Not a poem - but an insight into Freud...
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Today's Flickr photo with the most hits - Head and Shoulders of a Girl (detail), 1990 - Lucian Freud. Seen at Tate Modern, Liverpool.
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Death Has No Terror (From "Trojan Women" 371-408)
Lucius Annaeus Seneca (4 BC - 65 AD)
Is it the truth that souls live on
beyond the buried flesh?
Or just a myth to drug weak hearts
with hope for something else?
When fingers of the one we love
ease our eyes shut forever,
when our last day blots out the light
of days that lay ahead,
and the grim urn has sealed away
the ash that was our self,
can we not give our being up
in the grave's gift of death?
Are we, poor things, condemned to live
through more existence yet?
Or is death something absolute,
no fraction of us left
when our soul, like a burst of air
commingling overhead
with vaporous and fleeting clouds,
flees with our last gasped breath
and the cremation torches' tongues
have licked our naked flesh?
All that the Sun sees on its rise
or in its setting glow,
all that the Sea's blue billows wash
with global ebb and flow,
is pulled by Pegasus-swift Time
doomward. All things must go.
As the cyclonic cosmos' whirl
the Zodiac we see,
and Sun, the Lord of Stars, spins out
the roll of centuries,
and Moon in witching orbit's arc
speeds to Her destiny,
as all things extant go the way
they must go, so do we.
He who has reached the stagnant waves
of Styx, the Netherstream
where gods are sworn to ceaseless truth,
has simply ceased to be.
As smoke from sputtering fire, we soil
the atmosphere, then fade.
As the rain-pregnant clouds you see
first darken the blue day
are scattered by the sudden Northwind's
chill blasts, then dissipate,
the souls that rule our flesh will flow
apart without a trace.
For there is nothing after death
and death is not a state
only the finish line of this
swift existential race.
Lay down your greed for a reward,
your fears of punishment.
When greedy Time and gnashing Chaos
devour us, we just end.
For death can be no partial thing.
When it destroys the flesh
it nullifies the soul. There is
no afterlife, no Hell,
no hellhound guardian at the gates
to block escape attempts,
no savage tyrant Lord who rules
the kingdom of the dead.
These are no more than hollow folktales
unworthy of attention,
fragments of fantasy and myth
turned nightmare and deception.
You ask "where will we go when we
are dead forevermore?"
You'll be with the unborn.
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Today's photo with the most hits: Seneca, Austrian Parliament, Vienna.
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Today's photo with the most hits: Napoleon's carriage. Captured at Waterloo by the Prussians, it's now on display at Chateau Malmaison.
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Impression de Voyage
Oscar Wilde
The sea was sapphire coloured, and the sky
Burned like a heated opal through air,
We hoisted sail; the wind was blowing fair
For the blue lands that to the eastward lie.
From the steep prow I marked with quickening eye
Zakynthos, every olive grove and creek,
Ithaca’s cliff, Lycaon’s snowy peak,
And all the flower-strewn hills of Arcady.
The flapping of the sail against the mast,
The ripple of the water on the side,
The ripple of girls’ laughter at the stern,
The only sounds:—when ’gan the West to burn,
And a red sun upon the seas to ride,
I stood upon the soil of Greece at last!
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Today's Flickr photo with the most hits: the Langharda Pass, near Sparta, Peloponnese.
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Little Things
Marion Strobel
Little things I’ll give to you—
Till your fingers learn to press
Gently
On a loveliness;
Little things and new—
Till your fingers learn to hold
Love that’s fragile,
Love that’s old.
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Today's Flickr photo with the most hits: taken at Pedoulas - the Church of Archangelos Michail, interior.
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Come Let Us Be Friends
Sarah Lee Brown Fleming
Come, let us be friends, you and I,
E’en though the world doth hate at this hour;
Let’s bask in the sunlight of a love so high
That war cannot dim it with all its armed power.
Come, let us be friends, you and I,
The world hath her surplus of hatred today;
She needeth more love, see, she droops with a sigh,
Where her axis doth slant in the sky far away.
Come, let us be friends, you and I,
And love each other so deep and so well,
That the world may grow steady and forward fly,
Lest she wander towards chaos and drop into hell.
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Today's Flickr photo with the most hits: this V2 rocket, at La Coupole, Wizernes, France.
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Today's photo with the most hits: the Holsworth Historic Site, Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado.
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Colorado
Carl Adamshick
My dream lives close to my lungs.
Sometimes I feel it as a pen
spilling ink in the dark purse
of my breathing. My body
lives here in Colorado,
in an apartment with a few plants.
I am what the experts refer to
as history, a small totality
making its way to the future.
In the evening, I inherit death
as an idea, as a subject I’ll be tested on.
Mid-afternoons, I take long walks.
I live by myself as the state lives
by itself in borders it had nothing
to do with. I, too, have a river.
If you ask, I’ll tell you all about the light.
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Naïve
Tim Seibles
I love you but I don’t know you
—Mennonite Woman
When I was seven, I walked home
with Dereck DeLarge, my arm
slung over his skinny shoulders,
after-school sun buffing our lunch boxes.
So easy, that gesture, so light—
the kind of love that lands like a leaf.
It was 1963.
We were two black boys
whose snaggle-toothed grins
held a thousand giggles.
Remember? Remember
wanting to play
every minute, as if that
was why we were born?
Those hands that bring us
shouting into this life
must open like a fanfare
of big band horns.
Though this world is nothing
like where we’d been,
we come anyway, astonished
as if to Mardi Gras in full swing.
There must be a time
when a child’s heart builds
a chocolate sunflower
while katydids burnish the day
with their busy wings.
This itching fury that
holds me now—this knowing
the early welcome
that once lived inside me
was somehow sent away:
how I talk myself back
into all the regular disguises
but still walk these streets
believing in the weather
of the unruined heart.
My friends, with crow’s feet
edging their eyes,
keep looking for a kinder
city, though they don’t
want to seem naïve.
When was the last time
you wrapped your arm
around someone’s shoulder
and walked him home?
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Today's Flickr photo with the most hits: the Chicago Art Institute, and a Metra train.
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"I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain." - Frank Herbert, DUNE.
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