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Christopher Logue
Christopher Logue
A week of sonnets is de eerste publicatie in Nederland van de Brit Christopher Logue. Christopher Logue is geboren 23 November 1926 en begonnen met het schrijven van gedichten toen hij 22 was. Hij woont momenteel in Parijs. Hij heeft een bundel gedichten Wand and quadrant [Collection Merlin, Parijs 1953] op zijn naam staan en een nieuwe bundel Devil Maggot and Son in voorbereiding. Voorts verschenen gedichten van zijn hand in de tijdschriften Botteghe Oscure, The Paris Review en Merlin. Hij beveelt iedere dichter aan, zestien uur per dag te werken, waarvan vier uur op de typemachine. Hij weet dat poëzie ontstaat door Maandag, Dinsdag, Woensdag, enz. en de wijze waarop gewone mensen leven.
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A week of sonnets
Monday's child is full of grace,
The cherubim tune up their instruments.
Our dance begins; with eyes, and after, words.
And soon our limbs are moving round a core,
And we are loved; who were unloved before.
The cherubim tune up their instruments.
She moves her lips: I give her words to sing.
Thus on her tongue my tongue may gently swear,
Love, poetry is my body speaking.
The cherubim tune up their instruments.
I start this sentence on a Winter's day,
To fit our love, and finish it in August.
Mindful, that where she danced and I held say,
Could bring catastrophes that hell repents,
Where cherubim tune up their instruments.
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Tuesday's child is fair of face,
Seek her. Find out her mouth. Kiss her red mouth.
With your devotions satisfy her mouth.
And in these fresh collisions loose your mouth,
As a bright instant, throbbing everywhere:
Not less between her limbs than in the South,
Her dark voice tasting like an Hemisphere
Before known only by its songs and fruit.
In what condition do you find yourself?
Dumb-tongued and sick for joy, while brain is mute?
Your marrow bones and the heart's red cellar
Swarmed to adore the motion of her youth?
Quick particles of blood make hive her mouth,
Whose lips are midnight darlings, and seek out
The origin of kisses in her mouth.
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Wednesday's child has far to go,
Our desire moves in a lewd orbit;
Together we may make a planet.
Her belly is like a jug of white wine,
The lip of it is ferned and darkling,
Into the gentle hummock of her loin.
Where her divided breast is tentative,
Behind coarse silk clustered and pouted,
My lips disturb, and smally, under webs,
Of endless tendernesses moved to give.
And in the measure of her walk, tip-toe -
Girls do in love, this girl in love walks so -
Is apprehended by the rest of you
All the momentous secrets of us two.
In such has lust expression and runs true.
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Thursdays child is full of woe,
William, though great, was wrong. Love is time's fool
But worse is separation. He, left alone
Grinds out his love between the round here-stone,
And the white horizon's rim; for she is there.
His force taken from others, unaware
That he turns on and on, not only fool,
But Tom against the world, crouched on his fear
In a dark lobby, Bedlam's Senator,
Mumbling unreasonable means. Who said,
‘How could I be so wrong?’ But waits to hear,
‘Tush, it is little - why, she might be dead!’
Better perhaps? Stop up your mouth and swear
Love grinds your bones Fe Fi to make his bread;
You read the crust Fo Fum of a lovers head.
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Friday's child must work for a living,
Me to slay, out of abominable
Compassion upon I. Conceited grief
May fluently persuade its own brief
Pandemonium of misery, all
Reasons for self-sake lie in your will
To her: they are imperfectly bequeathed
Within a testament that robs of sleep
Even the memory of possesion.
Becoming we, the child of thou and I
Continued, till a dangerous bethlehem
Sawed up its manger to suit calvary,
And cut divine obsessive melody.
The wisest do not love but guard their kin.
I have been saved, perhaps to die again.
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Saturday's child is loving and giving,
For God's sweet sake give me back part of that
I gave. Part of a part? One loving jot?
Child, I am no Elizabethan hack
Spicing his dalliance in a sonnet's pot,
But a most recent ape on his bald knees,
Head down, with cap in hand, eagerly wrong,
And aptly pleading for - you know my rage -
Brass farthings of reconcilation.
Dismissed: I held palaver with Venus,
And other mythic Governors of love.
Why? Why in God's name? Silence. Concluded thus,
Your anguish is not meaningful to Gods.
Her it may touch; but is not best to win.
If you must love, she must give back again.
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But the child that is born on the Sabbath day, is bonny and bright and good alway.
Who will, if I do not, remember her?
Cast me again - as King; and then again -
A beggarman; and then again and when
I have been crying through a dozen selves,
Leaf, flesh, the changing air or mineral,
Shall I come home upon her name? Me, me,
A christopher who must be borne not bear?
I will. What's left of my three score and ten
Is mostly word work, wages of my sin,
And the paraphenalia of love.
The best, some active memories that move
Her to be compass while I twist and turn
Waiting bone idle for her selfs return,
Prepared to let all other lovers burn.
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