Auguries of Innocence: Poems
By Patti Smith
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About this ebook
Auguries of Innocence is the first book of poetry from Patti Smith in more than a decade. It marks a major accomplishment from a poet and performer who has inscribed her vision of our world in powerful anthems, ballads, and lyrics. In this intimate and searing collection of poems, Smith joins in that great tradition of troubadours, journeymen, wordsmiths, and artists who respond to the world around them in fresh and original language. Her influences are eclectic and striking: Blake, Rimbaud, Picasso, Arbus, and Johnny Appleseed. Smith is an American original; her poems are oracles for our times.
Patti Smith
Patti Smith is a writer, performer, and visual artist. She gained recognition in the 1970s for her revolutionary mergence of poetry and rock and was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2007. Her seminal album Horses, bearing Robert Mapplethorpe’s renowned photograph, hasbeen hailed as one of the top one hundred albums of all time. Her books include M Train, Witt, Babel, Woolgathering, The Coral Sea, and Auguries of Innocence.
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Book preview
Auguries of Innocence - Patti Smith
THE LOVECRAFTER
I saw you who was myself
slightly stooped whistling mouth
with leather sack and breeches brown
striding the naked countryside
with summer bones long and dry
into the breadth of our glad day
mid afternoon the longer night
as you tread bareheaded bright
I saw you a wraith bemoan
stir the fires of the ancient ones
scarred with sticks pome and haw
as the nectar for their script
I saw you walk the length of fields
far as the finger of Providence
far as the mounds we call hills
ranges cut from the heart of slate
I saw you dip into your sack
scattering seeds where they may
as the woodsman hews his way
through oak ash and variant pines
for writing desks that shall reflect
a sheaf of lines that speak of trees
all sober hopes required within
all drunkenness as sacred swims
I saw the book upon the shelf
I saw you who was myself
I saw the empty sack at last
I saw the branch your shadow cast
WORTHY THE LAMB SLAIN FOR US
On the edge of a pasture in a confusion of stones,
obscured by the long grass and floramour,
the footprint of horror cloven and drawn.
She had a beautiful name: freedom.
Pretty little chop. Unmarketable, light
the bleating of new life.
He loved her mouth, tiny feet dressed in pleats.
Hearing her cry, he picked her up by the stem
of her throat in his thick arms slick with dew.
And he, a governed soul, broad shouldered
with eyes like Blake, lamented who bred thee, nursed
thee on mead and flowers, as he ripped her apart.
The barn was burning an indifferent hell,
engulfing little maids in their curly coats.
The field and fell lay empty as the heart.
He called to his god gasping for breath
we abandoned the farms we culled,
cut the cord, incinerated our little ones.
We did it for love we did it for man,
the hawthorn and the cuckoo,
the footpaths of Cumbria.
We did it for a beautiful name.
freedom, baa baa baa,
nothing you could put your finger on.
SLEEP OF THE DODO
The dodo sleeping, dreaming of himself,
lost in his daily doings. His wife mounted
in a menagerie of mogul extremes.
His children born and slain for sport,
with nary a nod save the wind,
echoing an old dance tune.
Funny squawks: coracoo, coracoo
swept by mist into the grotto,
the sugar plantation. Funny beaks
bobbing the swamp’s dreaming pond.
Comic bodies washed up on the craggy
shore. Funny bones, then no more.
The sun hung, bled into the clouds.
God’s bloodshot eyes, such sad surprise.
The dodo awoke, and seeing them,
slowly