T. S., I Love You! Poet, T. S. Eliot & Ms. Mahvash Mossaed

It was a dark and stormy Sunday morning......LOL! I couldn't resist the photo of my busy kitchen window with all of my blue glass bottles, my blue origami bird Taylor made me years ago and my plants in it this morning. We had flooding last night, rivers of rain ran through the back yard. Only a little bit came into the back bedroom, but I was prepared for it with a stack of old towels. It's still dark and cloudy out. A perfect Sunday for reading. I found a book at the libary and couldn't resist the title, "Jane Austen Ruined My Life", so that's what I'm reading today. Its a romance, a good escapist read. I have some more new books to tell y'all about tomorrow. It's thundering out so I'm typing as fast as I can. I turn everything off during storms!!!

I ran across an old Yahoo blog entry I saved about how I acquired my first T. S. Eliot book of poems and decided to post it today on this dark, dreary Sunday. He's one to read on a day just like this. I know this poem is long, but it's worth the trip. Here's where you can find the poem in it's entirety:

http://www.bartleby.com/198/1.html

In a seriously heady bout of synchronicity a few years ago, I acquired a copy of T. S. Eliot's "Collected Poems, 1909 - 1935" at a book sale. It's worn and tattered (a 1958 paperback edition printed in Great Britain) and dog-eared. I had never really read T. S. Eliot that I could recall, but I have a habit of picking up any and every book of poetry I find at book sales or rummage sales, so I scooped it up for 50 cents. I got home and sat down to read it.

Inside the front cover in blue ink was written, George Lang, Glasgow, Scotland, August 13, 1959 in a shaky cursive, old man's scrawl. This intrigued me. I thumbed through the book and found small passages that Mr. Lang had underlined, "I have measured out my life with coffee spoons," from "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and "I, an old man, a dull head among windy spaces," from the poem, "Gerontion". There are five or six more such passages and I began to feel as if I knew Mr. Lang's sad state of mind as he read Mr. Eliot's poems.

In the center of the book I found a train ticket stub dated August 13 which he had apparently been using as a book mark. More intrigue!!! A veritable mystery. I keep that book with me at all times and read it often and wonder about the mysterious Mr. Lang, and how in the world his treasured little book of poetry ended up in my hands in central Louisiana, of all places. The fog imagery in "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" is some of the best I've read ever.

A few weeks later, I was again haunting the weekly library book sale and this time found a cassette tape of Mr. Eliot reading the very poems in the book I had so recently acquired! It's magnificent to hear a poet reading his own works. It put me back all of one dollar. I was listening to it in my truck as I drove to work one day thinking. , "I'll bet there's not another human being within 50 miles who reads OR listens to T. S. Eliot."

Here's an excerpt from my favorite Eliot poem:

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
By T. S. Eliot


"LET us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question …
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo. . . . "

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Wishing you love, health and happiness on this perfect Sunday morning,

~*~Marion~*~

"Poetry is the journal of the sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air. Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable. Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away." ~Carl Sandburg, Poetry Considered

PS:

Oh, dear, I found another poem I wanted to share today! LOL! Here it is from the amazing book, "My Painted Dreams" by Ms. Mahvash Mossaed, who is an amazing poet and artist. Check out her web site too!

http://www.mahvashmossaed.com/book/index.html


IN THE FIELDS OF TIME
By Mahvash Mossaed

Walking on an eggshell,
With a piece of cloud on a string as my kite.
I am going nowhere, lost in the fields of time.
Running around, looking for a good wind.

I have a body which will not last me long.
I have a soul which wants to come out and fly.
And I know when I go back where I came from,
When I go back home, God will be there waiting for me.

But for now I will fly my soul like a piece of a cloud,
Or like a kite,While I am running around in the fields of time.