J'thani - SELECTIONS ...by Miguel Hernandez

[Edie Antoinette]

The classical poet is one who finds the solution to his life and, therefore, to his work.
The romantic, one who solves nothing neither in his work nor in his life.

Lack of modesty is a romantic vice: it means speaking of the most intimate things, of what
only belongs to a few loved persons. Publishing griefs, misfortunes, with too much freedom,
is lack of foresight in a poet; he doesn't let any image or object alone that comes his way....

The poet creates in trance as an angel, in moments of crisis as a man.

The lemon tree in my garden is a bigger influence on my work than all the poets together...

Miguel Hernandez
translated by Hardie St. Martin

Jorge Luis Borges - The Mirror Man 1/6 - The Art of Poetry


The Art of Poetry

To gaze at a river made of time and water
And remember Time is another river.
To know we stray like a river
and our faces vanish like water.

To feel that waking is another dream
that dreams of not dreaming and that the death
we fear in our bones is the death
that every night we call a dream.

To see in every day and year a symbol
of all the days of man and his years,
and convert the outrage of the years
into a music, a sound, and a symbol.

To see in death a dream, in the sunset
a golden sadness--such is poetry,
humble and immortal, poetry,
returning, like dawn and the sunset.

Sometimes at evening there's a face
that sees us from the deeps of a mirror.
Art must be that sort of mirror,
disclosing to each of us his face.

They say Ulysses, wearied of wonders,
wept with love on seeing Ithaca,
humble and green. Art is that Ithaca,
a green eternity, not wonders.

Art is endless like a river flowing,
passing, yet remaining, a mirror to the same
inconstant Heraclitus, who is the same
and yet another, like the river flowing.


Jorge Luis Borges

On Walking With You
I


always felt good


walking with


you.


I


don’t know why


I


stopped.




Bill Lawson (2008)