Three sapphics for bees in winter (3)
Even if you’re
not into gardening,
you can
Make your garden
bee-friendly, leaving
piles of
Leaves and branches,
carefully shunning
any
Plant litter raking.
#poetry
Three sapphics for bees in winter (1)
Bees need nectar.
Plant winter bloomers,
Snowdrops,
Hellebores, and
aconites. Choose a
sunny
Spot to plant them,
and it will coax them
into
Opening fully.
#poetry
Three sapphics for bees in winter (2)
Care for wayward
queen bumblebees in
winter:
Relocate her
carefully to a
flower;
Offer her a
mixture of sweetened
water
Placed in the sunshine.
#poetry
Be: let it, let it, let it, let it, there must an answer, let it
— The Beatles factorised
Be: to, or not to?
— Shakespeare shortened
Sapphic juxtaposing views on juxtaposition from Calvert Watkins (How to Kill a Dragon) and Bashō (Skeleton in the Fields)
For some time, I’ve
come to believe that surface
formula is
not very far from deeper
theme. The hills of
Yoshino are Mount Lu, when
seen from this standpoint.
#poetry
…reading an Observer article reporting on the trial of Daniel Graham and Adam Carruthers, who together sawed down the historic Sycamore Gap tree, through the ‘Alpera bee stencil’
raged by clippings and video
now lit
para hum
driver
believer than
thou we talked dom
sheriff’s Sycamore
#poetry
Mesostic on a police interview with Daniel Graham, who sawed down a sycamore tree with Adam Carruthers
righT
rigHt
copE
saYing
fuCk
All
Morning
thE
Tomorrow
wHy
rEcall
You
nightS
Ago
What
typE
useD
#poetry
Sapphic on Beekeepers, for Bee Wilson, author of The Hive
First there is the beekeeper scholar-student.
Then there is the showman, parading courage.
Finally, the sage, who submits to nature,
finding life’s honey.
#poetry #beekeeping
Sapphic: Rilke explains his purpose in writing the Duino Elegies in a letter to his Polish translator
Bees of the invisible
wildly gath’ring
honey of the visible
our task is to
imprint deeply, painfully,
passionately
all this we ruined
#poetry #Rilke
Springtime concrete poem
(… on USAID, February 2025)
the
ca
tki
n
s
were still
ha
ng
in
g
from the
br
an
ch
e
s
when the foresters
lopped off the boughs
#usaid #poetry
Sapphic for Angela Merkel, Davos, 2013
Population, less than a tenth the
global;
GDP, approximately a
quarter;
Social welfare spending, a half or
greater:
Liberal Europe.
#poetry
Link to recent canvas from Anselm Kiefer https://ropac.net/artists/30-jules-de-balincourt/works/13720-anselm-kiefer-wer-jetzt-kein-haus-hat-baut-sich-keines-2021/
Link to recent canvas from Anselm Kiefer https://ropac.net/artists/30-jules-de-balincourt/works/13721-anselm-kiefer-wer-jetzt-kein-haus-hat-baut-sich-keines-2021/
Link to recent canvas from Anselm Kiefer https://ropac.net/artists/30-jules-de-balincourt/works/13610-anselm-kiefer-wer-jetzt-kein-haus-hat-baut-sich-keines-2021/
Link to recent canvas from Anselm Kiefer https://ropac.net/artists/30-jules-de-balincourt/works/13719-anselm-kiefer-wer-jetzt-kein-haus-hat-baut-sich-keines-2021/
Stanza on section 188 of the UK Housing Act 1996 requiring Local Authorities to relieve homelessness
Be,
whoever has no house now will,
if they’re unusually at risk.
The honka is Rainer Maria Rilke’s ‘Autumn Day’ (tr. M. Hamburger), and canvases by Anselm Kiefer titled ‘Wer jetzt kein Haus hat’
Sapphic: A Guessing Game
Anakin and Padmé are
naming all the
unseen singing birds on the
Naboo lakeshores.
Padmé knows their songs, and their
names, and folk names.
He must just guess them.
#poetry
The material on the left is from Bernstein, C., Blood on the cutting room floor, in Content's Dream: Essays 1975-1984, which is about ‘dysraphic poetry’ and yes it does involve Frankenstein! 👏
The material on the right is from elsewhere.
The poem is excerpted from www.amazon.com/Symphony-No-...
photo over a garden fence and evergreen foliage of a blue slide under a powdering of snow in my village
even the path I
traveled in my dreams has now
vanished blue slides
at rest under a powdering of
snow in my village
The honka is Shinkokinshū 673 by Fujiwara no Ariie (transl. Laurel Rasplica Rodd)
#poetry
Sapphic on the construction of the second Temple of Apollo at Delphi
Bring your wings, 0
birds; and you bees
your beeswax.
Sweep away the
branches of bay
from Tempe.
Raise Apollo’s
sanctuary,
extend it
up, from the chthonic.
#poetry
truth will be attained by him only when he takes two different objects, states the connexion between them … and encloses them in the necessary links of a well-wrought style
Time Regained - Proust
… reframing Dryden’s Virgil in a sapphic
Watch! The more he varies his
forms, restrain him
more with stricter care, until
tiring, lastly
turns to his true shape again.
Ask then, firmly,
Where the bees come from.
#poetry
blue slide at rest through the barren trees
when I see the blue
slide at rest through the barren
trees it is clear to
me that autumn has come and
taken control of my heart
The honka is the anonymous Kokinshū 184 (transl.Laurel Rasplica Rodd in Shinkokinshū 592)
Dysraphic sapphic for Viktor Orbán
Pindar’s hymns of
praise, like a bee,
flit here, there.
Haiku too, though
brief, have their sharp
disjunctions.
Who would blame the
bison’s precarity on
thirsting for freedom?
#poetry
🍎🌿 Just dropped a fresh essay on J.H. Prynne's Orchard 🍊🍒 — explore the juicy metaphors, ripe language, and fruit-laden imagery 🍇🍏 Dive into the lush garden of poetic meaning! 🍉🍑 #Poetry
justknecht.medium.com/beginning-an...
… on bees tending to visit flowers of only one type during a foraging trip
Apis mellifera is
strongly constant
In its choice of flower, but
when and whether
Flower constancy has a
profit motive
Is in contention.
#poetry
The Real Glass Bead Game - an update on the latest developments in this emerging new genre for the creative development of ideas
justknecht.medium.com/the-real-gla...
… to puff the recently completed reworking of an essay which has been rankling for a while
pointing at the moon
seeking what the ancients sought
but what’s there to see
new material, old concepts
linking film and poetry
#poetry #waka
justknecht.medium.com/the-loom-of-...
FOR YASMINE,
WINNER OF SILVER IN JAVELIN
Greater fools may
value the gold. So
let them.
Best is silver,
useful beyond its
value.
Godless girl, your
javelin flies like
glory
written on
blue sky.
#poetry
… Richard Hunter reading Sarah Nooter’s reading of Sappho fr. 31 as preserved by Longinus
Layered sediments, across
generations,
languages and cultures, of
reading practice
are themselves the mark of a
lasting search for
something that’s lasting.
#poetry #sapphic @thetls.bsky.social
… on how bees experience light differently
Trichromatic
vision, but no red:
rather
ultraviolet
light, where a flower’s
petal
iridesces,
changing with viewpoint,
through those
thousands of
lenses.
#poetry
Cezanne turns a bottle into a cylinder but I ... make a bottle — a particular bottle — out of a cylinder.
— Juan Gris
… on the discovery of the ‘queen bee’ by Luis Mendez de Torres (1586) and its denial by others
‘King bee’ and the
workers all proven
female,
some refused to
recognise that in
nature
females would be
leading and central,
with the
male at the
bottom.
#poetry