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Deborah J. Brasket

~ Living on the Edge of the Wild

Deborah J. Brasket

Tag Archives: Pablo Neruda

Romancing Life in Art, Poetry & Music

17 Thursday Feb 2022

Posted by deborahbrasket in Art, Love, music, Poetry, Spirituality

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

art, Jacob Guretvitsch, Joaquin Sorolla, life, Love, Lust for Life, music, Pablo Neruda, poetry, Romance, Spanish guitar, The Potter

The Siesta by Spanish painter Joaquin Sorolla

I’ve been in a romantic mood lately. Both in the sensual and spiritual sense. This lust for life. This sense of wanting to “crack open our ribs and merge with” . . . well, everything.

After writing my valentine for lovers in my last post, I’ve been reading more of Neruda’s love poetry. The one below inspired this post. It too speaks to that sense of being one with what one loves.

I’ve paired it with two other Spanish romantics, Sorolla’s art, and the Spanish guitar music of Jacob Gurevitsch. His song “If Da Vinci Was a Girl” is a favorite, and the accompanying video speaks to that tender regard for the everyday beauty so often overlooked. As does the painting above of the artist’s wife and daughters at siesta. Those lush sensuous lines falling across a cool grassy knoll. Sigh! Makes me want to curl up beside them. Enjoy!

The Potter

Your whole body holds
a goblet or gentle sweetness destined for me.
 
When I let my hand climb,
in each place I find a dove
that was looking for me, as if
my love, they had made you out of clay
for my very own potter’s hands.
 
Your knees, your breasts,
your waist,
are missing in me, like in the hollow
of a thirsting earth
where they relinquished
a form,
and together
we are complete like one single river,
like one single grain of sand.
 
—Pablo Neruda
 
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Heat & Heart, A Valentine for Lovers

14 Monday Feb 2022

Posted by deborahbrasket in Fiction, Love, Poetry

≈ 10 Comments

Tags

e. e. cummings, fiction, Isaac Marion, Jeanette Winterson, Love, Lovers, Pablo Neruda, poetry, quotations, Valentines Day

Marc Chagall

1.

I crush her against me. I want to be part of her. Not just inside her but all around her. I want our rib cages to crack open and our hearts to migrate and merge. I want our cells to braid together like living thread.

— Isaac Marion, Warm Bodies. 

2.

Sonnet XII

Full woman, fleshly apple, hot moon,
thick smell of seaweed, crushed mud and light,
what obscure brilliance opens between your columns?
What ancient night does a man touch with his senses?

Loving is a journey with water and with stars,
with smothered air and abrupt storms of flour:
loving is a clash of lightning-bolts
and two bodies defeated by a single drop of honey.

Kiss by kiss I move across your small infinity,
your borders, your rivers, your tiny villages,
and the genital fire transformed into delight

runs through the narrow pathways of the blood
until it plunges down, like a dark carnation,
until it is and is no more than a flash in the night.

— Pablo Neruda, Selected Poems.

Erhard Loblain

3.

Where did love begin? What human being looked at another and saw in their face the forests and the sea? Was there a day, exhausted and weary, dragging home food, arms cut and scarred, that you saw yellow flowers and, not knowing what you did, picked them because I love you?

— Jeanette Winterson, Lighthousekeeping.

4.

love is the voice under all silences,
the hope which has no opposite in fear;
the strength so strong mere force is feebleness:
the truth more first than sun more last than star

— e. e. cummings

Gustav Klimt

 

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Neruda: Drunk With the Great Starry Void

08 Monday Mar 2021

Posted by deborahbrasket in Art, Poetry, Writing

≈ 11 Comments

Tags

art, creativity, inspiration, Pablo Neruda, poem, poet, poetry, starry night, writing

One of my favorite poets, again, swept me off my feet, expressing the inexpressible with perfect eloquence.

Poetry

And it was at that age … poetry arrived
in search of me. I don’t know, I don’t know where
it came from, from winter or a river.
I don’t know how or when,
no, they were not voices, they were not
words, nor silence,
but from a street I was summoned
from the branches of night,
abruptly from the others,
among violent fires
or returning alone,
there I was, without a face,
and it touched me.

I didn’t know what to say, my mouth
had no way
with names,
my eyes were blind.
And something started in my soul,
fever or forgotten wings,
and I made my own way,
deciphering
that fire,
and I wrote the first, faint line,
faint, without substance, pure
nonsense,
pure wisdom
of someone who knows nothing;
and suddenly I saw
the heavens
unfastened
and open,
planets,
palpitating plantations,
shadow perforated,
riddled
with arrows, fire, and flowers,
the winding night, the universe.

And I, infinitesimal being,
drunk with the great starry
void,
likeness, image of
mystery,
felt myself a pure part
of the abyss.
I wheeled with the stars.


My heart broke loose on the wind. Pablo Neruda,
Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, trans. W.S. Merwin (Penguin Classics, 2004)

Illustration by Dorothy Lathrop 1891 – 1980 Stars, 1930, ink on illustration board. Illustration for Sarah Teasdale, Stars Tonight, New York: Macmillan Company, 1930.

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Poetry: The Thing We Die for Lack Of

09 Sunday Apr 2017

Posted by deborahbrasket in Culture, Poetry

≈ 9 Comments

Tags

National Poetry Month, Pablo Neruda, poem, poetry, Wallace Stevens

Paul Klee, Versunkene Landschaft, 1918

Paul Klee, Versunkene Landschaft, 1918

Wallace Stevens once famously said: “You can’t get the news from poems, but men die every day for lack of what is found there.”

It may be hard to argue the truthfulness of that statement when we consider the widespread unpopularity of reading poetry. A recent study finds that “since 2002, the share of poetry-readers has contracted by 45 percent—resulting in the steepest decline in participation in any literary genre.”

Poetry, it appears, is less popular than knitting, jazz, and dance. Perhaps that’s why we need the month of April to celebrate poetry, to help curb the decline and rekindle a comeback.

But Stevens wasn’t arguing that we die from the lack of reading poetry, but from the lack of what is found in there, the thing that inspires poets to put pen to paper, and artists to pick up their brushes, and musicians to play their instruments.

The thing we find in poetry that saves us, that renews us, that keeps us from dying for lack of, is the “poetry” we find in life, in nature, in human experience. In our deepest feelings and highest aspirations. So much of written poetry is about that, discerning the poetry in ordinary life, in things forgotten and overlooked and dismissed, and unfurling it in words on paper for all to read.

The ability to see poetry in all the aspects of our lives is what saves us. We don’t have to be poets to see the beauty, symmetry, grace in our surroundings, the imperfect perfection of ordinary things; to discern the repetitions in patterns, the rhymes and rhythms that surround us, to hear the alliteration, and the way assonance and dissonance complement and complete each other; to understand the contradictions and similarities of things, the subtle differences and deep complexities, to appreciate the humor and irony, the paradox and profundity that weaves itself through our lives.

In all of this is the poetry that poets write about. It’s what makes life rich and diverse and meaningful. It’s what moves us toward compassion and forgiveness, and inspires us toward greatness, and fills us with hope and humility.

The discernment and appreciation of the subtle and glorious intricacies of this grand tapestry in which we are woven–this is what saves us.

And this is what we find in reading poetry, if it is poetry at all.

I’ll leave you with the following poem.

Poetry

by Pablo Neruda

And it was at that age . . .  Poetry arrived
in search of me. I don’t know, I don’t know where
it came from, from winter or a river.
I don’t know how or when,
no, they were not voices, they were not
words, nor silence,
but from a street I was summoned,
from the branches of night,
abruptly from the others,
among violent fires
or returning alone,
there I was without a face
and it touched me.

I did not know what to say, my mouth
had no way
with names,
my eyes were blind,
and something started in my soul,
fever or forgotten wings,
and I made my own way,
deciphering
that fire,
and I wrote the first faint line,
faint, without substance, pure
nonsense,
pure wisdom
of someone who knows nothing,
and suddenly I saw
the heavens
unfastened
and open,
planets,
palpitating plantations,
shadow perforated,
riddled
with arrows, fire and flowers,
the winding night, the universe.

And I, infinitesimal being,
drunk with the great starry
void,
likeness, image of
mystery,
felt myself a pure part
of the abyss,
I wheeled with the stars,
my heart broke loose on the wind.

 

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After sailing around the world in a small boat for six years, I came to appreciate how tiny and insignificant we humans appear in our natural and untamed surroundings, living always on the edge of the wild, into which we are embedded even while being that thing which sets us apart. Now living again on the edge of the wild in a home that borders a nature preserve, I am re-exploring what it means to be human in a more than human world.

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