Love’s Shipshod Watchman
The Rockrose Moon (A Serial Fiction) Part 46
The truth is that I haven’t been writing lately. And all the usual remedies including listening to or reading bad poems as a trick to bring out the fierce competive streak in me, listening to things people call poems that aren’t (like what Garrison Keillor reads at the end of The Writer’s Almanac each day) just make me sad.
So I was surprised to hear real poems tonight here on Poetry Please, a bookmark leftover from the Blake Birthday Bash.
Yevgeny Yevtushenko
Colours
When your face
appeared over my crumpled life
at first I understood
only the poverty of what I have.
Then its particular light
on woods, on rivers, on the sea,
became my beginning in the coloured world
in which I had not yet had my beginning.
I am so frightened, I am so frightened,
of the unexpected sunrise finishing,
of revelations
and tears and the excitement finishing.
I don't fight it, my love is this fear,
I nourish it who can nourish nothing,
love's slipshod watchman.
Fear hems me in.
I am conscious that these minutes are short
and that the colours in my eyes will vanish
when your face sets.
I love it when gifted actors read poems. There is something so smoky, thoughtful and deep in Stephen Rea’s voice here that takes me to the very best moments when I used to read in front of an audience. Something I have not done for two years.
I don’t know why. Perhaps fear hems me in.
The truth is that I haven’t been writing lately. And all the usual remedies including listening to or reading bad poems as a trick to bring out the fierce competive streak in me, listening to things people call poems that aren’t (like what Garrison Keillor reads at the end of The Writer’s Almanac each day) just make me sad.
So I was surprised to hear real poems tonight here on Poetry Please, a bookmark leftover from the Blake Birthday Bash.
Yevgeny Yevtushenko
Colours
When your face
appeared over my crumpled life
at first I understood
only the poverty of what I have.
Then its particular light
on woods, on rivers, on the sea,
became my beginning in the coloured world
in which I had not yet had my beginning.
I am so frightened, I am so frightened,
of the unexpected sunrise finishing,
of revelations
and tears and the excitement finishing.
I don't fight it, my love is this fear,
I nourish it who can nourish nothing,
love's slipshod watchman.
Fear hems me in.
I am conscious that these minutes are short
and that the colours in my eyes will vanish
when your face sets.
I love it when gifted actors read poems. There is something so smoky, thoughtful and deep in Stephen Rea’s voice here that takes me to the very best moments when I used to read in front of an audience. Something I have not done for two years.
I don’t know why. Perhaps fear hems me in.
posted by NokoRose at 6:37 PM
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