Friday Poetry Corner

[Technically Blonde]

You're still here

Alf, Threaded .... you're still here!!!! I've been missing for a while but every now and then I come back to see what you guys are up to, and you are still here!!!! I'm so glad to have left the rat race and to be living the good life in Italy, but yes sometimes, secretly I do miss the contracting lifestyle (don't tell the hubby)

[EternalOptimist]

Hiawatha's vision

On the shores of Gitchgoomy by the shining big sea water
Hiawatha old and greyin' listened to the older prophet listened to lagu
And the young men and the women from the land of Ojibways
From the land of the Dakotas from the woodlands and the prairies
Stood and listened to the prophet heard lagu tell Hiawatha
I have seen he said a water bigger that the big sea water
Broader than the Gitchgoomy bitter so that none cold drink it
Salty so that none would use it
Hiawatha then spoke to them stopped all their jeering and their jesting
And he spoke to all the people
It's true what lagu tells you for I have seen it in a vision
I have also seen the water to the East to the land of morning
And upon this great water came a strange canoe with pinions
Bigger than a grove of pine trees taller than the tallest tree tops
And upon this great canoe were sails to carry it swiftly
And it carried many people strange and foreign were these people
And white were all their faces and with hair their chins were covered
Then said Hiawatha I beheld a darker vision
Many hundreds came behind them pushed their way across our prairies
In our woodlands rang their axes in our valleys smoked their cities
Our people were all scattered all forgetful of our councils
Left their homelands going westward wild and woeful
And the man with bearded faces the men with skin so fair
With their barking sticks of thunder drove the remnants of our people
Farther westward westward westward then wild wild and wilder
Grew the West that once was ours

[AlfredJPruffock]

And now for something completely Different

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[AlfredJPruffock]

And now for something completely Different

Well, the man upstairs always lends an ear
To the man downstairs even though he doesn't care

The man up the spiral staircase, he love the sympathy
With the man downstairs and the same old face

Big muff, can't you see I've had enough?
God knows you're trying to kill me

Big muff, get away with your powder puff
Lord knows you're killing me

It's like an allergy with no apology
It's sapped my energy and now my integrity
Big muff, get away with your powder puff

Lord knows you're killing me
The lord knows you're stifling me
The lord knows you're trying to kill me

Well, the man upstairs has learned it from his wife
But the man downstairs has got trouble in his life

The man upstairs don't notice what has gone
Every time he sees his neighbour singing that same old song

The lord knows you're killing me
This thing is dangerous, I tell you it's serious
No need to be envious, it's bigger than the both of us

Well, the man downstairs has moved away for good
Like the man upstairs, I always knew he would

The man downstairs has moved and gone away
And the girl upstairs every night can hear him say

Big muff, get away with your powder puff
Lord knows you're killing me

The lord knows you're stifling me
The lord knows you're trying to kill me


Long Live John Martyn

[AlfredJPruffock]

Excellent contribution from Threaded, one of my favourite Auden Poems to boot, here is the painting in Brussels which inspired the Poem.

[threaded]

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

[AlfredJPruffock]

I thought I would select my current abode in Brussels as the topic of this weeks poetry corner, following WH Audens Gare Du Midi there is an interesting account of a trip to Brussels from an FT writer .

Alas I suspect both of them do not know the delights of hidden Brussels that I know,there is one area of Brussels which is hauntingly beautiful more Parisian than Paris itself. but no vistors ever find it, even the Belgians themselves I suspect.


Gare du Midi

A nondescript express in from the South,
Crowds round the ticket barrier, a face

To welcome which the mayor has not contrived
Bugles or braid: something about the mouth
Distracts the stray look with alarm and pity.

Snow is falling.

Clutching a little case,
He walks out briskly to infect a city
Whose terrible future may have just arrived.

~~W.H. Auden



I began to wonder what sort of person Brussels would be, if a city could become a person.

Brussels would not be a cool, haughty beauty, like Paris, nor an irresistible seductress like Seville, nor even a dynamo of industry and creativity, like Barcelona.

Brussels would be a person with a lived-in face, the lines of WH Auden, the nose of actor Stephen Fry, the eye pouches of deputy prime minister John Prescott.

This person would have a messy, even dodgy past.

A breakdown of some sort would have occurred.

She would look her age.

Facelifts would not be part of the picture. She would almost certainly be a heavy smoker.

Such people can be warmer and more rewarding than the perfectly presented ones.

Brussels does not present or advertise itself especially well. Arrival at the Gare du Midi, a hellish place like the basement of a huge factory with spectacularly bad signposting, is an indication of the perverse, grungy side of the city.

Brussels has one of Europe's great galleries, the Musée des Beaux Arts, but this treasure-house - home of Rogier van der Weyden's "Lamentation", Brueghel's "Fall of Icarus" (which inspired Auden's poem), Lucas Cranach's "Adam and Eve", and vast acreages of Rubens - gets a fraction of the publicity of places such as the Louvre, the Uffizi or the Prado. An enormous advantage is that it is usually pretty empty.


Belgium seems self-deprecating not just about its greatest museum but also about its artists.

The late 19th and 20th century sections of the Musée des Beaux Arts yield some fine and fascinating work, not just James Ensor, a painter with a novelist's eye for character and atmosphere, who moved from realism to expressionism, like a cross between Ibsen and Strindberg, but the Belgian fauves including Rik Wouters, an outstanding colourist who died too young in 1916.

Then there is art nouveau.

The museum-house of Victor Horta is a gem. You get a sense of art nouveau as not just a collection of stylish objects but as a complete aesthetic style, a way of combining western industrial techniques with an oriental refinement and delicacy of line and living.

But getting there is made to seem absurdly difficult. When you arrive at the underground stop (the Brussels metro must be the scruffiest in western Europe), you are faced with an incomprehensible map suggesting you need to take another tram.

In fact the museum is an easy 10 minute walk. It's almost as if someone doesn't want you to get there. This is another of Brussels' quirks - the city, a psychoanalyst's delight, that deliberately makes the least of itself.


One area where Brussels doesn't underplay its attractions is food. If you haven't done a Mr Creosote on a combination of mussels, chips, chocolate and waffles, then I strongly recommend two restaurants we discovered pretty much by chance in the Place Sainte Catherine.

This is one of those attractive squares you come across at random in Brussels, like magnificent Brabant Gothic churches next to dual carriageways. The Place Sainte Catherine is near the old fish market, on the non-touristy side of the lower town. It sports a perfect pair of bistros.