Why It Often Rains in the Movies by Lawrence Raab

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 )