Pain is a cloud cut by a blade

My throat is learning to choke again

No one will be able to love you the same way before

No one can die like you did

I give you castles in the air

I give you sand castles

I’m drowning in the rising tide

I’m drowning in time and death

Pain is a cloud shot in/from minutes

The sand covers the past and 

I am drowning in the depths of the sands

***

Mom taught the soldier to read

Mom taught the soldier how to dress

The soldier did not teach his mother to cry

The soldier did not teach his mother to wait

You can’t be born mothers

You can die mothers

Corpses dig trenches for themselves

Corpses are dug out from trenches

***

The tree is dead

Nobody organized a funeral

No one came to say goodbye to the deceased

No one has made a coffin out of human skin

The tree was killed in an unequal battle with a chainsaw

The tree was killed by depriving the executioner of excess oxygen

Trees are so humble that they will endure anything

Trees are so proud that they even die in silence

***

Crystal air

Crystal man

Crystal leaves under crystal feet

Mines

***

1

snowflake cures snowflake

time does not stand still 

and the snow molds jugs of touches

2

the bird drinks the morning silence

spring grass is washed with morning dew

the cemetery in the morning is unchanged

3

Inevitable night plays snowballs

another moment and the eyelids will drop

forever

***

аliens are looking 

for the last flower 

in the history of planet 

***

the grass falls asleep

autumn rain drinks 

the growing silence

***

the leaves under my feet 

taught my bones to crunch 

again

***

birds seek sound 

and proud friendship 

in feathered dandelions

***

nobody knows 

who’s hiding under 

the killing snow

***

Feet are washed with water and eyes are dried

The desert of the gaze envelops with heat

Look at me and tell me that no one will die

The glass fades and the mosaic breaks into pieces

Bread crumbs gradually become smaller

Birds quietly peck bread or eyes

The world stands still waiting for the future

A storm of inaction envelops the tree

The tree does not resist but dies

How many crosses can a tree give birth to?

How many crosses can a cleaver make?

The grains of time keep their own count

***

You are silent

I drink the silence

You are a bird

I am a torn feather

You give me joy

I’m not happy about anyone or anything

You kiss me with your lips of sunny pearls

I’m still dying slowly

***

Someone is counting the number of stars in the sky

Nobody knows how many suns died in a sore chest

We all smoke the air of freedom and we all die

But what will the homeless angels think of us?

***

the sky under my feet turned into puddles

a little boy with a strange name comes to me every night

he asks to copy an icon from him

and I can draw little things in my dreams

the painted sky under my feet dissolves with the sound of the alarm clock

***

the garage stinks of gasoline

the radio in the kitchen is annoying during dinner

and the younger brother shudders at the sight of the leather belt as before

even after our father’s death

***

ran away from math class

autumn started a lesson with origami

but 

sorry I’m too lazy

sorry I’m too sad

for this lesson

silence flows through the veins of the air

the cuts on my hands are almost healed

the rope loop on the chandelier still hangs in my room

I still doubt that everything will go according to plan

I’ll probably skip English lesson tomorrow

I have important things to do in my room

***

lips crack without waiting for a kiss

the snow sculpting the touching 

at the bus stop

***
bones entwined
with flowers
wash the coffin
with their
whiteness
like its a dirty box
with a surprise

***
a black cat falls from the roof
into the night mouth of silence

***
sort through cards with the names of the dead
do not sort through cards with the names of the dead
the death assistant has a lot of busyness

***
white people with a clear (empty?) conscience enter my house
black birds on the windowsill knock on the iron night of death
white people beat
fear out of their heads
black birds sew up their eyes
with despair

***
the rubber hunger of poverty
blood flows like a spring
glossy eye drinks
sugar stream does not quench your thirst

***
Syncopation caught the top of the mountains, so air screamed and drowned in the river.
Surprisingly, the fiery heart descended from the sky and also sank in the water. We have
been living without the sun for a month.
What else does the river water carry away in memory and wash away on the eve of the end
of the world?

Daniel’ “Photo of a stapled bird”

HATE, SKIN OF BITTER BEANS

I praise the poetic effort and career

Of the poets “Ambassadors of Peace”:

Juanita, Annpol, Tatiana, Juan and Nelson

Alain, Eugenio, Beatriz, Michael

Libia, Zidiad and so many others

Who yearn in the beautiful pages

Of the San Francisco Solano Cultural Center

From Argentina

May it arrive, once and for all

The longed-for Peace that does not raise its eyes

From the ground of destruction and death

For the wars that do not end

Thanks to the countries of the moment

Traffickers of human beings and Arms.

Some say that the Lord of Heaven

Not even the thunder of bombs wakes him

Abandoning us to our good or bad luck.

Others sing, from their countries at peace

“La lara la la la larala la

We are at ease with the warlords

And the serial killers who defend us

Like, in the old days, the warriors of the Crusades

Giving us health and grace

While we watch the Eurovision Song Contest on TV

To the participants singing and dancing

Over the corpses of children, men and women

In Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and other nations

Taking away the pains of congenital Hatred

Which tastes like the skin of bitter beans.”

-My son, Wars will never end

Because men are very bad

My maternal grandmother said

Fleeing from Huesca, in Aragon

Towards Argelès-sur-Mer, in the south of France

Located in the Eastern Pyrenees

From the region of Occitania, Roussillon

When the fratricidal war of Spain.

Philip Larkin’s Whitsun Weddings

Examine a close reading of the poem “Whitsun Weddings” with critical analysis and textual references.

(Image of Philip Larkin, a black and white photo of a skinny middle-aged white man sitting on a couch in a room, wearing reading glasses).

Whitsun Weddings is a brandishing testamentary swashbuckler locomotive wedding party of ceremonial festivities and ritualistic observance of postcolonial and post industrial England. The impending wedding coach has been metaphorically epitomized by Philip Larkin as a means of celebratory cavalcade. “We headed towards London, shuffling gouts of steam. Now fields were building plots and poplars cast”

Whitsun Weddings occasion symbolically manifest old maidish Postcolonial British folks entrenched and rooted by a connubial affair in accord to the fiscal reformation aftermath of the beginning of a new financial year instead of that ending from a previous year. Philip Larkin’s vaticination and sortilege of the porters and mails bears to metaphorical connotations of pregnant women and their spouses respectively through avant garde impressionism. Poet laureate’s setting and locale of Whitsun Weddings is a treasure trove of observation, reflection and contemplation amidst “Where sky and Lincolnshire and water meet.”

“The secret like a happy funeral” encapsulates the oxymoronic ambivalence that is at the heart of this fascinating reading of Larkin’s litany poems. “While girls, gripping their handbags tighter, stared. At a religious wounding” might implicate references to saturnine temperaments and stony faced solemnity being exposed to sepulchral sombre melancholia. The affair of espousal is overall sultry dismay, gloomy despair, desultory grim and grave depression in accord with Larkin’s point of view. Expanses and vistas of England with drifting of Britannic legacy and British isles have been subjected to dismantlement and shrinkages afterwards of the Great World Wars. 

Whitsun Weddings is that seventh Sunday after Easter, Pentecost Christian holiday, commemorating the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the apostles and disciples of Jesus Christ while they were in Jerusalem and 1950s Britain’s progressive levy reform position legitimizes financially beneficiary matrimonial alliance. The signature litany of verbal photographic memorabilia from the memorialization of a train travelling outside the carriage windows rattling through the British landscapes. Englishness and Britishness of the 1960s era symbolize cultural hallmarks of the charismatic poem as indicated by the parodies of fashion lurking beneath veils and heels of soon to be wedded maidens and already betrothed ladies. Language, speech, prosody and rhetoric has been alchemically metamorphosed from the bedrock of ordinariness to that extraordinary visual and auditory impact and emphases. For exemplary evidences point to uncles with smutty mouth, fathers with broad belts under suits and mothers with seamy foreheads, nylon gloves and jewellery substitutes and lemons, mauves and olive ochres.  

“A sense of falling, like an arrow shower/ Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain” herein the epilogue revealing epiphanic heavenly downpour onto earth as metaphorical connotations of anarchy being poured. Larkin, haunted and obsessed with marriage, conspicuously extrapolates the unforeseen on edge and fidgety ending. 

BBC has a radio show where Simon Armitage explores Philip Larkin’s poem The Whitsun Weddings.