Poetry
This week: Osip Mandelstam Edited by: Stormy Lady More Newsletters By This Editor
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This is poetry from the minds and the hearts of poets on Writing.Com. The poems I am going to be exposing throughout this newsletter are ones that I have found to be, very visual, mood setting and uniquely done. Stormy Lady |
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This night is irredeemable
by Osip Mandelstam
This night is irredeemable.
Where you are, it is still bright.
At the gates of Jerusalem,
a black sun is alight.
The yellow sun is hurting,
sleep, baby, sleep.
The Jews in the Temple’s burning
buried my mother deep.
Without rabbi, without blessing,
over her ashes, there,
the Jews in the Temple’s burning
chanted the prayer.
Over this mother,
Israel’s voice was sung.
I woke in a glittering cradle,
lit by a black sun.
A flame is in my blood
by Osip Mandelstam
A flame is in my blood
burning dry life, to the bone.
I do not sing of stone,
now, I sing of wood.
It is light and coarse:
made of a single spar,
the oak’s deep heart,
and the fisherman’s oar.
Drive them deep, the piles:
hammer them in tight,
around wooden Paradise,
where everything is light.
On January 15, 1891 Mr and Mrs Mandel’shtam, welcomed son Osip Mandelstam. The coupled lived in Warsaw, Poland, where the Mr. Mandelstam was leather merchant and the Mrs. Mandelstam taught piano. Shortly after Osip was born the family moved to St Petersburg, Russia. As a child Osip was taught by tutors and governesses. He then attended Tenishev School before traveling to Paris and Germany, where he studied literature at the University of Heidelberg. Osip then returned home and studied philosophy at St Petersburg University. Osip first poem appeared in 1910 in the Apollon.
Osip collection “Kamen” published in 1913, established Osip as a poet and gained him popularity with his readers widely do to the variety of subject matters in his poems. The times were changing and a revolution was upon him. Osip welcomed the start of the revolution but became more hostile as time moved on. During this time Osip supported himself by writing childrens books and writing translations for other authors. In 1922 he married Madezhda lokovlevna Khazin. The couple would stay together through all the heartaches of exile and imprisonment that were to come in the years ahead of them.. Osip also published 'TRISTIA' in 1922 followed by 'STIKHOTVORENIA' 1921-25, published in 1928. By the time his later poems were published the readers could see a change in his writing, his work was sad and contained hints of exile as though he was saying farewell.
Osip wanted to preserve his cultural traditions and not compromise his beliefs, this made the Soviet authorities question his loyalties. Through his poems and his prose he shared his readers could see how he felt as an outsider in his own country. It was in 1933 that Osip published “Journey to Armenia” this would be his last publication of his work, while he was alive. In 1934 Osip was arrest for his written word, 'And every killing is a treat, For the broad-chested Ossete.' Mandelstam was exiled to Cherdyn, and then Voronezh. He was then released in 1937 only to be arrested again for 'counter-revolutionary' activities in May 1938. He was sentenced to five years in labor camps. This again was because of lines the poet had written, ‘We live without sensing the country beneath us, At ten paces, our speech has no sound and when there's the will to half-open our mouths the Kremlin crag-dweller bars the way.'
By this time Osip was already so weak he could hardly stand during transit to the camp. Osip, Mandelstam died in route, somewhere near Vladivostok, on December 27, 1938. His body was then taken to a common grave. His notebooks from Voronezh (1935-37) contained poems about his surroundings and the people he met and the lack of humanity he saw. His poems received international fame in the 1970’s when his widow Nadezhda Mandelstam published her memoirs 'HOPE AGAINST HOPE' published in 1970 followed by 'HOPE ABANDONED' in 1974. Which were her interpretations to what her husband had planned to write with the notebooks he was keeping.
Silentium
by Osip Mandelstam
She has not yet been born:
she is music and word,
and therefore the untorn,
fabric of what is stirred.
Silent the ocean breathes.
Madly day’s glitter roams.
Spray of pale lilac foams,
in a bowl of grey-blue leaves.
May my lips rehearse
the primordial silence,
like a note of crystal clearness,
sounding, pure from birth!
Stay as foam Aphrodite – Art –
and return, Word, where music begins:
and, fused with life’s origins,
be ashamed heart, of heart!
Brothers, let us glorify freedom’s twilight
by Osip Mandelstam
Brothers, let us glorify freedom’s twilight –
the great, darkening year.
Into the seething waters of the night
heavy forests of nets disappear.
O Sun, judge, people, your light
is rising over sombre years
Let us glorify the deadly weight
the people’s leader lifts with tears.
Let us glorify the dark burden of fate,
power’s unbearable yoke of fears.
How your ship is sinking, straight,
he who has a heart, Time, hears.
We have bound swallows
into battle legions - and we,
we cannot see the sun: nature’s boughs
are living, twittering, moving, totally:
through the nets –the thick twilight - now
we cannot see the sun, and Earth floats free.
Let’s try: a huge, clumsy, turn then
of the creaking helm, and, see -
Earth floats free. Take heart, O men.
Slicing like a plough through the sea,
Earth, to us, we know, even in Lethe’s icy fen,
has been worth a dozen heavens’ eternity.
Thank you all!
Stormy Lady
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Crimson tenderness of the blooming heart
She swells from deep within you
And never is she apart.
Red the color of ink-
Love always spells with since the start.
She collects every brick dreamt
In the wilderness of a little girls’ mind
Her feet made with glass and shattered pearls
Oh you there, do you know the depths of a lover’s eyes?
She lives in those pits of despair
Nothing compared to your shallow lies.
The man who walks down the street-
With such grace-
Ever wondered of that woman
Who kneels down-
To tie your very own lace?
Oh you there, drink a toast to humanity.
Embrace that woman you recall
The bold soul that dares to piece
All the pieces of your fiery world
With her love that is never to cease.
Honorable mention:
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