OTHER LITERARY MUSES

A photograph is like a finely crafted poem - a rhyme, a couplet, a sonnet, a haiku, sometimes  even a bit of doggerell or a limmerick. The lines, the shapes, the shades and the colours, all these carry meanings that exist beyond the specific context of their subject, just as nouns,  verbs, rhymes and turns of phrase become universal  metaphors for human existance. The following are some poetic inspirations... photographic poems, or poetic photographs which I have collected over the years. For the most part, they are injunctions on how to "be"... how to find the appropriate verb for our own way of living.

Music, when soft voices die

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Music, when soft voices die,
Vibrates in the memory,
Odours, when sweet violets sicken,
Live within the sense they quicken.

Rose leaves, when the rose is dead,
Are heaped for the beloved's bed;
And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone,
Love itself shall slumber on.

How To Be a Poet

Wendell Berry
(to remind myself)

i   
Make a place to sit down.
Sit down.
Be quiet.  
You must depend upon   
affection, reading, knowledge,   
skill—more of each   
than you have—inspiration,  
work, growing older, patience,   
for patience joins time   
to eternity. Any readers   
who like your poems,   
doubt their judgment.   

ii   
Breathe with unconditional breath   
the unconditioned air.   
Shun electric wire.   
Communicate slowly. Live   
a three-dimensioned life;   
stay away from screens.   
Stay away from anything   
that obscures the place it is in.   
There are no unsacred places;   
there are only sacred places   
and desecrated places.   

iii   
Accept what comes from silence.  
Make the best you can of it.   
Of the little words that come   
out of the silence, like prayers   
prayed back to the one who prays,   
make a poem that does not disturb   
the silence from which it came.

To Play Pianissimo

Lola Haskins

Does not mean silence.
The absence of moon in the day sky
for example.

Does not mean barely to speak,
the way a child's whisper
makes only warm air
on his mother's right ear.

To play pianissimo
is to carry sweet words
to the old woman in the last dark row
who cannot hear anything else,
and to lay them across her lap like a shawl.

An Epitaph

Walter de la Mare

HERE lies a most beautiful lady, 
Light of step and heart was she; 
I think she was the most beautiful lady 
That ever was in the West Country. 
But beauty vanishes; beauty passes;        
However rare—rare it be; 
And when I crumble, who will remember 
This lady of the West Country?