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Ode to Marie-Anne-Charlotte Corday

Le noir serpent, sorti de sa caverne impure,
A donc vu rompre enfin sous ta main ferme et sûre
le venimeux tissu de ses jours abhorrés!
Aux entrailles du tigre, à ses dents homicides,
Tu vins demander et les membres livides
Et le sang des humains qu'il avait dévorés!

La vertu seule est libre. Honneur de notre histoire,
Notre immortel opprobre y vit avec ta gloire.
Seule tu fus un homme, et vengea les humains.
Et nous, eunuques vils, troupeau lâche et sans âme,
Nous savons répéter quelques plaintes de femme,
Mais le fer pèserait à nos débiles mains.
. . . . .
Un scélérat de moins rampe dans cette fange.
La Vertu t'applaudit. De sa mâle louange
Entends, bell héroïne, entends l'auguste voix.
O Vertu, le poignard, seul espoir de la terre,
Est ton arme sacrée, alors que le tonnerre
Laisse régner le crime, et te vend à ses lois.

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poem by Andre Marie de Chenier
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Rimmon

1903 -- After Boer War

Duly with knees that feign to quake--
Bent head and shaded brow,--
Yet once again, for my father's sake,
In Rimmon's House I bow.

The curtains part, the trumpet blares,
And the eunuchs howl aloud;
And the gilt, swag-bellied idol glares
Insolent over the crowd.

"This is Rimmon, Lord of the Earth--
"Fear Him and bow the knee!"
And I watch my comrades hide their mirth
That rode to the wars with me.

For we remember the sun and the sand
And the rocks whereon we trod,

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poem by Rudyard Kipling
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When, Like a Running Grave

When, like a running grave, time tracks you down,
Your calm and cuddled is a scythe of hairs,
Love in her gear is slowly through the house,
Up naked stairs, a turtle in a hearse,
Hauled to the dome,

Comes, like a scissors stalking, tailor age,
Deliver me who timid in my tribe,
Of love am barer than Cadaver's trap
Robbed of the foxy tongue, his footed tape
Of the bone inch

Deliver me, my masters, head and heart,
Heart of Cadaver's candle waxes thin,
When blood, spade-handed, and the logic time
Drive children up like bruises to the thumb,
From maid and head,

For, sunday faced, with dusters in my glove,
Chaste and the chaser, man with the cockshut eye,

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poem by Dylan Thomas
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The Concubine

Chen Xiao Fei while the sun does shine
Was taken as the Emperor's concubine,
Just one of a hundred from the village Yang Ping
And chosen by the placing of a bright gold ring.

The Emperor's minions took her by the hand
And led her far away from the life she'd planned,
Her tears flew wide as she said zy jian
To the Ma ma, signing her away with a pen.

She said farewell to her friends from the school
Then they bathed her well in a rose-petalled pool,
They dressed her in the silks of a young girl's dream
And gave her to the Emperor, at just fourteen.

She lodged with the other of his concubines
Who taught her the rules she must follow all times
She never must climb in the top of his bed
But crawl beneath the sheet from his feet to his head.

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poem by David Lewis Paget
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To the Same

Though old in ill, the traitor sure should find
Some secret sting transfix his guilty mind.
Though bribes or favour may protect his fame,
Or fear restrain invectives on his name;
None 'quits himself -- his own impartial thought
Condemns -- and conscience shall record the fault.
Yet more, my friend! your happy state may bear
This disappointment, as below your care.
For what you have, return to Heav'n your thanks;
Few share the prizes, many draw the blanks.
Of breach of promise loudly you complain,
Have you then known the world so long in vain?
Worse than the iron age, our impious times
Have learn'd to laugh at most flagitious crimes.
Are you to know that 'tis a jest to find
Unthinking honesty pervade the mind?
At best, they say, the man is strangely odd
Who keeps his oath, and can believe a God.
This was the cant when Edward held the throne,
Before Spinoza wrote, or Hobbes was known;

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poem by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
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Tsunami Aftermath-Lividly living corpse

Their countless tears did definitely fill an ocean all right; but it was an ocean of unprecedented misery; with the wrath of the inexplicably crippling disaster transforming every trace of robust innocence into a mortuary of stinking death,

Their countless tears did definitely fill an ocean all right; but it was an ocean of hapless uncertainty; as boundless number of impeccable heads stared in distraught disbelief; for relentless hours towards empty sky,

Their countless tears did definitely fill an ocean all right; but it was an ocean of morbid blood; from which emanated the stench of pricelessly inimitable honesty hopelessly blended with the diabolical devil,

Their countless tears did definitely fill an ocean all right; but it was an ocean of unceasing sadness; in which perpetually floated innumerable lifeless bones of their enchanting siblings; children and immortal beloved,

Their countless tears did definitely fill an ocean all right; but it was an ocean of sadistic ridicule; where even the most eternally fructifying form of living kind was rendered to worthlessly lugubrious foam; salt and soap,

Their countless tears did definitely fill an ocean all right; but it was an ocean of parasitically ribald lechery; where man brutally asphyxiated his counterpart man; in an eventual bid to frenetically survive,

Their countless tears did definitely fill an ocean all right; but it was an ocean of cannibalistic hatred; from which spawned only the corridors of devilish hell; diffusing pain; pain and only intolerably inconsolable pain,

Their countless tears did definitely fill an ocean all right; but it was an ocean of bizarrely tawdry helplessness; where they were reduced to just infinitesimal frigid eunuchs; not able to do anything as the wave gobbled every trace of their celestial happiness,

Their countless tears did definitely fill an ocean all right; but it was an ocean of frenzied deliriousness; which apocalyptically shrieked the cry of ultimate extinction; the wholesome disappearance of this symbiotic planet from the map of this bountifully redolent Universe,

Their countless tears did definitely fill an ocean all right; but it was an ocean of unceasing remorsefulness; with the coffins of satanic oblivion ghoulishly transcending every conceivable happening in the atmosphere,

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poem by Nikhil Parekh
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Respondez!

RESPONDEZ! Respondez!
(The war is completed--the price is paid--the title is settled beyond
recall;)
Let every one answer! let those who sleep be waked! let none evade!
Must we still go on with our affectations and sneaking?
Let me bring this to a close--I pronounce openly for a new
distribution of roles;
Let that which stood in front go behind! and let that which was
behind advance to the front and speak;
Let murderers, bigots, fools, unclean persons, offer new
propositions!
Let the old propositions be postponed!
Let faces and theories be turn'd inside out! let meanings be freely
criminal, as well as results!
Let there be no suggestion above the suggestion of drudgery! 10
Let none be pointed toward his destination! (Say! do you know your
destination?)
Let men and women be mock'd with bodies and mock'd with Souls!
Let the love that waits in them, wait! let it die, or pass stillborn
to other spheres!

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poem by Walt Whitman
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Prima Noctis

Of human misery what’s left to tell
the single bead of the moon
that makes a lonely rosary of revolutions,
one face always turned away
as if it refused to look upon
its own imploring features
in the brutal, breathless, garish light of day,
or those of the earth
reviewed in the turning below?
I am nothing, a man, a microbe on a skull
picked clean by immaculate cannibals
whose hands are greased with brains,
my much vaunted, cultivated consciousness
and sterling will, free, or spontaneously
predetermined, the leaf of an afterthought
enhancing my passion for light
and periodic sentences.
Look where you will
and tell me this is evolution; tell me
this is that continuum of used mutations

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poem by Patrick White
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Song of Unending Sorrow.

China's Emperor, craving beauty that might shake an empire,
Was on the throne for many years, searching, never finding,
Till a little child of the Yang clan, hardly even grown,
Bred in an inner chamber, with no one knowing her,
But with graces granted by heaven and not to be concealed,
At last one day was chosen for the imperial household.
If she but turned her head and smiled, there were cast a hundred spells,
And the powder and paint of the Six Palaces faded into nothing.
...It was early spring. They bathed her in the FlowerPure Pool,
Which warmed and smoothed the creamy-tinted crystal of her skin,
And, because of her languor, a maid was lifting her
When first the Emperor noticed her and chose her for his bride.
The cloud of her hair, petal of her cheek, gold ripples of her crown when she moved,
Were sheltered on spring evenings by warm hibiscus curtains;
But nights of spring were short and the sun arose too soon,
And the Emperor, from that time forth, forsook his early hearings
And lavished all his time on her with feasts and revelry,
His mistress of the spring, his despot of the night.
There were other ladies in his court, three thousand of rare beauty,
But his favours to three thousand were concentered in one body.

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poem by Bai Juyi
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Baby Blue Sedan

A nice heart and a white suit and a baby blue sedan
And I am doing the best that I can
All the eunuchs, they were standing in rows
singing, "Please stud us out just as fast as you possibly can."
Sad song, last dance and no one knows who the band was
And Henry, you danced like a wooden Indian
Except this one mattered and I felt it had a spirit
And I shot the story because I didn't hear it that way
And it's hard to be a human being
And it's harder as anything else
And I'm lonesome when you're around
And I'm never lonesome when I'm by myself
And I miss you when you're around

song performed by Modest Mouse
Added by Lucian Velea
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