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Get Drunk! -- Charles Baudelaire

(Poem #141)Get Drunk!
 Always be drunk.
 That's it!
 The great imperative!
 In order not to feel
 Time's horrid burden
 bruise your shoulders,
 grinding you into the earth,
 Get drunk and stay that way.
 On what?
 On  wine, poetry, virtue, whatever.
 But get drunk.
 And if you sometimes happen to wake up
 on the porches of a palace,
 in the green grass of a ditch,
 in the dismal loneliness of your own room,
 your drunkenness gone or disappearing,
 ask the wind,
 the wave,
 the star,
 the bird,
 the clock,
 ask everything that flees,
 everything that groans
 or rolls
 or sings,
 everything that speaks,
 ask what time it is;
 and the wind,
 the wave,
 the star,
 the bird,
 the clock
 will answer you:
 "Time to get drunk!
 Don't be martyred slaves of Time,
 Get drunk!
 Stay drunk!
 On wine, virtue, poetry, whatever!"
-- Charles Baudelaire

Nothing is Lost -- Noel Coward

(Poem #140)Nothing is Lost
 Deep in our sub-conscious, we are told
 Lie all our memories, lie all the notes
 Of all the music we have ever heard
 And all the phrases those we loved have spoken,
 Sorrows and losses time has since consoled,
 Family jokes, out-moded anecdotes
 Each sentimental souvenir and token
 Everything seen, experienced, each word
 Addressed to us in infancy, before
 Before we could even know or understand
 The implications of our wonderland.
 There they all are, the legendary lies
 The birthday treats, the sights, the sounds, the tears
 Forgotten debris of forgotten years
 Waiting to be recalled, waiting to rise
 Before our world dissolves before our eyes
 Waiting for some small, intimate reminder,
 A word, a tune, a known familiar scent
 An echo from the past when, innocent
 We looked upon the present with delight
 And doubted not the future would be kinder 
 And never knew the loneliness of night.
-- Noel Coward

A Man Doesn't Have Time In His Life -- Yehuda Amichai

(Poem #139)A Man Doesn't Have Time In His Life
 A man doesn't have time in his life
 to have time for everything.
 He doesn't have seasons enough to have
 a season for every purpose. Ecclesiastes
 Was wrong about that.

 A man needs to love and to hate at the same moment,
 to laugh and cry with the same eyes,
 with the same hands to throw stones and to gather them,
 to make love in war and war in love.
 And to hate and forgive and remember and forget,
 to arrange and confuse, to eat and to digest
 what history
 takes years and years to do.

 A man doesn't have time.
 When he loses he seeks, when he finds
 he forgets, when he forgets he loves, when he loves
 he begins to forget.

 And his soul is seasoned, his soul
 is very professional.
 Only his body remains forever
 an amateur. It tries and it misses,
 gets muddled, doesn't learn a thing,
 drunk and blind in its pleasures
 and its pains.

 He will die as figs die in autumn,
 Shriveled and full of himself and sweet,
 the leaves growing dry on the ground,
 the bare branches pointing to the place
 where there's time for everything.
-- Yehuda Amichai

The Book of Pilgrimage, II, 22 -- Rainer Maria Rilke

(Poem #138)The Book of Pilgrimage, II, 22
 You are the future,
 the red sky before sunrise
 over the fields of time.

 You are the cock's crow when night is done,
 You are the dew and the bells of matins,
 maiden, stranger, mother, death.

 You create yourself in ever-changing shapes
 that rise from the stuff of our days --
 unsung, unmourned, undescribed,
 like a forest we never knew.

 You are the deep innerness of all things,
 the last word that can never be spoken.
 To each of us you reveal yourself differently:
 to the ship as coastline, to the shore as a ship.
-- Rainer Maria Rilke

Child -- Sylvia Plath

(Poem #137)Child
 Your clear eye is the one absolutely beautiful thing.
 I want to fill it with color and ducks,
 The zoo of the new
 Whose name you meditate--
 April snowdrop, Indian pipe,
 Little
 
 Stalk without wrinkle,
 Pool in which images
 Should be grand and classical
 
 Not this troublous
 Wringing of hands, this dark
 Ceiling without a star.
-- Sylvia Plath