Funeral Blues

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message ‘He is Dead’.
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

     — W H Auden

“Funeral Blues” poem by W H Auden, read by me (Click title link for text source; click here for image source). A sombre and cold-afflicted reading, but one which I hope will be enjoyed.

George Orwell’s manuscript of 1984 (x)

How wonderful to see the manuscript of Orwell’s 1984.

(Source: bookshavepores)

Sonnet III — Sonnets to Orpheus

A god can do it. But, tell me, how can a man
follow his narrow road through the strings?
A man is split. And where two roads intersect
inside him, no one has built the Singer’s Temple.

Writing poetry as we learn from you is not desiring
not wanting anything that can ever be achieved.
To write poetry is to be alive. For a god that’s easy.
When, however, are we really alive? And when does he

turn the earth and the stars so they face us?
Yes, you are young and you love and the voice
forces your mouth open – that is lovely, but learn

to forget that breaking into song. It doesn’t last.
Real singing is a different movement of air.
Air moving around nothing. A breathing in a god. A wind.

     — Rainer Maria Rilke (translated by Robert Bly)

“Sonnet III” from Sonnets to Orpheus by Rainer Maria Rilke, read by me. (Click here for image source).

A Partridge — A Pear Tree

The first day: Truelove sends
a shushed blue morning hour, the mute
absurdity of tarmac, a sobering of worn toes—
the upbeat’s echo dredges us home.

Second, he sends books, and underlinings—
Sartre’s mutter—something is beginning.
The words stem: flesh-nub,
furling bruise of a clear, new shoot.

We cultivate with iron tea and hours:
milk swigs, sweet drams, the open breath
of television at the schedule’s finish,
lush with nebula and static,

Johnny’s tender, breakfast croon.
The fruits set, wax, fluid and flesh,
specked skin—a fatty, nibbled velvet.
At four A.M. he cawls,

true as a child’s crayoned circle of bird—
twig-foot, shut-eye. He’s
no hart, nor dove, but gamey,
winter market plume.

His is a glistering, brass whirr
of wings, a glide—a chestnut tail.
I put by the feathers;
ease the meat from the bone.

     — Kate Potts

“A Partridge — A Pear Tree” poem by Kate Potts, read by me (Click title link for text source; click here for image source). I don’t know why I’m making recordings when I have a cold.