Posted 01.02.12 in Writing

‘Music of the Spheres’ by Ruth Darlow

I know someone who can cut out powdered melon hearts
And smell people’s feelings,
Who can open any door in the spindled universe,
And who changes colour with emotion,
They emit a glowing light that attracts red-pepper butterflies,
Sipping nectar from flowers made of fire and flags
Which contain droplets of diamonds that sparkle
When the moon shines over the mellow swamps of the desert,
Who weighs more than a mountain topped with powdered smoke
Trapped within a chameleon’s heart,
I know someone who can stab a person without shedding a dewdrop
Or having to cut twice,
Who paints the truffled dreams of the dead and unborn,
And sings to the bright music of the cello
As it plays deep at the core of the planets.

Ruth Darlow wrote Music of the Spheres in response to Jack Underwood’s Why Should Anyone Care Challenge, in which Jack encourages us to think about how we can involve our readers.

Comments (1)

One Response to “‘Music of the Spheres’ by Ruth Darlow”

1. Tap says:

   March 20, 2012 at 3:46 am

   I would recommend Sylvia Fischerova’s last clliectoon in translation published by Bloodaxe The Swing in the Middle of Chaos which apart from its excellence as original poetry and translation reminds of the cultural and historical hinterland from which all European poetry (including English-language poetry) emerges. It’s also enjoyable to read without a brow furrowed by excessive learning.Ida Vitale’s Garden of Silica gives us a great South American poet from Uruguay whose poetry preserves the notion of a poem as a work of art in its own right without using political, gender etc issues as a validation of the work. Her poems survive some translationese to expand an English sensibility’s notion of what a poem can be.Christopher Pilling’s translations of all of Catullus in Springing from Catullus from Flambard gives us a definitive Catullus for our times with some spell-binding translations of the great poems and hugely enjoyable versions of the poems Catullus himself admitted were written to make old men stiff. Pilling himself is one of the most monstrously underrated contemporary English poets.

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