Dark Poetry

Leonard Cline, Stars

Lover, lover, laughing by,
If life seem brief and earth seem fair,
For you is not the darkling sky
And lonely constellations there:
Lest you should gaze upon a star
And think how pale dead women are.

But when at last your heart is bled
Of hope and drained at last of song,
You will find comfort overhead
Though earth be drear and life be long:
For you will gaze upon a star
And think how peaceful dead men are.
 
"Song of the Stranger" by Edmond Jabès (1912-1991), translated from the French by Rosmarie Waldrop

I'm looking for
a man I don't know,
who's never been more myself
than since I started to look for him.
Does he have my eyes, my hands
and all those thoughts like
flotsam of time?
Season of a thousand wrecks,
the sea no longer a sea,
but an icy watery grave.
Yet farther on, who knows how it goes on?
A little girl sings backward
and nightly reigns over trees
a shepherdess among her sheep.
Let us wrench thirst from the grain
of salt no drink can quench.
Along with the stones, a whole world eats
its heart out, being
from nowhere, like me.
 
Necromancy
Clark Ashton Smith

My heart is made a necromancer's glass,
Where homeless forms and exile phantoms teem,
Where faces of forgotten sorrows gleam
And dead despairs archaic peer and pass:
Grey longings of some weary heart that was
Possess me, and the multiple, supreme,
Unwildered hope and star-emblazoned dream
Of questing armies. . . Ancient queen and lass,
Risen vampire-like from out the wormy mould,
Deep in the magic mirror of my heart
Behold their perished beauty, and depart.
And now, from black aphelions far and cold,
Swimming in deathly light on charnel skies,
The enormous ghosts of bygone worlds arise.
 
The Kingdom of Shadows
Clark Ashton Smith

A crownless king who reigns alone,
I live within this ashen land,
Where winds rebuild from wandering sand
My columns and my crumbled throne.

My sway is on the men that were,
And wan sweet women, dear and dead;
Beside a marble queen, my bed
Is made within this sepulcher.

In gardens desolate to the sun,
Faring alone, I sigh to find
The dusty closes, dim and blind,
Where winter and the spring are one.

My shadowy visage,grey with grief,
In sunken waters walled with sand,
I see- where all mine ancient land
Lies yellow like an autumn leaf.

My silver lutes of subtle string,
Are rust- but on the grievous breeze
I hear what sobbing memories,
And muted sorrows murmuring!

Across the broken monuments,
Memorial of the dreams of old,
The sunset flings a ghostly gold
To mock mine ancient affluence.

About the tombs of stone and brass,
The silver lights of evening flee;
And slowly now, and solemnly,
I see the pomp of shadows pass.

Often, beneath some fervid moon,
With splendid spells I vainly strive
Dead loves imperial to revive,
And speak a heart-remembered rune-

But, ah, the lovely phantoms fail,
The faces fade to mist and light,
The vermeil lips of my delight
Are dim, the eyes are ashen-pale.

A crownless king who reigns alone,
I live within this ashen land,
Where winds rebuild from wandering sand
My columns and my crumbled throne.
 
(and closing with the swan song on my favorite cycle of CAS)

Zothique
Clark Ashton Smith

He who has trod the shadows of Zothique
And looked upon the coal-red sun oblique,
Henceforth returns to no anterior land,
But haunts a later coast
Where cities crumble in the black sea-sand
And dead gods drink the brine.

He who has known the gardens of Zothique
Where bleed the fruits torn by the simorgh's beak,
Savors no fruit of greener hemispheres:
In arbors uttermost,
In sunset cycles of the sombering years,
He sips an amaranth wine.

He who has loved the wild girls of Zothique
Shall not come back a gentler love to seek,
Nor know the vampire's from the lover's kiss:
For him the scarlet ghost
Of Lilith from time's last necropolis
Rears amorous and malign.

He who has sailed in galleys of Zothique
And seen the looming of strange spire and peak,
Must face again the sorcerer-sent typhoon,
And take the steerer's post
On far-poured oceans by the shifted moon
Or the re-shapen Sign.


btw. the poetry volumes of CAS are finally available at Hippocampus Press- just as a side note, Hippocampus Press.....
 
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one of my favorite poems by EA Poe hasn't been cited yet (i always have this SA song in mind when reading this)


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Eldorado


Gaily bedight,
A gallant knight,
In sunshine and in shadow,
Had journeyed long,
Singing a song,
In search of Eldorado.

But he grew old—
This knight so bold—
And o'er his heart a shadow
Fell as he found
No spot of ground
That looked like Eldorado.

And, as his strength
Failed him at length,
He met a pilgrim shadow—
"Shadow," said he,
"Where can it be—
This land of Eldorado?"

"Over the Mountains
Of the Moon,
Down the Valley of the Shadow,
Ride, boldly ride,"
The shade replied—
"If you seek for Eldorado!"
 
One of my favourite poems of a great American poet -

Madame la Fleurie

Weight him down, O side-stars, with the great weightings of the end.
Seal him there. He looked in a glass of the earth and thought he lived in it.
Now, he brings all that he saw into the earth, to the waiting parent.
His crisp knowledge is devoured by her, beneath a dew.


Weight him, weight, weight him with the sleepiness of the moon.
It was only a glass because he looked in it. It was nothing he could be told.
It was a language he spoke, because he must, yet did not know.
It was a page he had found in the handbook of heartbreak.


The black fugatos are strumming the blackness of black...
The thick strings stutter the finial gutturals.
He does not lie there remembering the blue-jay, say the jay.
His grief is that his mother should feed on him, himself and what he saw,
In that distant chamber, a bearded queen, wicked in her dead light.

Wallace Stevens
 
"Verrà la morte e avrà i tuoi occhi" (pub. 1951) by Cesare Pavese, translated by Geoffrey Brock

Death will come and will have your eyes--
this death that accompanies us
from morning till evening, unsleeping,
deaf, like an old remorse
or an absurd vice. Your eyes
will be a useless word,
a suppressed cry, a silence.
That's what you see each morning
when alone with yourself you lean
toward the mirror. O precious hope,
that day we too will know
that you are life and you are nothingness.

Death has a look for everyone.
Death will come and will have your eyes.
It will be like renouncing a vice,
like seeing a dead face
reappear in the mirror,
like listening to a lip that's shut.
We'll go down into the maelstrom mute.
 
David Park Barnitz


Mankind

They do not know that they are wholly dead,
Nor that their bodies are to the worm given o’er;
They pass beneath the sky forevermore;
With their dead flesh the earth is cumbered.

Each day they drink of wine and eat of bread,
And do the things that they have done before;
And yet their hearts are rotten to the core,
And from their eyes the light of life is fled.

Surely the sun is weary of their breath;
They have no ears, and they are dumb and blind;
Long time their bodies hunger for the grave.

How long, O God, shall these dead corpses rave?
When shall the earth be clean of humankind?
When shall the sky cease to behold this death?
 
Donald Wandrei

Uncollected Poems - Sonnets of the Midnight Hours


Doom

Oblivion has laid its deathless curse
Upon all things of life and time and space;
Of death itself, there now was left no trace,
And DOOM had fallen on the universe.
The heavens like a dead, colossal hearse
Contained no thought or dust of thing or race;
In all infinity was left no place
Where Death in death all things did not immerse.

For Death the Conqueror at last was king;
His realms were vacua, he proved his vow
That all would pass, that nothing would abide.
Not anywhere was life nor anything,
Nor vestige of the worlds of old; and now,
Upon his fallen kingdoms, God had died.
 
"Elegy" by Salvatore Quasimodo

Cold harbinger of night
returning clear to the balconies
of ruined houses to shine
on unknown tombs, the derelict remains
of the smoking earth. Here rests
our dream. Lonely you turn
north where everything is flowing,
except you only, lightness to death.
 
"Milan, August 1943" by Salvatore Quasimodo

In vain you search in the dust,
poor hand, the city is dead.
Dead: on the heart of the Naviglio
the last hum has been heard.
The nightingale has fallen from the flagpole
high on the convent where once he sang before sunset.
Dig no wells in the courtyards,
the living have lost their thirst.
The dead, so red, so swollen, do not touch them:
leave them in the earth of their houses:
the city is dead, is dead.
 
Giuseppe Ungaretti


San Martino del Carso

Di queste case
non è rimasto
che qualche
brandello di muro

Di tanti
che mi corrispondevano
non è rimasto
neppure tanto

Ma nel mio cuore
nessuna croce manca

È il mio cuore
il paese più straziato

San Martino del Carso

Of these houses
nothing remains
but the rubble
of a ruined wall

Of the many
who were so close to me
nothing remains
not even that

But in my heart
not one cross is missing

This ravaged village
is my heart
 
From Unter dem Eisen des Mondes (pub. 1958) by Thomas Bernhard, translated by James Reidel

The bright iron of the moon
will kill you and the numb
talons of a giant bird
in whom
you confided your grief
during the winter.

The forest will wind its bones
in restlessness
and the wind
will beat you to the ground,
striking
from the white hiding-place
of rotting deer.

The sun will bury the mark
of its wounds
beyond the dying trees
and your lips of fire
will flame
into laughing flowers
of death.
 
George Bacovia

Panorama

Plangea caterinca-fanfara
Lugubru in noapte, tarziu ...
Si singur priveam prin ochene,
Pierdut in muzeul pustiu ...

Si-n lumea ochenelor triste
Ma prinse sinistre ganduri -
In jurul meu corpuri de ceara,
Cu hade si fixe priviri.

Si-acea caterinca-fanfara
Imi dete un tremur satanic;
In racle de sticla - princese
Oftau, in dantele, mecanic.

Si-atunci am fugit plin de groaza
Din sumbrul muzeu fioros,
Orasul dormea in tacere,
Flasneta plangea cavernos.

Plangea caterinca-fanfara
O arie trista, uitata ...
Si stam impietrit ... si de veacuri
Cetatea parea blestemata.

Sideshow

Lugubrious, late in the night
The brass-band barrel-organ whined ...
Lost in the deserted museum,
I looked through the glasses, alone.

And in the world of sad glasses
I was gripped by sinister thoughts -
There were bodies of wax around me,
With hideous, fixed stares

And the brass-band barrel organ
Gave me a satanic fright;
In coffins of glass - princesses
In lace mechanically sighed.

And then full of horror I ran
From the sombre museum of dread,
The town was sleeping in silence,
Like a cavern the organ whined.

A sad, forgotten aria
The brass-band barrel-organ whined ...
And I stood petrified .. and for ages,
The city seemed to be damned.
 
George Bacovia

Dusk
Like vast tears of blood
Leaves from the branches flow -
And slowly the bloodied dusk
Penetrates the window.

Over the blue hills
A moon of blood rises,
The lake looks like blood,
A deeper red always.

At the window, in the sick
Dusk, a girl coughs.
And now her handkerchief
Looks like the flowing leaves.

Amurg

Ca lacrimi mari de sange
Curg frunzele de pe ramuri, -
Si-nsangerat, amurgul
Patrunde-ncet prin geamuri.

Pe dealurile-albastre,
De sange urca luna,
De sange pare lacul,
Mai ros ca-ntotdeauna.

La geam tuseste-o fata
In bolnavul amurg;
Si s-a facut batista
Ca frunzele ce curg.
 
"Meditation on a Bone" by A. D. Hope

A piece of bone, found at Trondhjem in 1901, with the following runic inscription (about A.D. 1050) cut on it: I loved her as a maiden; I will not trouble Erlend's detestable wife; better she should be a widow. ​
Words scored upon a bone,
Scratched in despair or rage --
Nine hundred years have gone;
Now, in another age,
They burn with passion on
A scholar's tranquil page.

The scholar takes his pen
And turns the bone about,
And writes those words again.
Once more they seethe and shout
And through a human brain
Undying hate rings out.


"I loved her when a maid;
I loathe and love the wife
That warms another's bed:
Let him beware his life!"
The scholar's hand is stayed;
His pen becomes a knife


To grave in living bone
The fierce archaic cry.
He sits and reads his own
Dull sum of misery.
A thousand years have flown
Before that ink is dry.


And, in a foreign tongue,
A man, who is not he,
Reads and his heart is wrung
This ancient grief to see,
And thinks: When I am dung,
What bone shall speak for me?
 
Robert H. Barlow


Intimations of Mortality

The millions of years ahead,
When we swing as dust between moon and sun,
As we soon must, will be less fun
(Being dead, I mean), less fun
Than setting thorn trees out in pots,
Than scratching cats' fleas, cats' ears,
Oh, lots less fun, I have no doubt,
Than ever going to church.

The millions of days ahead,
When we lurch about Mars
Like smoke fled!
(Visitors' old cigar-smoke
Ascending a cold parlour at night,
With the blaze of light ending,
The dog put out.)


[Fall 1947]
 
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