#Medbh McGuckian

[witchesroad]

ARYA STARK of ASOIAF ↬ she remembered her father saying that when the cold winds blow the lone wolf dies and the pack survives. he had it all backwards. arya, the lone wolf, still lived, but the wolves of the pack had been taken and slain and skinned.

[haveyoureadthispoem-poll]

"I’ve just been served a pomegranate: / it’s crimson, dripping with seeds— // a veritable Céad Míle Fáilte of drops of blood."

Read it here | Reblog for a larger sample size!

[violettesiren]

Frost hollows small areas of leaf in gardenless margins.

Wounded by the thought of nests expanding, they inspire devotion of a sort,

using this world as if not using it to the full, a risky limbo.

Front action on the loose-fitting stones and frost-broken rock over-divides itself

and puts the spent hops with their pinch of old seed off flowering.

Rust will devote itself entirely to that ringingly taut and ample root,

though they will come into flower together a close grey spring

if you study your windswept window carefully bearing their colours in mind

that would find the move too much if they did not answer to this blue

found between the bones: movement towards a touch, with two five-nerved lips

reflexed to form a star, or one indistinct nerve erect and desirable in your violet throat.

Closed Bells by Medbh McGuckian

[tubborucho]

Team Soulfire – And at the end, your smile will light up my way out

taglist: @pastelvangelion @smallz-o @salineroses @dynamicworms @cindersnows @deadfishisyeq @snyland @missstrawberry @frubbotoxicyuri @haloberry @mobcharacter255 @thecardboardbutterfly @avianchorus @therearethornsinthisgarden @qtubbo @an-egghead

dm me if you want in or out of taglist

credits:

1. “Turning the Moon into a Verb” Medbh McGuckian

2. N/A

3. https://thisisnthappiness.com/post/659498021147557888/bi-weekly-claudia-keep

4. “Still I Rise” Maya Angelou

5. “The Hours” Michael Cunningham

6. https://pin.it/64Sa0KJ

7. “Privilege” Beau Taplin

8. art: https://pin.it/7EhaynO quote: “The Curtain” Hayden Carruth

9. https://pin.it/7MqIEow

10. “44th Birthday Evening, at Harris’s” Ted Berrigan

[feedmeteaandoranges]

Medbh McGuckian

[loneberry]

Hamlet Gonashvili

The voice of Georgia, they say. I have never been to the high hills of the Caucasus Mountains, yet Hamlet Gonashvili's voice transports me there.

What snuffed out the voice of Hamlet Gonashvili? He fell from an apple tree, at the height of his fame.

Tsintskaro (წინწყარო): the name of a Georgian village that also means "at the spring water" -- love that.

*

Often when I am thinking about the mystery of the voice and the way it brings to life the presence of the other, I hear the lines from the Medbh McGuckian poem "Charcoal Angel":

it’s by his voice,

it’s in his voice that he dies

Have you ever listened to a recording of the voice of the dead? Suddenly you are overwhelmed by the presence of their now-absent being. People really do die in their voices. (That's what I was thinking when L played a recording at C's memorial, how uncanny it was, the dead rising in her voice.) No wonder inventors working on radio, telephone, and sound recording became spiritualists.

Thomas Edison came to the idea of inventing the “spirit phone”, a device that would allow the living to speak with the dead.

While inventors Guglielmo Marconi and Nikola Tesla were individually working with radio waves, they both picked up mysterious voices which they believed to be the voices of either the dead, or beings from outer space. Upon hearing this, Edison decided that he would be the first to find a way to communicate with the spirit world.

Edison never managed to build his spirit phone but in a sense, his phonograph started a lineage of devices that allow us to listen to and preserve the voices of the dead.

...

For Marconi, these voices were not lost but still undulated throughout the universe on sound waves.

[ukdamo]

The Aphrodisiac

Medbh McGuckian

She gave it out as if it were

A marriage or a birth, some other

Interesting family event, that she

Had finished sleeping with him, that

Her lover was her friend. It was his heart

She wanted, the bright key to his study,

Not the menacings of love. So he is

Banished to his estates, to live

Like a man in a glasshouse; she has taken to

A little cap of fine white lace

In the mornings, feeds her baby

In a garden you could visit blindfold

For its scent alone:

But though a ray of grace

Has fallen, all her books seem as frumpish

As the last year’s gambling game, when she

Would dress in pink taffeta, and drive

A blue phaeton, or in blue, and drive

A pink one, with her black hair supported

By a diamond comb, floating about

Without panniers. How his most

Caressing look, his husky whisper suffocates her,

This almost perfect power of knowing

More than a kept woman. The between-maid

Tells me this is not the only secret staircase.

Rumour has it she’s taken to rouge again.

[whatpseudonymsaid]

A timeless winter / will go on taking shape in me

Medbh McGuckian, “Turning the Moon into a Verb”

[poem-today]

A poem by Medbh McGuckian

The Sofa

Do not be angry if I tell you your letter stayed unopened on my table for several days. If you were friend enough to believe me, I was about to start writing at any moment; my mind was savagely made up, like a serious sofa moved under a north window. My heart, alas,

is not the calmest of places. Still it is not my heart that needs replacing: and my books seem real enough to me, my disasters, my surrenders, all my loss. . . . Since I was child enough to forget that you loathe poetry, you ask for some— about nature, greenery, insects, and, of course,

the sun—surely that would be to open an already open window? To celebrate the impudence of flowers? If I could interest you instead in his large, gentle stares, how his soft shirt is the inside of pleasure to me, why I must wear white for him, imagine he no longer trembles

when I approach, no longer buys me flowers for my name day. . . . But I spread on like a house, I begin to scatter to a tiny to-and-fro at odds with the wear on my threshold. Somewhere a curtain rising wonders where I am, my books sleep, pretending to forget me.

Medbh McGuckian

[brauronia]

My heart, alas, / Is not the calmest of places.

Medbh McGuckian.

[kenneturner]

White-lined Sphinx Moth — Photo-Artistry White-lined Sphinx Moth -- Photo-Artistry by kenne "I blush blue and exemplary as it zips down to the river,

[gymnasiumexcess]

Currently reading: Blaris Moor by Medbh McGuckian (2016) Great way to start National Poetry Month!

[violettesiren]

Her Muse means water, the moisture on the banks, which can be awakened by a drop of oil. Her hair is bound by disturbing fidelity, hands lingering around her neck make her shoulder the shape of the island, sprinkle a balsam that spasms the clouds.

He had won her in an archery contest, a tame stag who wore pearl earrings descended from a work of art, the head, though not the body, painted from life. Cries of animals hunted centuries earlier took possession of the mountain.

Apples tended by nymphs of the evening and effortlessly harvested had been the earth’s wedding present, the losers in the singing contest mutated into magpies. She gave birth as a myrrh tree narrated across forty-four north wall windows. Were it not for her exhausted transformations

she would know the hedge behind the Muses is of unchanging laurel and resists fire.

The Girl Who Turned into a Sunflower by Medbh McGuckian

[a-poets-darling]

A timeless winter / will go on taking shape in me.

Medbh McGuckian, from The Flower Master: Poems; "Turning the Moon into a Verb,"

(happy autumn to everyone out there also we're now 26k+ strong🥺🥺 at this point I don't even know how to convey my gratitude to all of you. Thank you seems like such a small word for all the happiness you guys bring into my life every day. Keep showering your love on this girl, I am so grateful for you alll , also don't forget to follow me on my Instagram too @a.poets darling here

[hundredpocketed]

Medbh McGuckian 💌

[loneberry]

The Girl Who Turned into a Sunflower

Her Muse means water, the moisture on the banks,

which can be awakened by a drop of oil.

Her hair is bound by disturbing fidelity,

hands lingering around her neck

make her shoulder the shape of the island,

sprinkle a balsam that spasms the clouds.

He had won her in an archery contest,

a tame stag who wore pearl earrings

descended from a work of art, the head,

though not the body, painted from life.

Cries of animals hunted centuries earlier

took possession of the mountain.

Apples tended by nymphs of the evening

and effortlessly harvested had been the earth’s

wedding present, the losers in the singing contest

mutated into magpies. She gave birth as a myrrh tree

narrated across forty-four north wall windows.

Were it not for her exhausted transformations

she would know the hedge behind the Muses

is of unchanging laurel and resists fire.

–Medbh McGuckian, from My Love Has Fared Inland (2010)

.

.

This is too much. A poem about a girl who turns into a sunflower that begins “Her Muse means water”? Lord. I bow to the great Medbh McGuckian.

“The poem’s title refers to the Greek mythical figure Clytie, whose tragic love for the sun god, Helios, led to her transformation into a sunflower. The series of allusions to mythical transformations of women, bookended by water and the paradoxically ‘unchanging laurel,’ meta-poetically refers to both the mutability and the permanence of the poetic form.”

Actually, Clytie was turned into a heliotrope, not a sunflower. I allude to this in one of my poems when I write: What is the distance between tournesol and turnsole, a whole mythology erected on a false recognition—tournesol being French for sunflower, while turnsole is the English word for heliotrope. (Yet I’m grateful for this mistake.)