Questions of Travel

Think of the long trip home.

Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?

Where should we be today?

Is it right to be watching strangers in a play

in this strangest of theatres?

What childishness is it that while there’s a breath of life

in our bodies, we are determined to rush

to see the sun the other way around?

The tiniest green hummingbird in the world?

To stare at some inexplicable old stonework

inexplicable and impenetrable,

at any view,

instantly seen and always, always delightful?

Oh, must we dream our dreams

and have them, too?

And have we room

for one more folded sunset, still quite warm?

          (C)   Elizabeth Bishop, ‘Questions of Travel’

RAIN, YOU

Was it rain 
or you?

There were scents:
intense ones, 
of the rain-washed earth, of tobacco,
of the acrid sap of the mango-stalk, 
of oleander flowers, 
of woman’s inner lips.

There were colours,
flying ones, 
of the mynah, of the pink balsam,
of collyrium, of wild fire,
of wet yam leaves, of red wine,
of fresh paddy.

There were memories,
unendurable ones,
of the index finger, wet lips,
aroused nipples,
wounds, bells, 
irreplaceable hearts.

How many names how many selves
How many places how many births
How many rivers from touches

The mad ecstasy of dreaming of your return
when I lose you
The wild shock of the fear of losing you
when you return.

I have never seen a rain so blue
an embrace so liquid, a dance so irrepressible, 
a monsoon kiss that rains so incessantly
like flowers from a gulmohar tree. 

( 2005)
(Translated from Malayalam by the poet ) K. Satchidanandan

THIRST

Imagine thirst without knowing water.
And you ask me what freedom means.
Imagine love without love.

Some things are unthinkable,
until one day the unthinkable is here.
Imagine thirst without knowing water.

Some things we assume just are as they are,
no action is taken to make or sustain them.
Imagine love without love.

It is fear that eats the heart: fear and
endless talk, and not risking a step.
Imagine thirst without knowing water.

Fold away your beautiful thoughts.
Talk away curiosity, chatter away truth.
Imagine love without love.

Imagine believing in the whispers,
the screams and the gossip. Dancing to a tune
with no song to sing inside you.
Imagine love without love.

~”Thirst,” John Siddique, from Full Blood, 2011

 I love the dark hours of my being.

My mind deepens into them.
There I can find, as in old letters,
the days of my life, already lived,
and held like a legend, and understood.

Then the knowing comes: I can open
to another life that's wide and timeless.

So I am sometimes like a tree
rustling over a grave site
and making real the dream
of the one its living roots
embrace:

a dream once lost
among sorrows and songs.

 (C) Rainer Maria Rilke

"Before you came,
things were as they should be:
the sky was the dead-end of sight,
the road was just a road, wine merely wine.

Now everything is like my heart,
a color at the edge of blood:
the grey of your absence, the color of poison, of thorns,

the gold when we meet, the season ablaze,
the yellow of autumn, the red of flowers, of flames,
and the black when you cover the earth
with the coal of dead fires.

And the sky, the road, the glass of wine?
The sky is a shirt wet with tears,
the road a vein about to break,
and the glass of wine a mirror in which
the sky, the road, the world keep changing.

Don't leave now that you're here—
Stay. So the world may become like itself again:
so the sky may be the sky,
the road a road,
and the glass of wine not a mirror, just a glass of wine."

[Before You Came by Faiz Ahmed Faiz, 
translated by Agha Shahid Ali]

Very little grows
on jagged rock.
Be ground.

Be crumbled,

so wildflowers will come up
where you are.

You’ve been stony for too many years.
Try something different.
Surrender.

- Rumi

The Forgotten Dialect Of The Heart

How astonishing it is that language can almost mean,
and frightening that it does not quite. Love, we say,
God, we say, Rome and Michiko, we write, and the words
get it all wrong. We say bread and it means according
to which nation. French has no word for home,
and we have no word for strict pleasure. A people
in northern India is dying out because their ancient
tongue has no words for endearment. I dream of lost
vocabularies that might express some of what
we no longer can. Maybe the Etruscan texts would
finally explain why the couples on their tombs
are smiling. And maybe not. When the thousands
of mysterious Sumerian tablets were translated,
they seemed to be business records. But what if they
are poems or psalms? My joy is the same as twelve
Ethiopian goats standing silent in the morning light.
O Lord, thou art slabs of salt and ingots of copper,
as grand as ripe barley lithe under the wind's labor.
Her breasts are six white oxen loaded with bolts
of long-fibered Egyptian cotton. My love is a hundred
pitchers of honey. Shiploads of thuya are what
my body wants to say to your body. Giraffes are this
desire in the dark. Perhaps the spiral Minoan script
is not laguage but a map. What we feel most has
no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses, and birds.
 

(C) Jack Gilbert