Polletry Month

According to Gwen, April is Poetry Appreciation Month. To this end she's been hanging up Inspriational Poems and sonnets and things in the Hub.

I have casually altered these according to Torchwood's mission statement.

Go placidly amid the noise and haste
And remember what peace there may be in Stun Guns...

In the spirit of the season and in order to flex my new poll-taking abilities, I have constructed a general survey regarding verse. A Poll-etry Reading, if you will.

[Poll #1377468]

PS JACK the bowler hats came. DROWNING IN RED BOWLER HATS. I love you.

(no subject)

Taken from Ode To Solitude
by Pablo Neruda

And this word
which I poise here suspended on a branch,
this song that yearns
solely for the solitude of your lips
to repeat it-
the air inscribes it at my side, lives
that were lived long before me.
And you, who are reading my ode:
you've used it against your own solitude.
We've never met, and yet it's your hands
that wrote these lines, with mine.


Today's poem is stolen from blushingflower, who was reminded of it by yesterday's. Like The Gardener from yesterday, it is the last stanza of a longer work. I'd like to post the Spanish as well, but you can't even find the English online, let alone the original.

The themes of the poems are very different -- Tagore is writing about history and individual experience, while Neruda is writing about the "lie" that he found solitude to be. That being said, both of them share a single action, an urge of sorts, to form a bridge between their experiences and ours. Tagore invites the reader to imagine his past existence, Neruda invites the reader to accept his own sense of loneliness as a balm for solitude, but both are attempting to identify a method of uniting poet and reader in the common human experience.

(no subject)

I left the hardcopy of Nameless, with the edits, at work when I left today. GOOD JOB, SAM.

On the other hand, I am probably going downtown tomorrow (need shirts, summer trousers) and I have Keys To Everything, so it's not like I can't swing by and get in if I want to. And I'm going to fic my ass off this weekend for Big Bang, so it's just as well. One thing at a time. I've got bread rising and have started a grocery list too.

I also bought some LED wall/desk lamps from the woot-off, and those arrived today. They're surprisingly bright and they run on batteries, which is nice. Right now my screwdriver's charging in anticipation of hanging the fuck out of those bad boys. One's going over my bed as a reading light; I think I'll hang the other in the kitchen somewhere, probably by the sink so I can actually SEE WHAT I'M DOING when I wash the dishes.

Keeping my shit together: for grate yays!