☀ Today's Poem: "'Musical Notes' for a Poem" George Seferis

1
A woman with flashing eyes, smiling,
the sash of her dress hanging low,
standing amidst the tragic serenity—

2
Let me sing among skeletons
and souls whose life force faded,
alone on the deserted courtyard wall
of a monastery from the time of the Ottoman Empire,
while watching motionless bells ripen—

3
I traced a mystic orgy in chalk,
it was surrounded by burning bushes that licked the members,
shadowy snakes encircled the dark-skinned loins,
and in the belly's lake a red eel swam—

4
Oh friends, how you dance, masked,
on a mountaintop stamped by throngs,
playing with colorful ribbons,
dancing, look, there's the maypole—

5
And the sun punctures the greenery,
casts golden doubloons on the ground
a response to our self-offering—

6
The wizened faces of old men
fall into open graves
like masks—

7
Love, man's serene home.
Mengzi, seventeen.

8
The eagle bit a nipple and then one again,
dug its talons into the barren abdomen,
from the clouds I saw a flame descend,
a bloodied wave brought it to an end.

9
Antares: the cherry-red dogtooth of Venus.

10
Empty sea, empty boats, weak minds,
souls caught in the net of the great spider—

11
And you heard her howling at dawn:
"Remember the baths where they murdered you, Father,"
not only in the ancient beehive-shaped tombs and treasuries,
but here too, in the neighborhoods with sleepless movie theaters,
in the city garden swallowed by night,
in Syntagma before the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.
How many moments of silence does one life cost?
"Remember the baths where they murdered you, Father."
Blood alone will nourish life
and the nightingale.
He sings of his desire, caged,
(lost in thought, head bowed, a man condemned to death
by all passes on the street)
in the name of tomorrow's children
who will come and play with new
rattles—

12
Or colors of actors' robes, we barely remember them,
they were illuminated once—

13
I pass in front of icons that I destroy;
the great iconostasis—

14
Scrambling up words as if they were a rope ladder.

May-June 1946

from the journal THE KENYON REVIEW

READ ABOUT TODAY'S POEM

Forward

This poem was composed during the Greek Civil War while Seferis took a sabbatical on the Greek island of Poros. It contains the seeds for a book of poems entitled "Thrush" which the poet wrote a few months later. Each numbered stanza is a composition unto itself, a musical note or tone containing its own color, images, sounds, and meaning. This is the first time this poem has been translated into English.

Jennifer R. Kellogg on "'Musical Notes' for a Poem"

"A High School Spoken-Word Club Changed Students' Lives. Now, You Can Read Their Poems"

"Inspired by the club's potential to engage students, Kahn created an after-school spoken word club at the high school. And for over 20 years, the club has created space for students to engage in storytelling. Many have gone on to become award-winning poets, scholars, or even National Youth Poet Laureates. Now a new anthology called Respect the Mic is showcasing a portion of that talent."

via NPR

READ ALL TODAY'S HEADLINES

What Sparks Poetry:
Keene Carter on Susan Stewart's Cinder

"'Bees' is a wonderfully successful poem, as is the book Columbarium and indeed all of Cinder. I've pried into it a little because of its success, which is, as I've tried to show, tied directly to its 'failure'—a 'failure' in quotation marks because it is the failure to represent everything, and that's like calling death a failure of life: the requirement is absurd, even if the sentence is true."

READ THIS WEEK'S ISSUE

View in browser

You have received this email because you submitted your email address at www.poems.com.
If you would like to unsubscribe please click here.

© 2022 Poetry Daily, Poetry Daily, MS 3E4, 4400 University Dr., Fairfax, VA 22030

Design by the Binding Agency