The next meeting will be at 7.30, Wednesday, May 1, at
Coffee Corner. My original plan had been to see if we could conduct an
investigation of what is or isn’t poetry, coming from last month’s workshop.
The workshop didn’t quite work as I hoped, though I think it was fun. Mark
Shakespeare kindly provided at the event, though, an article about this
question of what
a poem, which I link to below, together with the poems referred to in it. This
might be interesting to discuss, and also of course the poems. I think we can
move on from this to share other poems we have read or written recently.
Jerome has his enormous dozy lion.
Myself, I have a cat, my Pangur Bàn.
What did Jerome feed up his lion with?
Always he's fat and fleecy, always
sleeping
As if after a meal. Perhaps a Christian?
Perhaps a lamb, or a fish, or a loaf of
bread.
His lion's always smiling, chin on paw,
What looks like purring rippling his face
And there on Jerome's escritoire by the
quill and ink pot
The long black thorn he drew from the
lion's paw.
Look, Pangur at the picture of the lion –
Not a mouser like you, not lean, not ever
Chasing a quill as it flutters over
parchment
Leaving its trail that is the word of God.
Pangur, you are so trim beside the lion.
- Unlike Jerome in the mouth of his desert
cave
Wrapped in a wardrobe of robes despite the
heat,
I in this Irish winter, Pangur Bàn,
Am cold, without so much as your pillow
case
Of fur, white with ginger tips on ears and
tail.
ii
My name is neither here nor there, I am
employed
By Colum Cille who will be a saint
Because of me and how I have set down
The word of God. He pays. He goes to
heaven.
I stay on earth, in this cell with the
high empty window,
The long light in summer, the winter
stars.
I work with my quill and colours, bent and
blinder
Each season, colder, but the pages fill.
Just when I started work the cat arrived
Sleek and sharp at my elbow, out of
nowhere;
I dipped my pen. He settled in with me.
He listened and replied. He kept my counsel.
iii
Here in the margin, Pangur, I inscribe
you.
Almost Amen. Prowl out of now and go down
Into time’s garden, wary with your tip-toe
hearing.
You’ll live well enough on mice and shrews
till you find
The next scriptorium, a bowl of milk. Some
scribe
Will recognise you, Pangur Bàn, and feed
you;
You’ll find your way to him as you did to
me
From nowhere (but you sniffed out your
Jerome).
Stay by him, too, until his Gospel’s done.
(I
linger over John, the closing verses,
You’re restless, won’t be touched. I’m
old. The solstice.)
Amen, dear Pangur Bàn. Amen. Be sly.
more familiar version, and closer as an actual translation is the following:
