OOC Prompt: Character Bio: 5 ...Poems
I absolutely refuse to do five movies. Having thought about it long and hard I could come up with absolutely nothing. Anyone who knows me well will know that I am not a movie fan, and while I can, if pressed, list a few good movies, none of them have anything to do with Thorn.
I lieu of this, I give you five poems Thorn adores.
Riddle #47 (from the Exeter Book)
I heard of a wonder, of words moth-eaten;
That is a strange thing, I thought, weird
That a man’s song be swallowed by a worm,
His binded sentences, bedside stand-by
Rustled in the night - and the robber-guest
Not one whit wiser for the words he had mumbled.
What Issa Heard
Two hundred years ago
Issa heard
The morning birds
Singing sutras
To this suffering world.
I heard them too,
This morning,
Which must mean
Since we will always have
A suffering world
We must also always
Have a song.
-David Budbill
England in 1819
An old, mad. Blind, despised and dying king -
Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow
Through public scorn - mud from a muddy spring;
Rulers who neither see, nor feel, nor know,
But leechlike to their fainting country cling,
Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow;
A people starved and stabbed in the untilled field -
An army, which liberticide and prey
Makes as a two-edged sword to all who wield;
Golden and sanguine laws which they tempt and slay;
Religion Christless, Godless - a book sealed;
A senate - Time’s worst statute unrepealed -
Are graves, from which a glorious phantom may
Burst, to illumine our tempestuous day.
-Percy Bysshe Shelley
The Pleasures of the Door
Kings do not touch doors.
They know nothing of this pleasure: pushing before one gently
Or brusquely one of those large familiar panels, then turning back to
Replace it - holding a door in one’s arms.
…The pleasure of grabbing the midriff of one of these tall obstacles
to a room by it’s porcelain node; that short clinch during which
movement stops, the eye widens, and the whole body adjusts to its
new surrounding.
With a friendly hand one still holds on to it, before closing it
Decisively and shutting oneself in - which the click of the tight but
Well-oiled spring pleasantly confirms.
-Francis Ponge
We Wear the Mask
We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,-
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,
And mouth with myriad subtleties.
Why should the world be otherwise,
In counting all our tears and sighs?
Nay, let them only see us, while
We wear the mask.
We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries
To thee from tortured souls arise.
We sing, but oh the clay is vile
Beneath our feet, and long the mile;
But let the world dream otherwise,
We wear the mask!
-Paul Laurence Dunbar
I lieu of this, I give you five poems Thorn adores.
Riddle #47 (from the Exeter Book)
I heard of a wonder, of words moth-eaten;
That is a strange thing, I thought, weird
That a man’s song be swallowed by a worm,
His binded sentences, bedside stand-by
Rustled in the night - and the robber-guest
Not one whit wiser for the words he had mumbled.
What Issa Heard
Two hundred years ago
Issa heard
The morning birds
Singing sutras
To this suffering world.
I heard them too,
This morning,
Which must mean
Since we will always have
A suffering world
We must also always
Have a song.
-David Budbill
England in 1819
An old, mad. Blind, despised and dying king -
Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow
Through public scorn - mud from a muddy spring;
Rulers who neither see, nor feel, nor know,
But leechlike to their fainting country cling,
Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow;
A people starved and stabbed in the untilled field -
An army, which liberticide and prey
Makes as a two-edged sword to all who wield;
Golden and sanguine laws which they tempt and slay;
Religion Christless, Godless - a book sealed;
A senate - Time’s worst statute unrepealed -
Are graves, from which a glorious phantom may
Burst, to illumine our tempestuous day.
-Percy Bysshe Shelley
The Pleasures of the Door
Kings do not touch doors.
They know nothing of this pleasure: pushing before one gently
Or brusquely one of those large familiar panels, then turning back to
Replace it - holding a door in one’s arms.
…The pleasure of grabbing the midriff of one of these tall obstacles
to a room by it’s porcelain node; that short clinch during which
movement stops, the eye widens, and the whole body adjusts to its
new surrounding.
With a friendly hand one still holds on to it, before closing it
Decisively and shutting oneself in - which the click of the tight but
Well-oiled spring pleasantly confirms.
-Francis Ponge
We Wear the Mask
We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,-
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,
And mouth with myriad subtleties.
Why should the world be otherwise,
In counting all our tears and sighs?
Nay, let them only see us, while
We wear the mask.
We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries
To thee from tortured souls arise.
We sing, but oh the clay is vile
Beneath our feet, and long the mile;
But let the world dream otherwise,
We wear the mask!
-Paul Laurence Dunbar