
Fandom: Flower Fairies - Cicely Mary Barker
Additional Tags: Fae & Fairies, Botanical accuracy, Biographical liberties, Poetry
Summary: The berries are not to be eaten
She says in a marginal note
Miss Barker, she asked you to listen
So what’s that bright thing in your throat?

Homage and critique, with a nice sting in the end.

Then I got two treats for another fandom, again a poem and a story. The poem is amazing, giving backstory using the stanza of the original:

The Vigil (1056 words) by Anonymous
Fandom: Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came - Robert Browning, Original Work
Characters: Childe Roland, Cuthbert, Giles
Additional Tags: Original Character(s), Backstory, Blank Verse, Time Loop
Summary: Upon this quest, there can be no release.
Unto that hallowed tower we must go...

I flail.

Three Knigths by the Dark Tower (2104 words) by Anonymous
Fandom: Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came - Robert Browning
Relationships: roland/cuthbert, Cuthbert & Giles, Roland & Cuthbert & Giles
Characters: Roland (Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came), Cuthbert (Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came), Giles (Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came)
Summary: Giles and Cuthbert follow their friend Roland even to the threshold of the Dark Tower, hoping to help him on his quest.

Cuthbert and Giles have not in fact departed from the quest, as Roland (at the end of his rope) had thought.

And finally, a treat on the Housman poem “Her strong enchantments failing,” being a poem cycle expanding a bit on the backstory and worldbuilding:

ILLUC VOLAT (278 words) by Anonymous
Fandom: Her Strong Enchantments Failing - A. E. Housman
Additional Tags: Poetry, Inspired by Poetry
Summary: A series of poems inspired by “Her strong enchantments failing” by A.E. Housman, which re-tell the story of that poem in a new way.

Yessssssss.

More links and recs later, after I’ve had time to explore more of the archive.

---L.

Subject quote from Your Own Special Way, Genesis.

For Poetry Monday, more autumn from an early Modernist:

Leaves, Frederic Manning

A frail and tenuous mist lingers on baffled and intricate branches;
Little gilt leaves are still, for quietness holds every bough;
Pools in the muddy road slumber, reflecting indifferent stars;
Steeped in the loveliness of moonlight is earth, and the valleys,
Brimmed up with quiet shadow, with a mist of sleep.

But afar on the horizon rise great pulses of light,
The hammering of guns, wrestling, locked in conflict
Like brute, stone gods of old struggling confusedly;
Then overhead purrs a shell, and our heavies
Answer, with sudden clapping bruits of sound,
Loosening our shells that stream whining and whimpering precipitately,
Hounding through air athirst for blood.

And the little gilt leaves
Flicker in falling, like waifs and flakes of flame.


Manning (1882-1935) was an Australian-born writer best known for his WWI novels, but he was also a significant Imagist. This is from 1915.

---L.

Subject quote from In August, William Dean Howells.

For Poetry Monday:

The More Loving One, W.H. Auden

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.

How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.

Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.

Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime
Though this might take me a little time.


From his collection Homage to Clio.

---L.

Subject quote from “Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,” W.H. Auden.