|
From 'One Hundred Years of Solitude' by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
Fernanda felt a delicate wind of light pull the sheets out of her hands and open them up wide. Amaranta felt a mysterious trembling in the lace on her petticoats and she tried to grasp the sheet so that she would not fall down at the instant in which Remedios the Beauty began to rise. Ursula, almost blind at the time, was the only person who was sufficiently close to identify the nature of that determined wind and she left the sheets to the mercy of the light as she watched Remedios the Beauty waving goodbye in the midst of the flapping sheets that rose up with her, abandoning with her the environment of beetles and dahlias and passing through the air with her as four o clock in the afternoon came to and end and they were lost forever with her in the upper atmosphere where not even the highest flying birds of memory could reach her.'
From 'Captain Corelli's Mandolin', by Louis DeBernierres.
'How like a woman is a mandolin, how gracious and how lovely. In the evening when the dogs howl and the crickets chirr, and the huge moon hoists above the hills, and in Argostoli the searchlights search for false alarms, I take my sweet Antonia. I brush her strings softly, and I say to her, 'How can you be made of wood?' just as I see Pelagia and ask without speaking, 'Are you truly made of flesh? Is there not here a fire? A vanishing trace of angels? A something far estranged from one and blood?' I catch her eye in passing, her gaze so frank and quizzical, holding mine. Her head turns, a smile, an arch and knowing smile, and she is gone....I notice that her wrists remind me of the slender necks of mandolins, and her hand broadens from the wrist like the head that hold the pegs, and the place where the heel swells to make the soundbox gives the same contour as her line of neck and chin, and glows the same with the soft polish of youth and pine.'
To A Squirrel At Kyle-Na-No
COME play with me;
Why should you run
Through the shaking tree
As though I'd a gun
To strike you dead?
When all I would do
Is to scratch your head
And let you go.
A Prayer For Old Age
GOD guard me from those thoughts men think
In the mind alone;
He that sings a lasting song
Thinks in a marrow-bone;
From all that makes a wise old man
That can be praised of all;
O what am I that I should not seem
For the song's sake a fool?
I pray - for word is out
And prayer comes round again -
That I may seem, though I die old,
A foolish, passionate man.
The Seed Shop porphyria's lover |
