Today is World Poetry Day, a global celebration of verse.
You might be able to swap your poetic musings for coffee today!
As part of Reading Ireland Month, I have chosen “Tractatus” by the wonderful Irish poet Derek Mahon.
The short poem is a heady mix that encompasses Wittgenstein, Greek myth, and a famed historian of the Roman Empire.
‘The world is everything that is the case.’
From the fly giving up in the coal-shed
To the Winged Victory at Samothrace.
Give blame, praise, to the fumbling God
Who hides, shame-facedly, His aged face;
Whose light retires behind its veil of cloud.
The world, though, is also so much more –
Everything that is the case imaginatively.
Tacitus believed mariners could hear
The sun sinking into the western sea;
And who would question that titanic roar,
The steam rising wherever the edge may be?
The Fluff Is Raging 