A man stands in a building earmarked for demolition in the Mathare neighbourhood of Nairobi, Kenya. Kenya’s authorities tore down a badly built residential block in the poor Nairobi district on Tuesday, one of more than 250 shoddy buildings that could now face demolition after a six-story structure collapsed this month killing 51 people.: photo by Goran Tomasevic/Reuters, 17 May 2016
It is an illusion that we were ever alive,
Lived in the houses of mothers, arranged ourselves
By our own motions in a freedom of air.
Regard the freedom of seventy years ago.
It is no longer air. The houses still stand,
Though they are rigid in rigid emptiness.
Regard the freedom of seventy years ago.
It is no longer air. The houses still stand,
Though they are rigid in rigid emptiness.
Even our shadows, their shadows, no longer remain.
The lives these lived in the mind are at an end.
They never were ... The sounds of the guitar
Were not and are not. Absurd. The words spoken
Were not and are not. It is not to be believed.
The meeting at noon at the edge of the field seems like
An invention, an embrace between one desperate clod
And another in a fantastic consciousness,
In a queer assertion of humanity:
A theorem proposed between the two --
Two figures in a nature of the sun,
In the sun’s design of its own happiness,
As if nothingness contained a métier,
A vital assumption, an impermanence
In its permanent cold, an illusion so desired
That the green leaves came and covered the high rock,
That the lilacs came and bloomed, like a blindness cleaned,
Exclaiming bright sight, as it was satisfied,
In a birth of sight. The blooming and the musk
Were being alive, an incessant being alive,
A particular being, that gross universe.
Wallace Stevens (1879-1955): Seventy Years Later, from The Rock, 1950, in The Rock (1954)
A fisherman smokes on his boat at a dried up pond at the drought-hit Kandal province in Cambodia: photo by Reuters, 16 May 2016
A fisherman smokes on his boat at a dried up pond at the drought-hit Kandal province in Cambodia: photo by Reuters, 16 May 2016
A
man injured following clashes with Kenyan riot police officers, runs
away from teargas, during a demonstration of Kenya's opposition
supporters in Nairobi: photo by Carl De Souza/AFP, 16 May 2016
A
man injured following clashes with Kenyan riot police officers, runs
away from teargas, during a demonstration of Kenya's opposition
supporters in Nairobi: photo by Carl De Souza/AFP, 16 May 2016
Migrants rest in Tripoli after they were rescued off the coast of Libya: photo by EPA, 17 May 2016
A worker takes samples for quality of molten iron outside a furnace at the Zhong Tian (Zenith) Steel Group Corporation in Changzhou, Jiangsu province, China: photo by Kevin Frayer, 17 May 2016
A Sri Lankan resident wades through floodwaters in Pugoda: photo by Ishara S Kodikara / AFP, 17 May 2016
Men exercise on the banks of the River Ganges ahead of the Bengal mud wrestling championships in Kolkata: photo by Rupak De Chowdhuri / Reuters, 17 May 2016
A Sadhu or Hindu holy man combs his beard after taking a dip in the waters of Shipra river during Simhastha Kumbh Mela in Ujjain, India: photo by Jitendra Prakash/Reuters, 16 May 2016
A Sadhu or Hindu holy man combs his beard after taking a dip in the waters of Shipra river during Simhastha Kumbh Mela in Ujjain, India: photo by Jitendra Prakash/Reuters, 16 May 2016
Construction workers in Yangon, Myanmar: photo by Gemunu Amarasinghe / AP, 17 May 2016
A wrestler applies mud to prevent slipping due to sweat, at a traditional training centre on the banks of the river Ganges ahead of the Bengal mud wrestling championships, in Kolkata, India today: photo by Rupak De Chowdhuri/Reuters, 17 May 2016
The starboard side of the world’s largest cruise ship, the 361m-long Harmony of the Seas, as it arrives in Southampton: photo by Peter Nicholls / Reuters, 17 May 2016
Pedernales, Ecuador, a month after a 7.8 magnitude earthquake rocked the city: photo by Rodrigo Beundia / AFP, 17 May 2016
A man runs past a riot police officer trying to kick him as supporters of Kenya’s opposition Coalition for Reforms and Democracy are dispersed during a demonstration in Nairobi: photo by Dai Kurokawa / EPA, 17 May 2016
Toronto Blue Jays Jose Bautista (19) gets hit by Texas Rangers second baseman Rougned Odor (12) after Bautista slid into second in the eighth inning of a baseball game at Globe Life Park in Arlington, Texas: photo by Richard W. Rodriguez / Star-Telegram via AP, 16 May 2016
A reveller takes a break during celebration of Virgen de los Desamparados, or Our Lady of the Abandoned, at Diria, Nicaragua: photo by Oswaldo Rivas / Reuters, 15 May 2016
A Palestinian boy plays with a ball in front of a mural at the Deir Al Balah refugee camp in central Gaza Strip: photo by Suhaib Salem / Reuters, 17 May 2016
A youth throws a stick at riot police officers during a protest in Paris. Truckers blocked French highways and workers marched through city streets Tuesday to protest longer working hours, but President Francois Hollande is insisting he won’t abandon the labour reforms that sparked their anger.: photo by Francois Mori/AP, 17 May 2016
Syrian boys seen on a bicycle in Deraa: photo by Mohamad Abazeed / AFP, 15 May 2016
A woman hangs laundry near her tent in front of the wired fence that separates Greece and Macedonia at a makeshift refugee camp on the northern Greek border point of Idomeni. Thousands of stranded refugees and migrants have camped in Idomeni for months after the border was closed.: photo by Petros Giannakouris / AP, 16 May 2016
Artists Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst pose during a photocall for the exhibition ‘Now’ with Koons' piece Play-Doh at Newport Street Gallery in London: photo by Charlie Bibby/FT, 17 May 2016
An amazing poem. But the truth hurts.
ReplyDeleteanother knockout combo of poetry and pictures Tom...I thank you particularly for the poem which I don't remember, either old age or post-op brain forgetfulness but it is now a new favorite...
ReplyDeleteThanks guys. Yes, truth hurts -- the opening lines here feel it. Rare revelation for Stevens.
ReplyDeleteHe was perhaps in a time of troubled passage -- troubled sleep, troubled dreams.
Can it be that, inescapably, a world slips in somehow, whatever the construction of self-protection?
This poem is the first of a series of three.
Have just now done up the third:
Wallace Stevens: Forms of the Rock in a Night-Hymn