poets and their poems

Passion for Solitude - By CESARE PAVESE (Translated by GEOFFREY BROCK)

2012-01-11T08:11:00.000-08:00

I'm eating a little supper by the bright window.
The room's already dark, the sky's starting to turn.
Outside my door, the quiet roads lead,
after a short walk, to open fields.
I'm eating, watching the sky—who knows
how many women are eating now. My body is calm:
labor dulls all the senses, and dulls women too.

Outside, after supper, the stars will come out to touch
the wide plain of the earth. The stars are alive,
but not worth these cherries, which I'm eating alone.
I look at the sky, know that lights already are shining
among rust-red roofs, noises of people beneath them.
A gulp of my drink, and my body can taste the life
of plants and of rivers. It feels detached from things.
A small dose of silence suffices, and everything's still,
in its true place, just like my body is still.

All things become islands before my senses,
which accept them as a matter of course: a murmur of silence.
All things in this darkness—I can know all of them,
just as I know that blood flows in my veins.
The plain is a great flowing of water through plants,
a supper of all things. Each plant, and each stone,
lives motionlessly. I hear my food feeding my veins
with each living thing that this plain provides.

The night doesn't matter. The square patch of sky
whispers all the loud noises to me, and a small star
struggles in emptiness, far from all foods,
from all houses, alien. It isn't enough for itself,
it needs too many companions. Here in the dark, alone,
my body is calm, it feels it's in charge.

The Darker Sooner BY CATHERINE WING

2011-12-12T05:35:00.001-08:00

Then came the darker sooner,
came the later lower.
We were no longer a sweeter-here
happily-ever-after. We were after ever.
We were farther and further.
More was the word we used for harder.
Lost was our standard-bearer.
Our gods were fallen faster,
and fallen larger.
The day was duller, duller
was disaster. Our charge was error.
Instead of leader we had louder,
instead of lover, never. And over this river
broke the winter’s black weather.

Catherine Wing, "The Darker Sooner" from The Best American Poetry 2010. Copyright © 2010 by Catherine Wing.

The Hinge Poem: Dorianne Laux

2011-11-15T00:31:00.000-08:00

WHO NEEDS US?

The quiet, the bitter, the bereaved,
the going forth of us, the coming home,
the drag and pull of us, the tome and teem
and tensile greed of us, the opening
and closing of us, our eyes, in sleep,
our crematorium dreams?

The brush of us one against another,
the crumple on the couch of us,
the spring in our step, the sequestered dance
in front of the cracked mirrors of us,
our savage suffering, our wobbly ladders
of despair, the drenched seaweed-green
of our tipped wineglass hearts, our wheels
and guitars, white spider bites blooming
on our many-colored skins, the din
of our nerves, our pearl onion toes
and orangey fingers, our effigies
and empty bellies, our plazas
of ache and despair, our dusky faces
round as dinner plates, our bald pates,
our doubt, our clout, our bold mistakes?

Who needs the footprints of us,
the glimpse of us in a corridor of stars,
who sees the globes of our breath
before us in winter, the angels
we make in the stiff snow,
the hack and ice of us, the glide
and gleam and busted puzzle of us,
the myth and math of us,
the blue bruise and excuse of us,
who will know the magnified
magnificence of us, could there be
too many of us, the clutch and strum
and feral singing of us, the hush of us,
who will hear the whisker of silence
we will leave in our wake?

(C) Dorianne Laux

"The Dream" by Louise Bogan

2011-10-09T10:42:00.001-07:00

O God, in the dream the terrible horse began
To paw at the air, and make for me with his blows,
Fear kept for thirty-five years poured through his mane,
And retribution equally old, or nearly, breathed through his nose.

Coward complete, I lay and wept on the ground
When some strong creature appeared, and leapt for the rein.
Another woman, as I lay half in a swound
Leapt in the air, and clutched at the leather and chain.

Give him, she said, something of yours as a charm.
Throw him, she said, some poor thing you alone claim.
No, no, I cried, he hates me; he is out for harm,
And whether I yield or not, it is all the same.

But, like a lion in a legend, when I flung the glove
Pulled from my sweating, my cold right hand;
The terrible beast, that no one may understand,
Came to my side, and put down his head in love.

****

Mirror by Sylvia Plath

2011-08-06T11:02:00.000-07:00

I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
Whatever I see I swallow immediately
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.
I am not cruel, only truthful --
The eye of a little god, four-cornered.
Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.
It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long
I think it is part of my heart. But it flickers.
Faces and darkness separate us over and over.

Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,
Searching my reaches for what she really is.
Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.
I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.
She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.
I am important to her. She comes and goes.
Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.
In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.

*****
http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/sylviaplath/1413

'Poems'

2011-08-04T01:01:00.001-07:00

When you come back to me
it will be crow time
and flycatcher time,
with rising spirals of gnats
between the apple trees.
Every weed will be quadrupled,
coarse, welcoming
and spine-tipped.
The crows, their black flapping
bodies, their long calling
toward the mountain;
relatives, like mine,
ambivalent, eye-hooded;
hooting and tearing.
And you will take me in
to your fractal meaningless
babble; the quick of my mouth,
the madness of my tongue.

~ Ruth Stone

Why It Often Rains in the Movies by Lawrence Raab

2011-05-17T11:19:00.000-07:00

Because so much consequential thinking
happens in the rain. A steady mist
to recall departures, a bitter downpour
for betrayal. As if the first thing
a man wants to do when he learns his wife
is sleeping with his best friend, and has been
for years, the very first thing
is not to make a drink, and drink it,
and make another, but to walk outside
into bad weather. It's true
that the way we look doesn't always
reveal our feelings. Which is a problem
for the movies. And why somebody has to smash
a mirror, for example, to show he's angry
and full of self-hate, whereas actual people
rarely do this. And rarely sit on benches
in the pouring rain to weep. Is he wondering
why he didn't see it long ago? Is he wondering
if in fact he did, and lied to himself?
And perhaps she also saw the many ways
he'd allowed himself to be deceived. In this city
it will rain all night. So the three of them
return to their houses, and the wife
and her lover go upstairs to bed
while the husband takes a small black pistol
from a drawer, turns it over in his hands,
then puts it back. Thus demonstrating
his inability to respond to passion
with passion. But we don't want him
to shoot his wife, or his friend, or himself.
And we've begun to suspect
that none of this is going to work out,
that we'll leave the theater feeling
vaguely cheated, just as the movie,
turning away from the husband's sorrow,
leaves him to be a man who must continue,
day after day, to walk outside into the rain,
outside and back again, since now there can be
nowhere in this world for him to rest.

(C)Lawrence Raab

It was supposed to rain today by Weam Namou

2011-05-17T08:06:00.000-07:00

It was supposed to rain today,
but it’s warm and sunny instead.
I sit on the porch to have my
morning coffee, all alone,
with no one to call my name
to order apple juice or screach, “Boula”
the Iraqi word for urine.

I’ve taken one, maybe two sips of my favorite drink,
Nes Café, a dash of sugar and milk,
when I hear the laughing voices
of my husband and daughter echo from inside the house.
He comes out, carrying her over his shoulders
like a sack of rice.
She is still in her pajamies, holding onto her blanket.

He instructs me to sit elsewhere.
There are bees in the barbecue grill beside me.
I move the chair to another place,
then do the same with my coffee cup,
the novel I’m reading, the journal I plan to write in,
the cell and home phone
I’ve taken outside so that it will
not wake anyone up when it rings.

He removes the cover off the barbecue grill.
Inside a honeycomb has been built.
A bright yellow bee comes to it.
I take a deep breath, close my eyes to pray.
“You’re falling asleep!” I hear an elder warn.
I’m annoyed. It’s an elder who is staying with us for a bit.

He brings over a scrub brush
bangs the honeycomb, then the bee.
The honeycomb falls to the ground,
the bee is dead. A second bee flies away.

I pick up the honeycomb and observe there’s no honey yet.
I think… of the people whose plans are spoiled
due to them being an inconvenience, or for whatever other reason,
to another group of humans who are so mighty
they can, with one bang, change the outcome of the weak one’s future.

I throw the honeycomb, go inside to prepare a breakfast of cheese and bread.

(C) Weam Namou

2011-04-20T01:27:00.000-07:00

The End and the Beginning
BY WISŁAWA SZYMBORSKA
TRANSLATED BY JOANNA TRZECIAK

After every war
someone has to clean up.
Things won’t
straighten themselves up, after all.

Someone has to push the rubble
to the side of the road,
so the corpse-filled wagons
can pass.

Someone has to get mired
in scum and ashes,
sofa springs,
splintered glass,
and bloody rags.

Someone has to drag in a girder
to prop up a wall.
Someone has to glaze a window,
rehang a door.

Photogenic it’s not,
and takes years.
All the cameras have left
for another war.

We’ll need the bridges back,
and new railway stations.
Sleeves will go ragged
from rolling them up.

Someone, broom in hand,
still recalls the way it was.
Someone else listens
and nods with unsevered head.
But already there are those nearby
starting to mill about
who will find it dull.

From out of the bushes
sometimes someone still unearths
rusted-out arguments
and carries them to the garbage pile.

Those who knew
what was going on here
must make way for
those who know little.
And less than little.
And finally as little as nothing.

In the grass that has overgrown
causes and effects,
someone must be stretched out
blade of grass in his mouth
gazing at the clouds.
Wislawa Szymborska, “The End and the Beginning” from Miracle Fair, translated by Joanna Trzeciak. Copyright © 2001 by Joanna Trzeciak. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Source: Miracle fair (New York : Norton, c2001., 2001)

POET
Wisława Szymborska b. 1923

100 Words by Neil Gaiman

2011-01-01T06:39:00.000-08:00

A hundred words to talk of death?
At once too much and not enough.
My plans beyond that final breath
are currently a little rough.

The dying thing comes on so slow:
reluctance to get out of bed
is magnified each day and so
transmuted into dead.

I dream of dying all alone,
nobody there to watch me pass
nothing remains for me to own,
no breath remains to fog the glass.

And when I do put down my pen
my memories will fly like birds.
When I am done, when I am dead,
and finished with my hundred words.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Highway Stripper

2010-11-14T20:07:00.000-08:00

Once as I was travelling
on a highway
to Mexico
behind a battered once-blue
Mustang
with a dusty rear window,
the wind really sang
for me
when suddenly out of the side
of the speeding car
in front of me
a woman’s hand
with a wrist watch on it
threw away
a series of whirling objects
on to the hurtling road:

a straw
hat,
a white shoe fit
to be a fetish,
then another,
a heavy pleated skirt
and a fluttery
slip, faded pink,
frayed lace- edge
and all
(I even heard it swish),
a leg-of-mutton blouse
Just as fluttery.

And as I stepped
on the gas
and my car lunged
into the fifty feet
between me
and them,
a rather ordinary,
used, and off-white bra
for smallish
breasts whirled off
the window
and struck
a farmer’s barbed wire
with yellow-green wheat grass
beyond
and spread-eagled on it,
pinned
by the blowing wind.

Then before I knew,
bright red panties
laced with white
hit
my windshield
and I flinched,
I swerved,
but then
it was gone,
swept aside
before I straightened up-
fortunately, no one else
on the road:
excited, curious
to see the stripper
on the highway,
maybe with an urgent
lover’s one free hand
(or were there more?)
on her breast
or thigh,
I stepped again
on the gas, frustrated by their
dusty rear window
at fifty feet
I passed them
at seventy.

In that absolute
second,
that glimpse and after-
image in this hell
of voyeurs, I saw
only one at the wheel:
a man,
about forty.

A spectacled profile
looking only
at the road
beyond the nose of his Mustang,
with a football
radio on.

again and again
I looked in my rearview
mirror
as I steadied my pace

against the circling trees,
but there was only
a man:

had he stripped
not only hat
and blouse, shoes
and panties
and bra,
had he shed maybe
even the woman
he was wearing,

or was it me
moulting, shedding
vestiges,
old investments,
rushing forever
towards a perfect
coupling
with naked nothing
in a world
without places.

~A.K. Ramanujan.

Love after Love by Derek Walcott

2010-10-13T10:50:00.000-07:00

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

~ Derek Walcott

IN YOU by K.Satchidanandan

2010-07-20T05:47:00.000-07:00

When you were near me,
I thought love didn’t need a body.
Now that you are away I know,
Love needs, like voice, a sky,
like water, a stream,
like electricity, a taut wire,
for me to be a cloud, a fish,
a warm tremor, in you.

Be my earth.
Let me blossom in your valleys,
their first blue flower.
Let me run whistling across your tunnels,
With a beacon on my brow.
Let me be a breeze in your woods,
a submarine in your seas.
I would be corn in your fields,
wander in your house
like the odour of mustard
bursting in oil.

I long to be born in you,
forever.

1992

( Translated from the Malayalam by the poet )

Dawning by Yahia Lababidi

2010-04-23T09:16:00.000-07:00

There are hours when every thing creaks
when chairs stretch their arms, tables their legs
and closets crack their backs, incautiously

Fed up with the polite fantasy
of having to stay in one place
and stick to their stations

Humans too, at work, or in love
know such aches and growing pains
when inner furnishings defiantly shift

As decisively, and imperceptibly, as a continent
some thing will stretch, croak or come undone
so that everything else must be reconsidered

One restless dawn, unable to suppress the itch
of wanderlust, with a heavy door left ajar
semi-deliberately, and a new light teasing in

Some piece of immobility will finally quit
suddenly nimble on wooden limbs
as fast as a horse, fleeing the stable.

Lesson From the Kama Sutra by Mahmoud Darwish

2010-03-24T05:27:00.000-07:00

Wait for her with an azure cup.
Wait for her in the evening at the spring, among perfumed roses.
Wait for her with the patience of a horse trained for mountains.
Wait for her with the distinctive, aesthetic taste of a prince.
Wait for her with seven pillows of cloud.
Wait for her with strands of womanly incense wafting.
Wait for her with the manly scent of sandalwood on horseback.
Wait for her and do not rush.
If she arrives late, wait for her.
If she arrives early, wait for her.
Do not frighten the birds in her braided hair.
Wait for her to sit in a garden at the peak of its flowering.
Wait for her to lift her garment from her leg, cloud by cloud.
And wait for her.
Take her to the balcony to watch the moon drwoning in milk.
Wait for her and offer her water before wine.
Do not glance at the twin partridges sleeping on her chest.
Wait and gently touch her hand as she sets a cup on marble.
As if you are carrying the dew for her, wait.
Speak to her as a flute would to a frightened violin string,
as if you knew what tomorrow would bring.
Wait, and polish the night for her ring by ring.
Wait for her until Night speaks to you thus:
There is no one alive but the two of you.
So take her gently to the death you so desire,
and wait.

Along the sun-drenched roadside

2010-03-22T23:18:00.001-07:00

Along the sun-drenched roadside, from the great
hollow half-treetrunk, which for generations
has been a trough, renewing in itself
an inch or two of rain, I satisfy
my thirst: taking the water's pristine coolness
into my whole body through my wrists.
Drinking would be too powerful, too clear;
but this unhurried gesture of restraint
fills my whole consciousness with shining water.

Thus, if you came, I could be satisfied
to let my hand rest lightly, for a moment,
lightly, upon your shoulder or your breast.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Do not stare at me by Martin Carter

2010-03-19T06:14:00.000-07:00

Do not stare at me from your window, lady

do not stare and wonder where I came from

Born in this city was I, lady,

hearing the beetles at six o'clock

and the noisy cocks in the morning

when your hands rumple the bed sheet

and night is locked up the wardrobe.

My hands are full of lines

like your breast with veins, lady -

So do not stare and wonder where I came from

My hands are full of lines

like your breast with viens, lady -

and one must rear, while one must suckle life...

Do not stare at me from your window, lady.

Stare at the wagon of prisoners!

Stare at the hearse passing by your gate!

Stare at the slums in the south of the city!

Stare hard and reason, lady, where I came from

and where I go.

My hand is full of lines

like your breast with veins, lady,

and one must rear, while one must suckle life.

****

2010-03-02T21:22:00.000-08:00

Near The Wall Of A House

by Yehuda Amichai

Near the wall of a house painted
to look like stone,
I saw visions of God.

A sleepless night that gives others a headache
gave me flowers
opening beautifully inside my brain.

And he who was lost like a dog
will be found like a human being
and brought back home again.

Love is not the last room: there are others
after it, the whole length of the corridor
that has no end.

***

2010-01-29T11:39:00.000-08:00

You Learn
After a while you learn the subtle difference
Between holding a hand and chaining a soul,

And you learn that love doesn't mean leaning
And company doesn't mean security.

And you begin to learn that kisses aren't contracts
And presents aren't promises,

And you begin to accept your defeats
With your head up and your eyes open
With the grace of a woman, not the grief of a child,

And you learn to build all your roads on today
Because tomorrow's ground is too uncertain for plans
And futures have a way of falling down in mid-flight.

After a while you learn...
That even sunshine burns if you get too much.

So you plant your garden and decorate your own soul,
Instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers.

And you learn that you really can endure...

That you really are strong

And you really do have worth...

And you learn and learn...

With every good-bye you learn.

~Jorge Luis Borges

2010-01-15T21:02:00.000-08:00

This is what the things can teach us:
To fall
Patiently to trust our heaviness
Even a bird has to do that
Before he can fly.

– Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke’s Book Of Hours: Love Poems To God

2010-01-14T05:47:00.000-08:00

"Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I'll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.

Ideas, language, even the phrase "each other" doesn't make any sense."

~RUMI

2010-01-12T00:56:00.000-08:00

|| Who in the rainbow can draw the line
where the violet tint ends and the
orange tint begins? Distinctly we see
the difference of the colours,
but where exactly does the one
first blendingly enter into the other?
So it is with sanity and insanity. ||

- Herman Melville

OBITUARY

2010-01-11T23:35:00.000-08:00

Father, when he passed on,
left dust
on a table of papers,
left debts and daughters,
a bedwetting grandson
named by the toss
of a coin after him,

a house that leaned
slowly through our growing
years on a bent coconut
tree in the yard.
Being the burning type,
he burned properly
at the cremation

as before, easily
and at both ends,
left his eye coins
in the ashes that didn’t
look one bit different,
several spinal discs, rough,
some burned to coal, for sons

to pick gingerly
and throw as the priest
said, facing east
where three rivers met
near the railway station;
no longstanding headstone
with his full name and two dates

to hold in their parentheses
everything he didn’t quite
manage to do himself,
like his caesarian birth
in a brahmin ghetto
and his death by heart-
failure in the fruit market.

But someone told me
he got two lines
in an inside column
of a Madras newspaper
sold by the kilo
exactly four weeks later
to streethawkers

who sell it in turn
to the small groceries
where I buy salt,
coriander,
and jaggery
in newspaper cones
that I usually read

for fun, and lately
in the hope of finding
these obituary lines.
And he left us
a changed mother
and more than
one annual ritual.

Poem by AK Ramanujan

Take this Waltz by Leonard Cohen

2009-10-27T00:54:00.000-07:00

Little Viennese Waltz is written in Spanish by Lorca. Leonard Cohen discovered Lorca's poems when young. Later, he translated Lorca and wrote the song 'Take this Waltz'.

Little Viennese Waltz (Lorca)

In Vienna there are ten little girls,
a shoulder for death to cry on,
and a forest of dried pigeons.
There is a fragment of tomorrow
in the museum of winter frost.
There is a thousand-windowed dance hall.

Ay, ay, ay, ay!
Take this close-mouthed waltz.

Little waltz, little waltz, little waltz,
of itself of death, and of brandy
that dips its tail in the sea.

I love you, I love you, I love you,
with the armchair and the book of death,
down the melancholy hallway,
in the iris's darkened garret,

Ay, ay, ay, ay!
Take this broken-waisted waltz.

In Vienna there are four mirrors
in which your mouth and the ehcoes play.
There is a death for piano
that paints little boys blue.
There are beggars on the roof.
There are fresh garlands of tears.

Ay, ay, ay, ay!

Take this waltz that dies in my arms.
Because I love you, I love you, my love,
in the attic where the children play,
dreaming ancient lights of Hungary
through the noise, the balmy afternoon,
seeing sheep and irises of snow
through the dark silence of your forehead

Ay, ay, ay, ay!
Take this " I will always love you" waltz

In Vienna I will dance with you
in a costume with
a river's head.
See how the hyacinths line my banks!
I will leave my mouth between your legs,
my soul in a photographs and lilies,
and in the dark wake of your footsteps,
my love, my love, I will have to leave
violin and grave, the waltzing ribbons
________________________________________

Take This Waltz - Leonard Cohen
(After Lorca)

Now in Vienna there's ten pretty women
There's a shoulder where Death comes to cry
There's a lobby with nine hundred windows
There's a tree where the doves go to die
There's a piece that was torn from the morning
And it hangs in the Gallery of Frost

Ay, Ay, Ay, Ay
Take this waltz, take this waltz

Take this waltz with the clamp on its jaws
Oh I want you, I want you, I want you
On a chair with a dead magazine
In the cave at the tip of the lily
In some hallways where love's never been
On a bed where the moon has been sweating
In a cry filled with footsteps and sand

Ay, Ay, Ay, Ay
Take this waltz, take this waltz
Take its broken waist in your hand

This waltz, this waltz, this waltz, this waltz
With its very own breath of brandy and Death
Dragging its tail in the sea
There's a concert hall in Vienna
Where your mouth had a thousand reviews
There's a bar where the boys have stopped talking
They've been sentenced to death by the blues
Ah, but who is it climbs to your picture
With a garland of freshly cut tears?

Ay, Ay, Ay, Ay
Take this waltz, take this waltz
Take this waltz it's been dying for years

There's an attic where children are playing
Where I've got to lie down with you soon
In a dream of Hungarian lanterns
In the mist of some sweet afternoon
And I'll see what you've chained to your sorrow
All your sheep and your lilies of snow

Ay, Ay, Ay, Ay
Take this waltz, take this waltz
With its "I'll never forget you, you know!"

This waltz, this waltz, this waltz, this waltz ...
And I'll dance with you in Vienna
I'll be wearing a river's disguise
The hyacinth wild on my shoulder,
My mouth on the dew of your thighs
And I'll bury my soul in a scrapbook,
With the photographs there, and the moss
And I'll yield to the flood of your beauty
My cheap violin and my cross
And you'll carry me down on your dancing
To the pools that you lift on your wrist

Oh my love, Oh my love
Take this waltz, take this waltz
It's yours now. It's all that there is
_____________________________________________________________________________________

poem XXIII from The Stones Of The Sky by PABLO NERUDA

2009-08-19T00:38:00.000-07:00

I am this naked
mineral:
echo of underneath:
I am happy
to have come so far,
from such an earth:
I am the last one, barely
guts, body, hands
that split off
from the mother lode
without knowing why,
without hope of staying,
resigned to this flighty human
fated to live and drop like a leaf.

Ah, this destiny
of the darkening incessancy,
of being your own-- unsculptured granite,
sheer bulk, irreducible, cold:
I was rock, dark rock
and the parting was violent,
a gash of an alien birth:
I want to go back
to that sure thing,
to home base, to the middle
of the stone mother
from which, I don't know how or when
I was torn away to be torn apart.

AHMET HASIM

2009-08-19T00:23:00.000-07:00

POOL
Deep down, the night has massed again
My darling smiles in her wonted place
My darling who doesn't come by day
Appears at night by the pool.

The moonlight a sash for her waist
The heavens her secret veil
The stars roses in her hand.

DARKNESS
On this dark night of love
Wildly the nightingale sings again,
Has Leyla left Mejnun?
I thoght the Wild voice sang of parting pain.

On this dark night of love
I felt my grief, remembered you,
Burned like the love-lorn nightingale's sad refrain.

STAIRCASE
Slowly, slowly will you mount this stairway
--A heap of sun-tinged leaves upon your skirts-
And for a while gaze weeping at the sky...

The waters darken and your face grows pale,
Look at the scarlet air, for evening comes...

Bowed towards the earth, the roses endless glow,
Flame-like the nightingales bleed upon the boughs;
Has marble turned to bronze, do waters burn?

This is a secret tongue that fills the soul
Look at the scarlet air, for evening comes...

DAWN
Shall we return then from this dawn of love?
And shall we travel to the realms of night?
Now those who came here earlier than we
Weep for the phantom of an earlier light.

Return? How can there be a turning back?
When hearts are fallen in so sad a plight?
--It is a hand that reaches from the skies-
The darkness draws to oneness and delight.

Translated by Bernard Lewis

MUKADDIME
Don't think it's rose, or tulip,
filled with fire, don't hold it, you burn,
this rosy glass.

Fuzuli had drunk of this fire
Majnun, fallen with its elixir
into the state ofthis poem.

Those drinking from this cup buming
why, filling the night of love
with moans and mint, end to end

Filled with fire, don't hold it you burn
this rosy glass.

Translated by Murat Nemet Nejat

AHMET HASIM (1884-1933) He came to Istanbul from Baghdad and began his education at the Mekteb-i Sultani (presently the Galatasaray High School, long known for its excellence in French language education) as a boarding student. There he was introduced to the French poetry which later would influence his own work. The poems that he wrote during these years exhibit a romantic attitude and many lyrical qualities. In his later works, one can see the influence of Seyh Galip (1757-1799), in addition to that of French and Belgian poets. POETRY: Gol Saatleri (1921), Piyale (1926). OTHER WORKS: Gurabhane-i Laklakan (1928, collected newspaper articles), Bize Gore (1928, collected newspaper articles), Frankfurt Seyahatnamesi (1933, travel notes).

The Pardah Nashin by Sarojini Naidu

2009-05-31T02:52:00.000-07:00

Her life is a revolving dream
Of languid and sequestered ease;
Her girdles and her fillets gleam
Like changing fires on sunset seas;
Her raiment is like morning mist,
Shot opal, gold and amethyst.

From thieving light of eyes impure,
From coveting sun or wind's caress,
Her days are guarded and secure
Behind her carven lattices,
Like jewels in a turbaned crest,
Like secrets in a lover's breast.

But though no hand unsanctioned dares
Unveil the mysteries of her grace,
Time lifts the curtain unawares,
And Sorrow looks into her face . . .
Who shall prevent the subtle years,
Or shield a woman's eyes from tears?

~Sarojini Naidu(1879 - 1949)

2009-05-26T22:03:00.001-07:00

कभी किसी को मुकम्मल जहां नहीं मिलता
कहीं ज़मीन तो कहीं आसमान नहीं मिलता

जिसे भी देखिये वो अपने आप में गुम है
जुबां मिली है मगर हम_जुबां नहीं मिलता

बुझा सका है भला कौन वक़्त के शोले
ये ऎसी आग है जिसमें धुंआ नहीं मिलता

तेरे जहां में ऐसा नहीं के प्यार न हो
जहां उम्मीद हो इसकी वहाँ नहीं मिलता

~निदा फाज़ली

Kabhii kisii ko mukammal jahaaN nahiin milataa
kahiin zamiin to kahiin aasmaaN nahiin milataa

Jise bhii dekhiye vo apane aap mein gum hai
zubaaN milii hai magar ham_zubaaN nahiin milataa

Bujhaa sakaa hai bhalaa kaun vaqt ke shole
ye aisii aag hai jis mein dhuaaN nahiin milataa

Tere jahaan mein aisaa nahiin ke pyaar na ho
jahaaN ummiid ho is kii vahaaN nahiin milataa.

English translation: Kabhi Kissi Ko Mukammal JahaN Nahiin Milataa

No one ever gets a perfect world

Sometimes the earth is missing and sometimes the sky.

Each one seems to be lost in oneself

One has the tongue but no one to understand the words

Who has been able to douse the flames of time!

This is the kind of fire that emits no smoke

It is not that your world is devoid of love

Just that, it is not found where one hopes it will be.

~Nida Fazli

Translated by Mohammad Ahsaan/ Abha Iyengar, May 25th 2009

कभी किसी को मुकम्मल जहां नहीं मिलता ~निदा फाज़ली (3) with English translation Share

2009-05-25T03:43:00.000-07:00

कभी किसी को मुकम्मल जहां नहीं मिलता
कहीं ज़मीन तो कहीं आसमान नहीं मिलता

जिसे भी देखिये वो अपने आप में गुम है
जुबां मिली है मगर हम_जुबां नहीं मिलता

बुझा सका है भला कौन वक़्त के शोले
ये ऎसी आग है जिसमें धुंआ नहीं मिलता

तेरे जहां में ऐसा नहीं के प्यार न हो
जहां उम्मीद हो इसकी वहाँ नहीं मिलता

~निदा फाज़ली

Kabhii kisii ko mukammal jahaaN nahiin milataa
kahiin zamiin to kahiin aasmaaN nahiin milataa

Jise bhii dekhiye vo apane aap mein gum hai
zubaaN milii hai magar ham_zubaaN nahiin milataa

Bujhaa sakaa hai bhalaa kaun vaqt ke shole
ye aisii aag hai jis mein dhuaaN nahiin milataa

Tere jahaan mein aisaa nahiin ke pyaar na ho
jahaaN ummiid ho is kii vahaaN nahiin milataa.

English translation: No one ever gets a perfect world

No one ever gets a perfect world

Sometimes the earth is missing and sometimes the sky.

Each one seems to be lost in oneself

One has the tongue but no one to understand the words

Who has been able to douse the flames of time!

This is the kind of fire that emits no smoke

It is not that your world is devoid of love

Just that, it is not found where one hopes it will be.

~Nida Fazli

Translated by Mohammad Ahsaan/ Abha Iyengar, May 25th 2009

Say Something about Child’s Play by Chris Abani

2009-05-19T08:45:00.001-07:00

The soldier asks the boy: Choose which
do I cleave? Your right arm or left?
The boy, ten, maybe nine, says: Neither,
or when I play, like a bird with a broken wing
I will smudge the line of the hopscotch
square, let the darkness in.

The soldier asks again: Choose which
do I cleave? Your right leg or left?
Older in this moment than his dead father, the boy
says: Neither, or when I dance the spirit dance,
I will stumble, kick sand in the face of light.

This boy says: Take my right eye,
it has seen too much, but leave me the left,
I will need it to see God.

From Hands Washing Water

Slow Dance by Matthew Dickman

2009-05-19T07:43:00.000-07:00

Slow Dance
by Matthew Dickman

More than putting another man on the moon,
more than a New Year’s resolution of yogurt and yoga,
we need the opportunity to dance
with really exquisite strangers. A slow dance
between the couch and dining room table, at the end
of the party, while the person we love has gone
to bring the car around
because it’s begun to rain and would break their heart
if any part of us got wet. A slow dance
to bring the evening home. Two people
rocking back and forth like a buoy. Nothing extravagant.
A little music. An empty bottle of whiskey.
It’s a little like cheating. Your head resting
on his shoulder, your breath moving up his neck.
Your hands along her spine. Her hips
unfolding like a cotton napkin
and you begin to think about
how all the stars in the sky are dead. The my body
is talking to your body slow dance. The Unchained

Melody,
Stairway to Heaven, power-chord slow dance. All my life
I’ve made mistakes. Small
and cruel. I made my plans.
I never arrived. I ate my food. I drank my wine.
The slow dance doesn’t care. It’s all kindness like

children
before they turn four. Like being held in the arms
of my brother. The slow dance of siblings.
Two men in the middle of the room. When I dance with him,
one of my great loves, he is absolutely human,
and when he turns to dip me
or I step on his foot because we are both leading,
I know that one of us will die first and the other will suffer.
The slow dance of what’s to come
and the slow dance of insomnia
pouring across the floor like bath water.
When the woman I’m sleeping with
stands naked in the bathroom,
brushing her teeth, the slow dance of ritual is being spit
into the sink. There is no one to save us
because there is no need to be saved.
I’ve hurt you. I’ve loved you. I’ve mowed
the front yard. When the stranger wearing a sheer white dress
covered in a million beads
slinks toward me like an over-sexed chandelier suddenly come to life,
I take her hand in mine. I spin her out
and bring her in. This is the almond grove
in the dark slow dance.
It is what we should be doing right now. Scraping
for joy. The haiku and honey. The orange and orangutan slow dance.

Prayer by Rebecca Wee

2009-05-19T07:31:00.000-07:00

I love you so I swear I do adore you
Tristan Tzara

From the wreck and tangle of the past moon the past
moment every minute since this thirst began,
I lean
I stumble toward you hoping
you’ve not turned away yet

hoping there might be something here
to hold your falling eyes, tack your feet
to the floor

If I could escape my head
for one day
and come to you as tongue, as open mouth proud
hunger and thighs, as fingernail and footsole

lapis and emerald

If I could come to you
without my voice pulling words
around the sound
but just carry you with me

to the water
and walk our bodies in until our mouths are under-

neath us and making Os, marking us
with sucking, octopus and leech

If I could I would leave
the flimsy skin of my intellect on the sand

like a towel, a blouse, to change shape and texture
into wind

From Uncertain Grace

Salmon by Kim Addonizio

2009-05-07T22:54:00.000-07:00

In this shallow creek
they flop and writhe forward as the dead
float back toward them. Oh, I know

what I should say: fierce burning in the body
as her eggs burst free, milky cloud
of sperm as he quickens them. I should stand

on the bridge with my camera,
frame the white froth of rapids where one
arcs up for an instant in its final grace.

But I have to go down among
the rocks the glacier left
and squat at the edge of the water

where a stinking pile of them lies,
where one crow balances and sinks
its beak into a gelid eye.

I have to study the small holes
gouged into their skin, their useless gills,
their gowns of black flies. I can't

make them sing. I want to,
but all they do is open
their mouths a little wider

so the water pours in
until I feel like I'm drowning.
On the bridge the tour bus waits

and someone waves, and calls down
It's time, and the current keeps lifting
dirt from the bottom to cover the eggs.

(C)Kim Addonizio

Home is so Sad by Philip Larkin

2009-05-06T01:32:00.000-07:00

Home is so sad. It stays as it was left,
Shaped to the comfort of the last to go
As if to win them back. Instead, bereft
Of anyone to please, it withers so,
Having no heart to put aside the theft

And turn again to what it started as,
A joyous shot at how things ought to be,
Long fallen wide. You can see how it was:
Look at the pictures and the cutlery.
The music in the piano stool. That vase.

From Collected Poems by Philip Larkin. Copyright © 1988, 2003 by the Estate of Philip Larkin. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. All rights reserved.

B&B by Dick Allen

2009-04-08T23:55:00.000-07:00

Are you so tired then, Stranger? Are you so tired
that you can’t lift your arms above a whisper
or extend your hand?
Are you so tired that you accept the verdicts of salamanders
and fish bones, and the sun in the morning and the moon at night,
so tired that you think another day’s another day
and nothing in your life is new—while all around you
ideas percolate, branches break, computers go wild?
Stranger,

are you so tired

that you’d give up wishing for a second chance
if you could only have a day or two in the country,
sitting in an Adirondack chair with your wristwatch off
until someone calls, “Croquet, croquet. Anyone for croquet?”
Are you tired enough not to care who’s invading who,
who’s playing who, who speaks for who, who’s rising to the top,
whose cat’s got whose tongue?
Was it experiences with an early grave that did you in?
Why do you always think of yourself as half-dissolved,
wretchedly torn? Talk to us, Stranger,
tell us what we’ve forgotten about room dividers,
bottle caps, memory lapse, cufflinks, sad sacks,
and how young men/young women stand on various fire escapes
promising themselves the world
but at the same time sensing they’ll be lost in money,
houses and children. Stranger, are you tired enough
to lay down your burdens, to think of opportunities
finally as things to let slip by with no regrets,
like early morning starlings rising above green pastures,
skimming across bristlegrass and wildflowers,
heading somewhere no one knows? If so,
we’ll straighten the pictures on our guest room walls,
turn down the covers, fluff up the pillows. . . . Tap at our door,

Stranger

or send us your message on the Internet’s blue waves,
and we’ll provide for you a place to rest your head.

-Dick Allen
The Gettysburg Review

[Dick Allen, one of America's best-known poets, and author of six volumes of poetry]