Pengamen, Jakarta Selatan

Poetry Of Departures

Sometimes you hear, fifth-hand,
As epitaph:
He chucked up everything
And just cleared off,
And always the voice will sound
Certain you approve
This audacious, purifying,
Elemental move.

And they are right, I think.
We all hate home
And having to be there:
I detest my room,
It's specially-chosen junk,
The good books, the good bed,
And my life, in perfect order:
So to hear it said

He walked out on the whole crowd
Leaves me flushed and stirred,
Like Then she undid her dress
Or Take that you ****;
Surely I can, if he did?
And that helps me to stay
Sober and industrious.
But I'd go today,

Yes, swagger the nut-strewn roads,
Crouch in the fo'c'sle
Stubbly with goodness, if
It weren't so artificial,
Such a deliberate step backwards
To create an object:
Books; china; a life
Reprehensibly perfect.

Philip Larkin

Jakarta & Philip Larkin

Nearly there. Just a weekend to go. Then everything changes, or so we are told. Best listen to some Larkin then to cool our savage nerves & salve our anticipation.

The Trees 

The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too.
Their yearly trick of looking new 
Is written down in rings of grain.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

by Phillip Larkin

Kids & Philip Larkin

I am procrastinating by watching Philip Larkin on YouTube. Philip Larkin wasn't just dour and miserable, he was very funny, not just sardonic, he also had a little Viz in him: his correspondence with Kingsley Amis was signed off 'Bum'. Here is one of his funniest, truest poems:

This Be The Verse

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.   
    They may not mean to, but they do.   
They fill you with the faults they had 
    And add some extra, just for you. 

But they were fucked up in their turn 
    By fools in old-style hats and coats,   
Who half the time were soppy-stern 
    And half at one another’s throats. 

Man hands on misery to man. 
    It deepens like a coastal shelf. 
Get out as early as you can, 
    And don’t have any kids yourself.

Philip Larkin

Kids, Philip Larkin & Rilke via Bly

Two of my favourite poems to think about, contrast & compare:

Story

Tired of a landscape known too well when young:
The deliberate shallow hills, the boring birds
Flying past rocks; tired of remembering
The village children and their naughty words,
He abandoned his small holding and went South,
Recognised at once his wished-for lie
In the inhabitants' attractive mouth,
The church beside the marsh, the hot blue sky.

Settled. And in this mirage lived his dreams,
The friendly bully, saint, or lovely chum
According to his moods. Yet he at times
Would think about his village, and would wonder
If the children and the rocks were still the same.

But he forgot all this as he grew older.

Philip Larkin

Sometimes a man

Sometimes a man stands up during supper

and walks outdoors, and keeps on walking,
because of a church that stands somewhere in the East.

And his children say blessings on him as if he were dead.

And another man, who remains inside his own house,
dies there, inside the dishes and in the glasses,
so that his children have to go far out into the world
toward that same church, which he forgot.

Rainer Maria Rilke

translated by Robert Bly