Najczęściej czytane ▸
Robert Louis Stevenson
Behold, as goblins dark of mien
And portly tyrants dyed with crime
Change, in the transformation scene,
At Christmas, in the pantomime,
Instanter, at the prompter's cough,
The fairy bonnets them, and they
Throw their abhorred carbuncles off
And blossom like the flowers in May.
— So mankind, to angelic eyes,
So, through the scenes of life below,
In life's ironical disguise,
A travesty of man, ye go:
But fear not: ere the curtain fall,
Death in the transformation scene
Steps forward from her pedestal,
Apparent, as the fairy Queen;
a porcupine puts
one foot in
As the crescent moon ripples and breaks apart, the mountaintop pool suddenly seems cavernous, its tree reflections trailing into the abyss. I stand to leave and the illusion passes. A bat nearly the same shade of darkness as the forest careens in and out of vision. The short path to the woods’ edge seems to have doubled in length, but this of course is another illusion. As is the bobcat quality of that snarl I just heard from the spruce grove.
The night makes everything grow: half-seen, fuzzy outlines dissolve, and the darkness itself becomes the only upward limit on size. Names and identities we wear by day become as loose-fitting as nightgowns or pajamas.
your gloved hands tugged at my waistband while
the magic hat swept me forwards,
and with that your trick began.
you placed me in a handmade box
of splinters and jagged nails;
trapped me inside with the click of a thousand locks
and finally disappeared.
but you're a master of deception,
an illusionist with no faults,
because just behind that curtain
you watched.
my hands bled.
my words blurred into a scream.
the crowd cheered
as you emerged with another copy of me.
and at the end of your waistcoat,
In this cold asylum
They drug me in the bottom
In this death of patients bed
I'm seeing my visions red
I know I may not be myself
Didn't you know, the illusion is ourself?
I never wanted to see my face
This is just a playing case
They never love to see me this
But I love being the abyss.
He halted in the wind, and--what was that
Far in the maples, pale, but not a ghost?
He stood there bringing March against his thought,
And yet too ready to believe the most.
‘Oh, that’s the Paradise-in-bloom,’ I said;
And truly it was fair enough for flowers
Had we but in us to assume in March
Such white luxuriance of May for ours.
We stood a moment so in a strange world,
Myself as one his own pretense deceives;
And then I said the truth (and we moved on):
A young beech clinging to its last year’s leaves.
you are real
but this world is made up
this world is real
but you are made up
you are made up
of opposing forces
united
like a symphony orchestra
being orchestrated
by the band leader
except the band leader doesn’t really exist
only the band is real
the dream castle the exotic land
expand to ordinary space
as you walk into them
almost bored the magic gone with
presence like a lover, or
Spring taken for granted
these tulips open
only seen with stopping,
wondering abandoning
mind's webs
this chocolate gone
with two quick bites
yet we go on exclaiming
chasing
inventing diet versions
not noticing how good dry bread
Everything is made
of little units, which
are made of even smaller
units. The smallest units,
undetectable by us, are
reality. All units larger
than these are rearrangement,
illusion, phony structure.
They constitute a kind
of molecular cinema
watched by us and
understood by God,
who is exempt from
the unit-arrangement.
This is how the wind shifts:
Like the thoughts of an old human,
Who still thinks eagerly
And despairingly.
The wind shifts like this:
Like a human without illusions,
Who still feels irrational things within her.
The wind shifts like this:
Like humans approaching proudly,
Like humans approaching angrily.
This is how the wind shifts:
Like a human, heavy and heavy,
Who does not care.
August sauntered down the mountain-side,
Dropping mottled, turbid wraiths of decay.
The air was like an old priest
Disrobing without embarrassment
Before the dark and candid gaze of night.
But these things brought no pause
To the saucily determined squirrel.
His eyes were hungrily upturned
To where the stars hung--icily clustered nuts
Dotting trees of solitude.
He saw the stars just over the horizon,
And they seemed to grow
On trees that he could reach.
So he scampered on, from branch to branch,
Wondering why the fairy nut-trees
Ran away from him.
To chase a never-reached mirage
Across the hot, white sand,
And choke and die, while gazing on
Its green and watered strand.
The mystic sits by the sacred stream
Watching the sun as it mounts the sky;
And life to him is a haunting dream
Or a motley pageant passing by.
Sorrow and joy go on their way,
Passion and lust and love and hate;
Only a band of mummers they,
Blindly led by the hand of fate.
Though the pageant is real and himself the dream,
Though men are born and strive and die,
Yet the mystic sits by the sacred stream
Watching the sun go down the sky.