The Treasure of Catalina Huanca (In English and Spanish)

June 30, 2008

Note: written after seeing the little adobe 16th century church San Sebastian, in San Jeronimo, by the mountains of Huancayo, Peru, after being taken there by the Wandering Quechua guide, Enrique (4-13-2005).

The Treasure of Catalina Huanca

Written by Dennis L. Siluk

There, by the lofty mountains fair

Hidden under the earth by Huancayo In San Jerónimo de Tunan-

Is Catalina’s treasure of gold!

Whereupon, the Spaniards killed

Atahualpa, the Inca King–; Hence, Catalina turned around to seek

And found-her new, sacred ground!…

And, a glutted stream swept-

This little adobe church Called San Sebastian-ever since

In the lofty mountains by Huancayo!…

Spanish Version Por Dennis L. Siluk

Translated by: Rosa and Minerva Peñaloza

Note: Escrito después de visitar la pequeña iglesia San Sebastián construida de adobe en el siglo 16, en San Jerónimo de Tunan, por las montañas de Huancayo, Perú, después que ser tomado allí por el Peregrino Quechua guía, Enrique (4-13-2005)

El Tesoro de Catalina Huanca

Allí, por las altas montañas

Ocultado bajo la tierra de Huancayo En San Jerónimo de Tunan-

¡Esta el tesoro de oro de Catalina!

The Gaul of La Laguna de Paca

June 24, 2008

Part One

I tell you a legend of long ago Of the sunken city of La Laguna de Paca, (Where I had met a lingering ghost) Within this region of Huancayo–Peru; Truth lies, but only the soul knows.

Part Two

So the legend goes, of long ago: During the rising of the full moon The Mermaid of La Laguna de Paca, appears And to the nearby towns folks, she echoes… Echoes: her cries and moans!!

Then when one thinks all is well– The enchanting rings, the rings…! Of the bells, the Great Bells, bells Of the sunken church of La Laguna de Paca Are heard by the folks of the town.

Part Three

But there is more to this legend: For it is said, wherein the dark night (The ink dark macabre star-lit nights) Wherein the Errieness of the full moon Ebbs across the Laguna Paca, gives birth, To the Great Bull,who scrotches the hillside

Scrotches the foliage to its bones…! Scrotches its with fire and brimstone.

Part Four

And now I tell you of my tale– A tale of that took place but a few days ago, By an embankmnment along the Laguna de Paca.

Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Dog

June 18, 2008

Emlyn Williams Theatre, Mold, North Wales: 20th February 2003

Clwyd Theatr Cymru commemorated the 50th anniversary of the death of the Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas (1914-1953) with a superb run of performances by a small but accomplished cast of actors.

Described in the programme as "A theatrical journey through the prose writing of Dylan Thomas", the production was created by Tim Baker, an Associate of the Royal National Theatre, who won the Manchester Evening News Best Visiting Production award in 1992 for the highly acclaimed To Kill a Mockingbird.

Although Thomas is best known for his ‘play for voices’, Under Milk Wood, his evocative poems such as Fern Hill and Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night are rarely overlooked when anthologies celebrating 20th century poetry are put together. Indeed, this mesmerizing interpretation of Thomas’s short stories could well be described as a rich fusion of prose and poetry. For example, in a scene crossing a river he speaks of, "slipping stepping stones" and early on in the piece he describes his "love" of words thus:

Death & the Supernatural: Poetry/Five Poems

June 12, 2008

Supernatural Poetry

Here are five poems,-what I call-death and supernatural poems. Perhaps a bit bizarre, a few stanzas may be, but with unfailing subtlety of course, and a ting of acuteness, but we have to hag on if we want a good ride:

1.

Evil’s Creation

Thou knowith evil clings To tender peace-; Nor does it heed one’s drowsy Un-enthralled grief?

But softly it darkens Twilight’s dunes-; With sprinkling shadows Straight from the moon.

O Night! Who giveth birth? To Evils plight? As mighty murmurs Reached my breast?:

"His name has no beginning And no end?!"

But why?! O why? Everlasting King, Have you created?! Such a thing?

As mighty murmurs Reached my breast?: "To see, whom you love The very best!…"

#609 4/1/05

2.

The First Depth

Struggling against unrestful skies The warlords of eternal darkness -unseen to life’s obvious eyes- Ebb and seek the prize, dominion!

‘The First depth,’ the silence of the deep Eternal legions with unrestful eyes The Abysses storm, uncircumcised The colossal ramparts now untied

‘The First Depth,’ with rival skies Here, gathers demonic and divine Now with storms, once hidden beyond Armies of defense, build their saga

Man Unbowed [A poem]

June 6, 2008

Man Unbowed

Unbowed by sin, the world of man, stands Upon his feet he gapes into the sky, The indifference of centuries within his eyes, And in his heart the curse of the old world. Who made him dead to love and God? A thing that breathes only for wants and needs, With a lack of emotion, a brother to the fox? Who tightened and pushed up his jagged brow? (To make him look so grand, so proud-so tall.) Who was it that produced his naked pulse? Who sucked out his soul from its frame?

Is this the handy work Satan made and gave? To have command over man as slave; To have him chase stars that never reach heaven; To have him cursed for time without end? Is this the revenge he dreamed for God and man? The one thrown out of heaven, into darkness: Down to earths ground and Hades, Hell?? There is no morbid thing worse than he More greedy with condemning man to Hell’s eternity More blind-hate with leaches and spells for mans fate- More filled with demonic revenge for him.

Three Poems [Lima; Judges and Evils Creation]

May 30, 2008

1.

Evil’s Creation

Thou knowith evil clings To tender peace-; Nor does it heed one’s drowsy Un-enthralled grief?

But softly it darkens Twilight’s dunes-; With sprinkling shadows Straight from the moon.

O Night! Who giveth birth? To Evils plight? As mighty murmurs Reached my breast?:

"His name has no beginning And no end?!"

But why?! O why? Everlasting King, Have you created?! Such a thing?

As mighty murmurs Reached my breast?: "To see, whom you love The very best!…"

#609 4/1/05

2.

Lima, City with the Stretched out Wings

It’s an ink-black night: no stars: no moon in sight Just dots of: red, green and white-white lights As the plane descends, descends, slides down On the long-drawn-out-flat lingering city of lights Flat as a pancake, lit up like a Christmas tree- The sleepless city, with its stretched out wings Stretching from the mountains to the sea- Winding through the valley’s, forests, and streams Stretching, stretching its naked wings-endlessly

As, I’m descending, down, over and around the city The city with stretched out winds-endless lights Down, down, behind, downward, it’s immune to me I’m just part of its evening, a baptism in its inky, sky

Famous Poets Quotations - Top 30 Poetry Quotations by Famous Poets

May 24, 2008

  • “For this reason poetry is something more philosophical and more worthy of serious attention than history.”– Aristotle

  • “Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one.”– W. H. Auden

  • “Eloquence is the poetry of prose.”– William C. Bryant

  • “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.”– Emily Dickinson

  • “How poetry comes to the poet is a mystery.”– Elizabeth Drew

  • “She opened up a book of poems and handed it to me written by an Italian poet from the 13th century and every one of them words rang true and glowed like burning coal pouring off of every page like it was written in my soul from me to you.”– Bob Dylan

  • “When a poet’s mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experiences.”– T S Eliot

  • “Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.”– Ralph Waldo Emerson

  • “Only poetry inspires poetry.”– Ralph Waldo Emerson

  • “Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.”– Robert Frost

  • “The man is either mad, or he is making verses.”– Horace

  • “Good religious poetry . . . is likely to be most justly appreciated and most discriminately relished by the undevout.”– A. E. Housman

  • “I did not believe political directives could be successfully applied to creative writing . . . not to poetry or fiction, which to be valid had to express as truthfully as possible the individual emotions and reactions of the writer.”– Langston Hughes

  • “I went for years not finishing anything. Because, of course, when you finish something you can be judged . . . I had poems which were re-written so many times I suspect it was just a way of avoiding sending them out.”– Erica Jong

  • “As I am a poet I express what I believe, and I fight against whatever I oppose, in poetry.”– June Jordan

  • “Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality.”– James Joyce

  • “Poetry should surprise by a fine excess and not by singularity –it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.”– John Keats

  • “Conventional wisdom notwithstanding, there is no reason either in football or in poetry why the two should not meet in a man’s life if he has the weight and cares about the words.”– Archibald MacLeish

  • “I see no reason for calling my work poetry except that there is no other category in which to put it.”– Marianne Moore

  • “I’ve never read a political poem that’s accomplished anything. Poetry makes things happen, but rarely what the poet wants.”– Howard Nemerov

  • “And he whose fustian’s so sublimely bad/ It is not poetry, but prose run mad.”– Alexander Pope

  • “I have written some poetry that I don’t understand myself.”– Carl Sandburg

  • “Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.”– Percy Bysshe Shelley

  • “Great poetry is always written by somebody straining to go beyond what he can do.”– Stephen Spender

  • “I owe everything to a system that made me learn by heart till I wept. As a result I have thousands of lines of poetry by heart. I owe everything to this.”– George Steiner

  • “Everything is complicated; if that we not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.”– Wallace Stevens

  • “Good poetry seems too simple and natural a thing that when we meet it we wonder that all men are not always poets. Poetry is nothing but healthy speech.”– Henry David Thoreau

  • “How do poems grow? They grow out of your life.”– Robert Penn Warren

  • “All good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity.”– William Wordsworth

  • “A poet’s autobiography is his poetry. Anything else can be only a footnote.”– Yevgeny Yevtushenko

  • The Time Has Come and Buzzing

    May 19, 2008

    Most of my poems are written late at night, often, as this one was, after I have turned out the lights to go to sleep. It seems that is the time when I am most creative. I hope you enjoy these two poems that talk a little bit about where my ideas come from.

    Buzzing

    My mind is buzzing as I try to sleep the words won’t rest all around me they creep. They cry to me with their siren song “just a few more lines, it won’t take long”. And so I succumb I pick up my pen I dash down a few words, I wait and then…. I try to sleep

    March 5, 2004 Fran Watson

    The Time Has Come

    Rocks

    May 11, 2008

    Take some time to stop and look at nature. Pick up a rock or two and think about where it might have started out and what it might have gone through to end up where you found it.

    Rocks

    The smoothest rock is the one that was in the roughest part of the stream, where it was tossed to and fro, bouncing from rock to rock or tree branch, losing a little of its roughness with each bang, until gradually it comes to rest in the calm, quiet sand at the edge of the stream. When you pick it up and feel its smoothness you can feel the vibrations of its tumultuous journey and know that despite the troubles you now face, you too will come to a calm and quiet place, your rough edges smoothed, and you will grant peace to those who hold you close. The energy you contain will speak to their hearts and minds and calm them, and they will realize that they too can have this peace, if only they will trust that God has their best interests at heart. We seek out the smooth stones because we know that they can easily skip across the surface of the water for a great distance. Those with rough edges quickly sink to the bottom - they have no longevity. A good “skipping stone” is a great find indeed. For it is in the heart of the stone that the strength is found. The outside edges are weak and break off easily, but the centre becomes purer and more durable as the roughness is ground away. So too our inner core becomes more durable as our rough edges are smoothed.

    Stones

    May 5, 2008

    As I picked up some of the polished gemstones in the rock store I began to think about what the stones looked like before they were polished. The store had several rocks on display showing the before and after and I realized that unless you knew what you were looking for, you could easily pass by a valuable gemstone. I also thought about how many times we pass by someone because they look “ordinary” and what we might be missing because we don’t get to know their “inner person”. Thus this poem.

    Stones

    Like stones in a polisher We are tossed to and fro, bouncing off each other while wearing off our rough edges. Sometimes the sharpness may hurt others, sometimes we are the ones being hurt, but as our edges become smoother, our surface becomes shinier. What was once hidden in plain grey rock begins to show its true colours. We may have paused to look at our fellow tumblers and dismissed some of them because of the drabness of their coats. But now they are the stones that shine the brightest. Think of the diamond. It is just a simple crystal until it is broken, cut and shaped to reveal its inner brilliance. We too are being tossed and turned cut and shaped, in order to reveal our brilliance. God the master stone cutter sees within our drab outer covering to the hidden beauty within. Thanks be to God.

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