29. This New Vagrant Sanctuary1

One Positive Thing That Has Come out of Stort Poetry Group’s Change of Meeting Place to the Bar at the Rhodes Centre:
– at least no one can maintain ignorance
  as to what has paid for all our poetry now

 
stories unfolded the universe in wonder
a dream or a scar to me or you
to themselves hidden, small, disordered

 
somewhere in the west midlands
the dog’s head has got the vapours

 
bubbling of declining games
swift above the brambles
all the symbols of memory
think in utter astonishment

 

O: “Sometimes, don’t you sometimes wish you didn’t care? I mean of course you want a change, we want a change, but if a thing ain’t godsdamn coming, then the next thing I wish is that I didn’t care.”
A: “We are become history. There is no backward now. No way back. You know what we have to do. Where we should go.”
J: “We don’t choose what we’ll remember, what stops with us.”
– even now he is a citizen of this new vagrant sanctuary

China Miéville, Iron Council (Pan Books, 2005) pp 88, 275 & 295

 

and all done
in the various regions of this dark and obscure Terrestrial Star
where, wandering as strangers, we lead,
                              in a short space of time,
                              a life harassed by varied fortunes.

from letter from Thomas Digges to William Cecil, Lord Burghley, quoted in Benjamin Woolley, The Queen’s Conjuror: The Life and Magic of Dr Dee (Flamingo, 2002), p 155, cited from F R Johnson & Sanford V Larkey, “Thomas Digges, the Copernican System, and the idea of the infinity of the universe in 1576”, Huntington Library Bulletin, v5, 1934

 
massed choirs might have helped us once Sig. Verdi
but the succour we seek surrounds us not like rain
but a bright feast we have prepared for
                                        flying coloured words
                                        above the grey
                                        of conceptual & concrete poetry
                                        that’s never
                                        as beautiful & nourishing as
                                        music, good food, common fun

 

“Here we meet with the idea put forward by Mme Blavatsky, that there can be no manifestation without differentiation into the Pairs of Opposites. Kether differentiates into two aspects as Chokrah and Binah, and manifestation is in being. Now in this supernal triangle, The Head Which Is Not, the Father and the Mother, we have the root concept of our cosmogony, and we shall return to it again and again under innumerable aspects, and each time that we return to it we shall receive illumination.”

Dion Fortune, The Mystical Qabalah (Aquarian/Thorsons, 1987), p 45

 
close attention close attention
of children concerned/unconcerned
chomo ildrmef mchi
loseor attrtro entita
chble bis ildrle let
in close attention lose

 

Der Garten trauert,
Kühl sinkt in die Blumen der Regen.
Der Sommer schauert
Still seinem Ende entgegen.

Hermann Hesse, “Der Garten trauert”, as Richard Strauss, Vier letzte Lieder, “September”.

 

 

 1 Is this all a mistake?