Fun_People Archive
25 Sep
LIT BITS V3 #267

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From: Peter Langston <psl>
Date: Mon, 25 Sep 100 14:01:10 -0700
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Subject: LIT BITS V3 #267

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Excerpted-from: LITERARY CALENDAR V3 #267
From: ptervin@pent.yasuda-u.ac.jp

Today was Saturday, 23 September 2000; on this day,

139 years ago (1861),

     Poet Mary Coleridge is born.

138 years ago (1862),

     Count Leo Tolstoy, 34, marries Sophie Andreyevna Behrs, 18. They will
     produce 13 children in 17 years.

135 years ago (1865),

     Hungarian-born British novelist, Baroness Emmuska Orczy, is born in
     Tarnaors. The only child of Baron Felix Orczy, a noted composer and
     conductor, she will become famous in 1905 with the publication of _The
     Scarlet Pimpernel_.

109 years ago (1891),

     John Masefield, 13, goes down to the sea for the first time to serve
     as an apprentice aboard the training ship _Conway_.

104 years ago (1896),

     George Bernard Shaw advises Ellen Terry on how to perform Shakespeare::
     "Play _to_ the lines, _through_ the lines, but never _between_ the
     lines. There simply isn't time for it."

27 years ago (1973),

     In Santiago, Chilean poet, diplomat, and Marxist, Pablo Neruda, dies.
     His most widely read work remains the 1924 _Veinte poemas de amor y
     una cancion desesperada_ (_Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair_).

Today's poem:

                  We Have Lost Even

     We have lost even this twilight.
     No one saw us this evening hand in hand
     while the blue night dropped on the world.

     I have seen from my window
     the fiesta of sunset in the distant mountain tops.

     Sometimes a piece of sun
     burned like a coin between my hands.

     I remembered you with my soul clenched
     in that sadness of mine that you know.

     Where were you then?
     Who else was there?
     Saying waht?
     Why will the whole of love come on me suddenly
     when I am sad and feel you are far away?

     The book fell that is always turned to at twilight
     and my cape rolled like a hurt dog at my feet.

     Always, always you recede through the evenings
     towards where the twilight goes erasing statues.

                                                Pablo Neruda

© 2000 Peter Langston