From the Book of Byzantium -- Parts 1 and 2
by 
seanfarragher
|
Posted: Thursday, March 10, 2005 Word Count: 302 Summary: The Poetry Seminar Group looked at this several months ago. How about Poetry IV. What do you think? Argument Byzantium: As children are abused by adults, terror grows. As horror expands, intellect diminishes and lives are wasted in the pursuit of apparent gods, forgotten nightmares and natural greed. That wound reminded me of my own face when I was beated and raped as a child. In the mirror now I am more blank than before terror was tasted as air failed and sulfuric smoke was rising. Related Works: From the Book of Byzantium -- Parts 5 and 6 -- By Laurie Fallon, A Virtual Person Dead 9/11/01 • From the Book of Byzantium -- Parts 3 and 4 • Living Will – Ecclesiastes 12 • Narratives of New Netherland: 1611-1621 • Poems with Anais Nin • |
The Book of Byzantium (September 11, 2001)
© Sean Farragher (work-in-progress)
“Byzantium”
by William Butler Yeats
“...The unpurged images of day recede;
The Emperor's drunken soldiery are abed;
Night resonance recedes, night walkers' song
After great cathedral gong;
A starlit or a moonlit dome disdains
All that man is,
All mere complexities,
The fury and the mire of human veins.”
From the Book of Byzantium
By Sean Farragher
LAPIS LAZULI Part 1
Consider Byzantine cross, bare sky,
icon, Juden Star, lapis lazuli.
Worship oak branch, bronze
statues guard the banks
of Hudson; bathe in gray ash
of its shallows; list in
fallout of repeated terror.
In witness skim World Trade debris
for nacreous shell; load barges
with magic flutes while weapons
bang out terrified signs and
mad butchers, meat grinders
poised, screwed, locked and loaded,
delivered hamburger with applause.
###
DIRECTIONS TO YANKEE STADIUM
HOW I FIRST MET MARILYN MONROE --
Late Spring 1953 -Age ten.
Part 2
You are on the edge of Byzantium and I pull you
inside or you pull outside. I have been speaking
recursion for a week. There was a time in my past
when my father slashed death with a butcher's knife.
He did not cut, but I bled. What's the measure
of criminal intent? My mother stood in his path
and saved her son but later that night molested
the boy while her husband slept off drink.
I should know what happened.
I did not. Many years blind.
Life went blank out of wet dream.
Dad had promised Yankee Stadium
but cancelled. "I'm drunk," he said.
I left on my own.
followed the bus to 168th,
D train, I would not miss my life.
My Angels warned:
"Go to the Yankee stadium," --
Marilyn Monroe will spray
sex in your eyes."
###
more to come
© Sean Farragher (work-in-progress)
“Byzantium”
by William Butler Yeats
“...The unpurged images of day recede;
The Emperor's drunken soldiery are abed;
Night resonance recedes, night walkers' song
After great cathedral gong;
A starlit or a moonlit dome disdains
All that man is,
All mere complexities,
The fury and the mire of human veins.”
From the Book of Byzantium
By Sean Farragher
LAPIS LAZULI Part 1
Consider Byzantine cross, bare sky,
icon, Juden Star, lapis lazuli.
Worship oak branch, bronze
statues guard the banks
of Hudson; bathe in gray ash
of its shallows; list in
fallout of repeated terror.
In witness skim World Trade debris
for nacreous shell; load barges
with magic flutes while weapons
bang out terrified signs and
mad butchers, meat grinders
poised, screwed, locked and loaded,
delivered hamburger with applause.
###
DIRECTIONS TO YANKEE STADIUM
HOW I FIRST MET MARILYN MONROE --
Late Spring 1953 -Age ten.
Part 2
You are on the edge of Byzantium and I pull you
inside or you pull outside. I have been speaking
recursion for a week. There was a time in my past
when my father slashed death with a butcher's knife.
He did not cut, but I bled. What's the measure
of criminal intent? My mother stood in his path
and saved her son but later that night molested
the boy while her husband slept off drink.
I should know what happened.
I did not. Many years blind.
Life went blank out of wet dream.
Dad had promised Yankee Stadium
but cancelled. "I'm drunk," he said.
I left on my own.
followed the bus to 168th,
D train, I would not miss my life.
My Angels warned:
"Go to the Yankee stadium," --
Marilyn Monroe will spray
sex in your eyes."
###
more to come