The book of lost tales

I'm utterly enchanted by the story that a book of lost fairy tales has been found. A contemporary of Grimm, Franz Xaver von Schönwerth collected five hundred tales by asking folk about their lore, but neglected to publish them. I find this magical, not because an unknown nineteenth-century book has come to light (exciting as that is), but because it might contain unguessed tales many centuries older. Stories from the long, long ago that have lain untold. Stories that walked among our ancestors, once upon a time.

Franzen versus Twitter

If you want to say that Twitter can’t convey emotion, argument, evidence, then you must say that poetry can’t either. For Twitter is poetry.

The bright end of my voice

For International Women's Day, this from Persian poet Shadab Vajdi. 

Wait for Me 

And I become alive again
Outside the confines of my body,
Beyond the misery of want,
Among the fruit-laden branches
Within a moment,
Itself begotten by the sun;
And in the shelter of a bush
That carried the pure fragrance of love
To the boundless plains;
And my eyes,
Not a pair of mute spheres,
But flames of quest;
And my hands,
Two guiding sails
Speeding towards the green land of lovers;
And my soul, my heart
Singing,
singing.

Wait for me
Along the blue line of the horizon
That leads the silver path of the moon
To the glittering fountains of stars,
And by the waterfalls of dawn
At the moment when the sun rises
And draws the threads of light
From one branch to another,
Carrying them like grains
Deep inside the nests
Where the chicks,
With desire for light and sky,
Are cheeping,
cheeping.

Wait for me
At the bright end of my voice
That from above the mysteries of the galaxies
Flows down to the earth
To be absorbed by the buds of growth
And to give the slumberers of the gardens
Tidings of sunshine and life. 
Wait for me;
I will become alive again.

Whatever a moon has always meant

Today a poet with a sublime creative disregard for rules: e e cummings. His poetry often looks whimsical or childish for its breaking of rules, but it's often, as here, terribly beautiful and full of wonder. Enjoy this bit of unpunctuated ecstasy. 

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear; and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you 

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart) 

Spelling trouble

In year 2, spelling tests were not uncommon. One day, introducing one of these tests, and doubtless to take the sting from it, my teacher said it was ok if we spelt the words wrong. Accordingly, I deliberately misspelled every word on the test with, as I remember, some glee. Later in the day, we were in the library having a story read to us when I was summoned back to our classroom for an interview with the teacher. Disappointed and terrified, I made my way back alone through the deserted school grounds. My teacher asked with concern why I had spelled wrongly words he knew I could spell correctly. Through my sobs I answered ‘You said we could!’  

At the time I was mostly grief-stricken that I had misunderstood, and that I had missed the end of the story. Looking back, I’m intrigued by this episode and what it was that motivated me to misspell. (And I wonder what my teacher made of it.) During the test I think I enjoyed the creative act of coming up with novel ways to spell known words; experimenting with - had I known it - morphology. Perhaps some part of me enjoyed the act of impersonating a child who knew less than I did, inhabiting for a time the world and intelligence of an other.  More than this, I think I enjoyed the freedom of what I (mistakenly) thought was a momentary reprieve from the whole scholastic morality, from the knife-edge between accuracy and failure that so dominated our days and separated us into impenetrable categories of ‘good’ students and bad ones. For once, it seemed, we were offered the freedom of artists and the communion of brothers. Who could resist such grace? Not I, though I paid for my error with bitter tears. And I never found out how the story ended.