by Kurt Vonnegut
The crucified planet Earth,
should it find a voice
and a sense of irony,
might now well say
of our abuse of it,
“Forgive them, Father,
They know not what they do.”
The irony would be
that we know what
we are doing.
When the last living thing
has died on account of us,
how poetical it would be
if Earth could say,
in a voice floating up
perhaps
from the floor
of the Grand Canyon,
“It is done.”
People did not like it here.
by Claude Esteban
Around the bend of a phrase
you return, it’s dawn in a book, it’s
a garden, one can
see everything, the dew, a moth
on a leaf and it’s you
who rises suddenly amid the pages
and the book grows more lovely
because it’s you
and you’ve not grown old, you walk
slowly to the door.
by William Blake
I was angry with my friend;
I told my wrath—my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe;
I told it not—my wrath did grow,
And I watered it in fears,
Night and morning with my tears,
And I sunned it with smiles
And with soft deceitful wiles,
And it grew both day and night
‘Til it bore an apple bright,
And my foe beheld it shine,
And he knew that it was mine—
And into my garden stole
When the night had veiled the pole;
In the morning, glad, I see
My foe outstretched beneath the tree.
by Rati Amaghlobeli
This forest is thick, but it’s light,
Like a temple, like Athens city.
In the forest every daybreak seems
An outbreak of harmless fire.
When the sun rises, its descent is silent –
Here rarely anyone comes to visit.
It is dozing fitfully, or mist has descended.
There is no pillow
On its bed. The empty paths
Are eternally circular. Deep breathing,
Rational breathing – carefree breathing here.
I took a good look round –
The trees belong to all sorts of religions:
This tree is Lao-Tze, that one is Confucius,
Fruit has bowed the branch with ripeness,
It’s given a good harvest.
In the forest grow verbs’ infinitives,
Words’ roots, dreams’ notions,
The golden fleece, if it’s the Lord’s drink,
The voice here is forest-like.
The echo of this forests is unbroken in time,
An echo which has never cut short
Similar words, a forest, or a land of words,
That is a foreign country.
by Eugenio Montale
Don’t let your hand brush back
the bang of hair that veils
your cherub brow. It too speaks
of you; on my road, it’s my whole horizon,
my only light, it and the jades
circling your wrist; the curtain your dispensations
spread in the tumult of sleep; the wing on which you move
unharmed, transmigratory Artemis
among the wars of the stillborn. And if, now,
the background blooms with airy down, it’s you, suddenly
descending, you’re there to marble it, your restless brow
fuses with the dawn, darkens it.
by Margaret Atwood
You could sit on your chair and pick over the language
as if it were a bowl of peas.
A lot of people do that.
It might be instructive.
You don’t even need the chair,
You could juggle plates of air.
You could poke sticks through the chain-link fence
at your brain, which you keep locked up in there,
which crouches and sulks like an old tortoise,
and glares out at you, sluggish and eyeless.
You could tease it that way,
make it blunder and think,
and emit a croaking sound
you could call truth.
A harmless activity,
sort of like knitting,
until you go too far with it
and they bring out the nooses and matches.
Or you could do something else.
Something more sociable.
More group-oriented.
A lot of people do that too.
They like the crowds and the screaming,
they like the adrenalin.
Hunker down. Get a blackout curtain.
Pretend you’re not home.
Pretend you’re deaf and dumb.
Look: pitchforks and torches!
Judging from old pictures,
things could get worse.
by Tomas Tranströmer
The storm puts its mouth to the house
and blows to get a tone.
I toss and turn, my closed eyes
reading the storm’s text.
The child’s eyes grow wide in the dark
and the storm howls for him.
Both love the swinging lamps;
both are halfway towards speech.
The storm has the hands and wings of a child.
Far away, travelers run for cover.
The house feels its own constellation of nails
holding the walls together.
The night is calm in our rooms,
where the echoes of all footsteps rest
like sunken leaves in a pond,
but the night outside is wild.
A darker storm stands over the world.
It puts its mouth to our soul
and blows to get a tone. We are afraid
the storm will blow us empty.
by Herman de Coninck
I remember myself most. How, all of a sudden I had one
wife, instead of now and then this love or that.
And how we had to love each other, instead of simply
falling in love sometimes.
I used to sit in bars, boasting about how beautiful you were,
and shy, and brash too, until my women friends would say:
why don’t you just go and be in love at home —
and how I still needed to order that one last drink.
I remember how silently you sat sometimes, hugging
your knees; how you wanted to be all sorts of women
for me, if only I’d be there.
And how, too young, I was unable to receive so much.
by Hafiz
Out
Of a great need
We are all holding hands
And climbing.
Not loving is a letting go.
Listen,
The terrain around here
Is
Far too
Dangerous
For
That.
by J. Bradley
I’m terrible at painting. You can tell
from the way the bulls-eye shifts
based on her name.
I look for the red flags, burn
the ones I can’t live with, fuck her
on top of the ones I’ll tolerate.
The ending constantly revises itself.
Mondays, she gets bored of my
fingernail biting. Thursdays,
I catch her kissing light poles.
Saturdays, her patience erodes
when for the fiftieth time I’ll fend off
the economic benefits of abandoned
surnames in Vegas.
The good news: not being around
when only one of us can wake up.
