poetry – Page 9 – Content Catnip

Words and Music: Dave Clarke’s World Service & Shanghai

Words and Music: Miss Hollywood & Shanghai

I wrote this poem because I came across an album I hadn’t heard in years, it reminded me so much of Shanghai where I lived briefly as a teenager that I had this all rush into my head and I needed to get it out. So here is a memory purge of my time inContinue reading “Words and Music: Dave Clarke’s World Service & Shanghai”

Every Picture Tells a Story: Winter’s Ivory Skies

Artists & Writers in Their Own Words: Jari Österberg AKA Liuos

In a far off field Your animals put away The rustling of bare branches And dagger winds Although an ivory and lemon sky Keeps up the spirits Of a cold valley day

Every Picture Tells a Story: City of Dreams

In a far off field Your animals put away The rustling of bare branches And dagger winds Although an ivory and lemon sky Keeps up the spirits Of a cold valley day

Every Picture Tells a Story: Oh child inside

Every Picture Tells a Story: Winter’s sudden contemplation

When the night scented stock come in And all of the dusk reigns around us A musky smoke Of burning leaves and wet rocks All is cosy, locked in and battened down A sleepy knowingness seeps in A season and reason for movement is over And the winter sits down long and low Her frosty embrace –Continue reading “Every Picture Tells a Story: Winter’s sudden contemplation”

Every picture tells a story: Observe yourself and time gets longer

Every picture tells a story: When you observe, time gets longer

Every picture tells a story: Into the unknowable

Every picture tells a story: hear your own voice

Every picture tells a story: Into the unknowable

Nothing passes from rest to motion – unless you move it in hidden ways

You glide between the heart and its casing as tears glide from the eyelid. You dwell in my inwardness, in the depths of my heart, as souls dwell in bodies. Nothing passes from rest to motion unless you move it in hidden ways, O new moon. ~ Mansur al-Hallaj (Persia, 9th century)

Tilda Swinton recites Rumi’s 12th Century Poem: ‘Like This’

The beautiful and transcendental love poems of Sufi mystic Rumi meets the modern day artist Tilda Swinton in this evocative reading of the poem ‘Like this’. If anyone asks you how the perfect satisfaction of all our sexual wanting will look, lift your face and say, Like this. When someone mentions the gracefulness of theContinue reading “Tilda Swinton recites Rumi’s 12th Century Poem: ‘Like This’”

Love letters sent by the wind

Every day, priests minutely examine the Law And endlessly chant complicated sutras. Before doing that, though, they should learn How to read the love letters sent by the wind and rain, the snow and moon. ~ Ikkyu (1394–1481, Japanese Zen Buddhist monk, saint and poet)