The King of Time Knows

For my choice of a photo go here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/edanial/5366916225/

From Rainer Marie Rilke

(Especially for Sisters and Brothers of my Deepest Heart during Ramzan/Ramadan)

From Rilke's Book of Hours:  Love Poems From God

"And God said to me, Paint:

Time is the canvas
stretched by my pain:
the wounding of woman,
the brothers’ betrayal,
the city’s sad bacchanals,
the madness of kings.

And God said to me, Go forth:

For I am king of time.
But to you I am only the shadowy one who knows with you your loneliness and sees through your eyes. "   

***********

I am too alone in the world, and yet not alone enough
to make every hour holy.
I am too small in the world, and yet not tiny enough
just to stand before you like a thing,
dark and shrewd.
I want my will, and I want to be with my will
as it moves towards deed;
and in those quiet, somehow hesitating times,
when something is approaching,
I want to be with those who are wise
or else alone.
I want always to be a mirror that reflects your whole being,
and never to be too blind or too old
to hold your heavy, swaying image.
I want to unfold.
Nowhere do I want to remain folded,
because where I am bent and folded, there I am lie.
And I want my meaning
true for you. I want to describe myself
like a painting that I studied
closely for a long, long time,
like a word I finally understood,
like the pitcher of water I use every day ,
like the face of my mother,
like a ship
that carried me
through the deadliest storm of all.

**************

A Walk

My eyes already touch the sunny hill.
going far ahead of the road I have begun.
So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp;
it has inner light, even from a distance-

and charges us, even if we do not reach it,
into something else, which, hardly sensing it,
we already are; a gesture waves us on
answering our own wave...
but what we feel is the wind in our faces.

 

"When heaven pulls earth into its arms..."

This blogsite is dedicated to my dear friends:  N (who's name has to do with light), AWD and RW (also for his artist daughter, Summer)

"soliel levant" by Monet

Monet Refuses The Operation

by Lisel Mueller


Doctor, you say there are no halos

around the streetlights of Paris

and what I see is an aberration

caused by old age, an affliction.

I tell you it has taken me all my life

to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,

to soften and blur and finally banish

the edges you regret I don’t see,

to learn that the line I called the horizon

does not exist and sky and water,

so long apart, are the same state of being.

Fifty-four years before I could see

Rouen cathedral is built

of parallel shafts of sun,

and now you want to restore

my youthful errors: fixed

notions of top and bottom,

the illusion of three-dimensional space,

wisteria separate

from the bridge it covers.

What can I say to convince you

the Houses of Parliament dissolve

night after night to become

the fluid dream of the Thames?

I will not return to a universe

of objects that don’t know each other,

as if islands were not the lost children

of one great continent. The world

is flux, and light becomes what it touches,

becomes water, lilies on water,

above and below water,

becomes lilac and mauve and yellow

and white and cerulean lamps,

small fists passing sunlight

so quickly to one another

that it would take long, streaming hair

inside my brush to catch it.

To paint the speed of light!

Our weighted shapes, these verticals,

burn to mix with air

and change our bones, skin, clothes

to gases. Doctor,

if only you could see

how heaven pulls earth into its arms

and how infinitely the heart expands

to claim this world, blue vapor without end.


http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/236810#about


The painting which gave rise to the Impressionist movement is now in the public domain.
This photo from Sindh, Karachi here seems to me to lends itself to a monet-like painting if the artist
had the right eye and soul.  Hint, hint :-)

Various websites suggest how to copy Monet's technique or provide critique/opinions/analysis -- yet in some ways these may limit the free expression of someone who may come to this blogsite.  This someone may easily feel the beginning from within of a one of a kind impression.  Perhaps there is another sunrise, sunset, view of streetlamps or angels or beautiful vision of light in need of a poem, painting, photo, wall, letter or journalistic expression?

Is there a possibility you are the one to provide the freedom to "that" particular vision?

******************

Credit for the 2nd photo of a sunrise goes to:

                 http://www.trekearth.com/gallery/Asia/Pakistan/East/Sindh/Karachi/photo633042.htm