Poetry

Today I was at Vasconcelos library, and I bumped into several interesting books, I found that there is a section with books in English, which will be helpful for us, and there are some grammar books too.   

I spent more time than I would've liked to, reading some poems, but I realized that it would be great if we read some poems to practice our pronunciation and to learn some vocabulary.

There was a book with English poems and their translations to spanish.

Here are some poems I liked:

WOMAN TO LOVER

I am fire

Stilled to water

A wave

Lifting from the abyss

In my veins

The moon-drawn tide rises

Into a tree of flowers

Scattered in sea-foam

I am air

Caught in a net

The prophetic bird

That sings in a reflected sky

I am a dream before nothingness

I am a crown of stars

I am the way to die.

Kathleen Raine.

 

This is the translation

Two invocations of death

I

Death, I repent
Of these hands and feet
That for forty years
Have been my own
And I repent
Of flesh and bone,
Of heart and liver,
Of hair and skin-
Rid me, death,
Of face and form,
Of all that I am

And I repent
Of the forms of thought,
The habit of mind
And heart cripped
By long-spent pain,
The memory-traces
Faded and worn
of vanished places
And human faces
Not rightly seen
Or understood
Rid me, death,
Of the words I have used

Nor this or that
But all is amiss
That I have done,
And I have seen
Sin and sorrow
Befoul the world-
Release me, death,
Forgive, remove
From place and time
The trace of all
That I have been.

II

From a place I came
That was never in time.
From the beat of a heart
That was never in pain.
 The sun and the moon,
The wind and the world,
The song and the bird
Travelled my thought
Time out of mind.
Shall I know at last
My lost delight?

Tell me, death,
how long must I sorrow
My own sorrow?
While I remain
The world is ending.
Forests are falling,
Suns are fading,
While I am here
Now is ending
And in my arms
The living are dying.
Shall I come at last
To the lost beginning?

Kathleen Raine.

And the last one:

Lovesong

He loved her and she loved him 

His kisses sucked out her whole past and future or tried to

He had no other appetite

She bit him she gnawed him she sucked

She wanted him complete inside her

Safe and sure forever and ever

Their little cries fluttered into the curtains

Her eyes wanted nothing to get away

Her looks nailed down his hands his wrists his elbows

He gripped her hard so that life

Should not drag her from that moment

He wanted all future to cease

He wanted to topple with this arms round her

Off that moment's brink and into nothing

Or everlasting or whatever there was

Her embrace was an immense press

To print him into her bones

His smiles were the garrets of a fairy palace

Where the real world would never come

Her smiles were spider bites

So he would lie still till she felt hungry

His words were occupying armies

Her laughs were an assin's attempts

His looks were bullets daggers of revenge

Her glances were ghosts in the corner with horrible secrets

His whispers were whips and jackboots

Her kisses were lawyers stedily writing

His caresses were the last hooks of a castaway

Her love-tricks were the grinding of locks

And their deep cries crawled over the floors

Like an animal dragging a great trap

His promises were the surgeon's gag

Her promises took the top off his skull

She would get a brooch made of it

His vows pulled out all her sinews

He showed how to make  a love-knot

Her vows put his eyes in formalin

At the back of her secret drawer

Their screams stuck in the wall

Their heads fell apart into sleep like the two halves

Of a lopped melon, but love is hard to stop

In their entwined sleep they exchanged arms and legs

In their dreams their brains took each other hostage

In the morning they wore each other's face.

Ted Hughes