There Will Come Soft Rain, by Sarah Teasdale

I post this because it's evocative of Alfonsina Storni's Litanies for the Dead Earth, and because it's evocative in itself...thanks to Simran Khurana's poetry blog, where I read it some days ago:


There Will Come Soft Rain

There will come soft rain and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;

And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum-trees in tremulous white;

Robins will wear their feathery fire
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;

And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree
If mankind perished utterly;

And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone

- Sarah Teasdale

A thought from Erich Fromm

If it is true that the ability to be puzzled is the beginning of wisdom, then this truth is a sad commentary on the wisdom of modern man. Whatever the merits of our high degree of literary and universal education, we have lost the gift for being puzzled. Everything is supposed to be known – if not to ourselves then to some specialist whose business it is to know what we do not know. In fact, to be puzzled is embarrassing, a sign of intellectual inferiority…to have the right answers seems all-important; to ask the right questions is considered insignificant by comparison.

Fromm, Erich: The Forgotten Language: an Introduction to the Understanding of Dreams, Fairy Tales and Myths, GROVE PRESS, INC., NEW YORK, N.Y.

Sonnets

Garcilaso de la Vega (1501-1536)

Escrito está en me alma vuestro gesto...translation:

Written upon my soul your gesture is
and everything I write desire of thee
who wrote it all along, I only read,
yet still I keep myself from you in this.

Thus I am and I will always be;
for though I see I can't contain your good,
as you exceed my fit, I still believe,
and take my faith in you as understood.

I'd not be born except for love of you,
My soul has cut your measure to its size
and made of you a habit for the soul.

I owe you all I have, and can't deny:
From you my birth, for you I live my life,
For you it is I'll die; for you I die.

Keynotes from Robert Graves and Rosalía de Castro

Robert Graves' first verse of....
To Juan at the Winter Solstice

There is one story and one story only
That will prove worth your telling,
Whether by learned bard or gifted child;
To it all lines or lesser gauds belong
That startle with their shining
Such common stories as they stray into.

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...from Rosalía de Castro:

Yo no sé lo que busco eternamente
en la tierra, en el aire y en el cielo;
yo no sé lo que busco, pero es algo
que perdí no sé cuando y que no encuentro,
aún cuando sueñe que invisible habita
en todo cuanto toco y cuanto veo.

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I don’t know what I’m eternally seeking
on the earth, and in the air and in the sky;
I don’t know what I seek, but it is something
that I lost I don’t know when and do not find,
even when I dream that invisibly it resides
in everything I touch and all I see.