Cloud Poetry

Jorge Luis Borges’ collected short stories

Be as true to each other as this dial is to the sun.

Begone about Thy business.

Come along and grow old with me; the best is yet to be.

Hours fly, Flowers die. New days, New ways, Pass by. Love stays.

Hours fly, Flowers bloom and die. Old days, Old ways pass. Love stays.

I only tell of sunny hours.

I count only sunny hours.

Let others tell of storms and showers, I tell of sunny morning hours.

Let others tell of storms and showers, I'll only count your sunny hours.

Life is but a shadow: the shadow of a bird on the wing.

Self-dependent power can time defy, as rocks resist the billows and the sky.

Time, like an ever-rolling stream, bears all its sons away.

Today is Yesterday's Tomorrow

When I am gone, mark not the passing of the hours, but just that love lives on.

The Concern of the Rich and the Poor

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A follower of Epicurus, Lucretius believed the world to be composed of tiny atoms moving in a void and viewed life in terms of pleasure and pain, representing good and bad.

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“The Signature of All Things” by Jacob Böhme, who suggests that God marked objects with a sign, a “signature” for their purpose: the concept that every object in the real world has some hidden meaning, and particularly how these signatures interact.

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JG Ballard’s dystopian novel set in a waterlogged London

Notes on Invisibility in a Time of Transparency by Akiko Busch

If ever there was a writer in flight from his name, it was Fernando Pessoa. Pessoa is the Portuguese word for “person,” and there is nothing he less wanted to be. Again and again, in both poetry and prose, Pessoa denied that he existed as any kind of distinctive individual. “I’m beginning to know myself. I don’t exist,” he writes in one poem. “I’m the gap between what I’d like to be and what others have made of me. . . . That’s me. Period.” ... “Through these deliberately unconnected impressions I am the indifferent narrator of my autobiography without events, of my history without a life. These are my Confessions and if I say nothing in them it’s because I have nothing to say.” - Adam Kirsch, New Yorker, Aug 2017

'We wear the helmet when our locks are grey.'

We are they who are so far from indulging in any leisure until we die, that if circumstances permit it, we do not allow ourselves to be at leisure even when we are dying.

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Footprints On The Sands Of Time

Tell me not, in mournful numbers,

Life is but an empty dream! –

For the soul is dead that slumbers,

And things are not what they seem.

Life is real! Life is earnest!

And the grave is not its goal;

Dust thou art, to dust returnest,

Was not spoken of the soul.

Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,

Is our destined end or way;

But to act, that each to-morrow

Find us farther than to-day.

Art is long, and Time is fleeting,

And our hearts, though stout and brave,

Still, like muffled drums, are beating

Funeral marches to the grave.

Trust no Future, howe’er pleasant!

Let the dead Past bury its dead!

Act, — act in the living Present!

Heart within, and God o’erhead!

Lives of great men all remind us

We can make our lives sublime,

And, departing, leave behind us

Footprints on the sands of time;

Footprints, that perhaps another,

Sailing o’er life’s solemn main,

A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,

Seeing, shall take heart again.

Let us, then, be up and doing,

With a heart for any fate;

Still achieving, still pursuing,

Learn to labor and to wait.

Classic poem by T.S. Eliot written in 1922, The Waste Land is in part personal, the voices projected universal. Eliot later denied that he had large cultural problems in mind, but, nevertheless, in The Waste Land he diagnosed the malaise of his generation and indeed of Western civilization in the 20th century.