I Sundjata’s Conception
After it had happened
That Sundjata’s mother had become pregnant,
When she had been pregnant for one year,
Susu Sumanguru Baamangana’s diviners by stones said to him,
‘The child who will destroy your kingship
Has been conceived within Manding.’
Sumanguru gathered together all the women of the town of Manding
And for seven years
He kept them within
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O no, it is an ever-fixèd mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand’ring bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s
They said, ‘You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are.’
The man replied, ‘Things as they are
are changed upon the blue guitar.’
– The Blue Guitar (Wallace Stevens)
I do my best to tell it true
a thing exceeding hard to do
or tell it slant as Emily
advises in her poetry,
and, colour blind,
Lapobo,
Tall but not too tall,
Short but not too short,
She is of medium size.
Lapobo,
Her teeth are not as ash
Nor the colour of maize flour,
Her teeth are white as fresh milk.
The whiteness of her teeth
When I think of her
Makes food drop from my hand.
The plump good-natured children play in the blue pool:
roll and plop, plop and roll;
slide and tumble, oiled, in the slippery sun
silent as otters, turning over and in,
churning the water; or-seamstresses-cut and sew
with jackknives its satins invisibly.
Not beautiful, but suddenly limned with light
their elliptical wet flesh in a flash reflects it
It wasn’t holy so let us not praise gods.
Let us not look to them for bread,
nor the cup that changed water to wine.
Let us look to the bend of the road
that reaches. A silver blur across
the skyline, woman standing on the farm.
In her grasp, the shine that is seed,
that is beginning. She will work
the
I’ll sing you a new ballad, and I’ll warrant it first-rate,
Of the days of that old gentleman who had that old estate;
When they spent the public money at a bountiful old rate
On ev’ry mistress, pimp, and scamp, at ev’ry noble gate,
In the fine old English Tory times;
Soon may they come again!
The good old laws were
Be nobody’s darling;
Be an outcast.
Take the contradictions
Of your life
And wrap around
You like a shawl,
To parry stones
To keep you warm.
Watch the people succumb
To madness
With ample cheer;
Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow —
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see
Now the sprinkled blackthorn snow
Lies along the lover’s lane
Where last year we used to go-
Where we shall not go again.
In the hedge the buds are new,
By our wood the violets peer-
Just like last year’s violets too,
But they have no scent this year.
Every bird has heart to sing
Of its nest, warmed by its breast;<br
The town, the churchyard, and the setting sun,
The clouds, the trees, the rounded hills all seem,
Though beautiful, cold- strange- as in a dream
I dreamed long ago, now new begun.
The short-liv’d, paly summer is but won
From winter’s ague for one hour’s gleam;
Through sapphire warm their stars do never beam:
All is cold Beauty; pain is
Two roads lie in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for
Tell them about an unflappable warrior
A warrior both at home and on the battlefield
The bird’s offspring on Ìrókò tree
Akalamagbo’s child with magical sight
One who walks ahead and notices people approaching from behind
Oníkòyí, who used a thread to bind the rock
With the witchery lines of Ayajo
Oníkòyí, who is undeterred by gunshots
Death’s son, disease’s
He sleeps where he would wish, in easy call,
Here in a primrose nook beside the wall.
And near the gate, that he may guard us all
Even in death, our faithful seneschal.
I do not think the courteous Cherubim
Will chide him if he waits, nor Seraphim
Summon him hence till we may follow him
Who knew no heav’n
I have lined up the threshold,
Of my soul with lamps of hope;
From the blossoms of passion,
I have threaded garlands for Him;
The kohl you see in my eyes,
Is the soot of fire in my heart;
My fidgetiness is the expression,
Of my irrepressible madness,
To be held in His arms forever;
I find no reason why
The barbed-wire fences rust
As their cedar uprights blacken
After a night of rain.
Some early, innocent lust
Gets me outdoors to smell
The teasle, the pelted bracken,
The cold, mossed-over well,
Rank with its iron chain,
And takes me off for a stroll.
Wetness has taken over.
From drain and creeper twine
It’s runnelled and trenched and edged
A
A poor man doesn’t know
how to eat with a rich man.
When he eats fish
he begins with the head.
If you invite a poor man
he comes without manners:
He comes licking his lips
upsetting the platter in eagerness.
The poor man has no reserves.
If invited, he comes in a hurry
with the blood of his lice
dirtying his
Ukraine’s sovereignty
is
a
right
not
a
privilege
trespassers
will
be
The price seemed reasonable, location
Indifferent. The landlady swore she lived
Off premises. Nothing remained
But self-confession. “Madam” , I warned,
“I hate a wasted journey – I am African.”
Silence. Silenced transmission of pressurized good-breeding. Voice, when it came,
Lipstick coated, long gold-rolled
Cigarette-holder pipped. Caught I was, foully.
“HOW DARK?”…I had not misheard….”ARE YOU LIGHT OR VERY DARK?”
? or John Fletcher.
ORPHEUS with his lute made trees
And the mountain tops that freeze
Bow themselves when he did sing:
To his music plants and flowers
Ever sprung; as sun and showers
There had made a lasting spring.
Every thing that heard him play,
Even the billows of the sea,
Hung their heads and then lay by.
