Sunday 1 March 2009

The Eclipse


The Scraper and I love poetry, we belong to a poetry reading group in the town just over the border in Wales, where we meet up with like-minded friends. We also read poetry to each other.

"Poetry is what gets lost in translation". Who said that?

It is totally true, I've tried reading translations of poems by French or German poets to monoglot English friends. Poets that can move me to tears, raise me up, fill me with wonder, leave them cold. They stare at me in bemusement.

Last week's theme was "hope".  To me, Richard Eberhart,  American Poet, b. 1904, expressed the epitome of "hope" in just six lines:

The Eclipse

I stood out in the open cold
To see the essence of the eclipse
Which was its perfect darkness.

I stood in the cold on the porch
And could not think of anything so perfect
As man's hope of light in the face of darkness.

 

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