May 2012
31 posts
3 tags
Unfinished Poem
by Natalya Gorbanevskaya
Already past midnight, and every other street lamp burns. Wander about the town until the sun appears at dawn. Night has erased the year, the age from the buildings’ facades. The town is bleak as a kitchen garden, but the town is like the ark – floating, floating, now it sails into dawn’s bitterness, and between the windows, at the gates, the age,...
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To a Mouse, on Turning Her Up in Her Nest with the...
by Robert Burns
Small, crafty, cowering, timorous little beast, O, what a panic is in your little breast! You need not start away so hasty With argumentative chatter! I would be loath to run and chase you, With murdering plough-staff.
I’m truly sorry man’s dominion Has broken Nature’s social union, And justifies that ill opinion Which makes thee startle At me, thy...
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One Hundred and Eighty Degrees
by Federico Moramarco
Have you considered the possibility that everything you believe is wrong, not merely off a bit, but totally wrong, nothing like things as they really are? If you’ve done this, you know how durably fragile those phantoms we hold in our heads are, those wisps of thought that people die and kill for, betray lovers for, give up lifelong friendships for. If you’ve not done this,...
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Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
by Thomas Gray
The curfew tolls the knell of parting day, The lowing herd wind slowly o’er the lea, The ploughman homeward plods his weary way, And leaves the world to darkness and to me. Now fades the glimmering landscape on the sight, And all the air a solemn stillness holds, Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight, And drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds; Save that from...
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Nearly a Valediction
by Marilyn Hacker
You happened to me. I was happened to like an abandoned building by a bull- dozer, like the van that missed my skull happened a two-inch gash across my chin. You were as deep down as I’ve ever been. You were inside me like my pulse. A new- born flailing toward maternal heartbeat through the shock of cold and glare: when you were gone, swaddled in strange air I was that alone...
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The Lonely Hunter
by William Sharp
Green branches, green branches, I see you beckon; I follow! Sweet is the place you guard, there in the rowan-tree hollow. There he lies in the darkness, under the frail white flowers, Heedless at last, in the silence, of these sweet midsummer hours.
But sweeter, it may be, the moss whereon he is sleeping now, And sweeter the fragrant flowers that may crown his moon-white brow:...
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A Conceited Mistake
by Vasko Popa
Once upon a time there was a mistake So silly so small That no one would even have noticed it It couldn’t bear To see itself to hear of itself It invented all manner of things Just to prove that it didn’t really exist It invented space To put its proofs in And time to keep its proofs And the world to see its proofs All it invented Was not so silly Nor so small But was of...
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Hamlet
by Boris Pasternak
The noise subsides. I walk onto the stage. I listen closely to the echo of the hum And, leaning on the doorway, try to gauge Just what will happen in the age to come.
In gloom of night, the theater glasses gather In thousands and focus on the play. If only you are willing, Abba Father, Allow this cup to pass me by today.
I love your plan, unyielding, fixed and bold, And I am...
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Sympathy
by Paul Dunbar
I know what the caged bird feels, alas! When the sun is bright on the upland slopes; When the wind stirs soft through the springing grass, And the river flows like a stream of glass; When the first bird sings and the first bud opes, And the faint perfume from its chalice steals — I know what the caged bird feels!
I know why the caged bird...
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Ode to a Nightingale
by John Keats
My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk, Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk: ‘Tis not through envy of thy happy lot, But being too happy in thine happiness, - That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees, In some melodious plot Of beechen green...
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Untitled
by Ono no Komachi
Though I visit him Ceaselessly In my dreams, The sum of all those meetings Is less than a single waking glimpse.
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How to Read Ezra Pound
by Martín Espada
At the poets’ panel, after an hour of poets debating Ezra Pound, Abe the Lincoln veteran, remembering the Spanish Civil War, raised his hand and said: If I knew that a fascist was a great poet, I’d shoot him anyway.
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Confession
by Alexander Pushkin
I love you - I love you, e’en as I Rage at myself for this obsession, And as I make my shamed confession, Despairing at your feet I lie. I know, I know - It ill becomes me, I am too old, time to be wise … But how? … This love - it overcomes me, A sickness this in passion’s guise. When you are near I’m filled with sadness, When far, I yawn, for...
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Haiku
by Issa
How sadly the bird in his cage watches the butterfly.
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In a Stolen Boat
by April Bernard
push off what seemed safe: The fishing dock, pitch pines, children glazed to sheen by ruthless summers. Past
the jetty, past the past, to open sea— all violet and green, that choppy path between doom and luck— Put your back into it, and row.
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Anxiety of Influence
by Ana Božičević
I fell asleep in the snow, and woke up in leaves. Cotillions of them were already out A limo glided by. There was a crane, too yellow, brand of KOMATSU. What does it mean, I asked. The leaf/sun interplay played on. I heard that sleep was a thing of healing so I looked in to see what it had healed, but couldn’t find the scar. I loved and hated that. I’ll go into town, I...
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Instructions: Early Epiphanies
by Elizabeth Macklin
What to do: First you put your hand on her arm on a weekday morning, coming out of the subway. Nothing flies up from the street that shouldn’t— not newspapers, not trash. The island’s becalmed, dazzling: mica is caught in the sidewalk, it’s ten o’clock, too early in the year for shade.
Test: Does the pavement tremble? Trains pull away under you and the ground. Cross calmer...
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Value and Extent
by Thomas Sturge Moore
The more they peer through lenses at the night, The finer they split the rays of stellar light, The vaster their estimates Of distances, of movements, and of weights! The stupor of this unimagined size Like a mole’s eyelid palls the keenest eyes. Yea, like unearthed moles, We, by truth tortured, writhe outside those holes… Dark homely galleries of confined thought, Whose...
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Cherry Blossoms
by Shuntaro Tanikawa
Over cherry blossoms white clouds over clouds deep sky over cherry blossoms over clouds over the sky I can climb on forever once in spring I with god had a quiet talk.
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Chamber Music: V
by James Joyce
Lean out of the window, Goldenhair, I hear you singing A merry air.
My book was closed; I read no more, Watching the fire dance On the floor.
I have left my book, I have left my room For I heard you singing Through the gloom,
Singing and singing A merry air. Lean out of the window, Goldenhair.
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The End
by Arkaye Kierulf
You must have felt it working in your bones. It’s begun: The papers print the same stories over and over, and have you checked
the obituaries? Already, nobody remembers
how their first kiss went. The phone keeps ringing and ringing when nobody’s home. Between our skins is a necessary friction
that separates us forever. Look: space. Somewhere, a lost key. It’s begun: What was...
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The Achill Woman
by Eavan Boland
”[…] but nothing now can change the way I went indoors, chilled by the wind and made a fire and took down my book and opened it and failed to comprehend
the harmonies of servitude, the grace music gives to flattery and language borrows from ambition—
and how I fell asleep
oblivious to the planets clouding over in the skies, the slow decline of the Spring...
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Certainty
by Octavio Paz
If it is real the white light from this lamp, real the writing hand, are they real, the eyes looking at what I write?
From one word to the other what I say vanishes. I know that I am alive between two parentheses.
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Song of Myself: 2
by Walt Whitman
Houses and rooms are full of perfumes, the shelves are crowded with perfumes, I breathe the fragrance myself and know it and like it, The distillation would intoxicate me also, but I shall not let it.
The atmosphere is not a perfume, it has no taste of the distillation, it is odorless, It is for my mouth forever, I am in love with it, I will go to the bank by the wood and...
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Proof
by Angel Gonzalez
At any rate, I still have this sheet of paper, the pen and the right hand that grasps it, and the arm that joins it to the body so that it will not be left— so distant and far away— like a strange, uprooted object— five fingers moving, crawling on the floor, like a filthy animal pursued by the broom… This is something, I repeat, if one...
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The Letter
by Linda Gregg
I’m not feeling strong yet, but I am taking good care of myself. The weather is perfect. I read and walk all day and then walk to the sea. I expect to swim soon. For now I am content. I am not sure what I hope for. I feel I am doing my best. It reminds me of when I was sixteen dreaming of Lorca, the gentle trees outside and the creek. Perhaps poetry replaces something in me that...
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Untitled
by Lima
You won’t allow me to go to school. I won’t become a doctor. Remember this: One day you will be sick.
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Pilgrimage
by Jay Udall
I’m tired of monotheism. I, for one, for many, prefer the cockroach emerging from the ivy, reading the night with quivering antennae, the fat rattlesnake that turned me back out of the canyon’s rocky throat, presences in a hallway of willows. Yesterday we scrubbed slippery, clayish mud from the season’s first potatoes, their irregular roundnesses all the psalms my palms ever...
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Why I Am Not a Buddhist
by Molly Peacock
I love desire, the state of want and thought of how to get; building a kingdom in a soul requires desire. I love the things I’ve sought- you in your beltless bathrobe, tongues of cash that loll from my billfold- and love what I want: clothes, houses, redemption. Can a new mauve suit equal God? Oh no, desire is ranked. To lose a loved pen is not like losing faith. Acute desire...
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A Meeting
by Wendell Berry
In a dream I meet my dead friend. He has, I know, gone long and far, and yet he is the same for the dead are changeless. They grow no older. It is I who have changed, grown strange to what I was. Yet I, the changed one, ask: “How you been?” He grins and looks at me. “I been eating peaches off some mighty fine trees.”
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Unbidden
by Rae Armantrout
The ghosts swarm. They speak as one person. Each loves you. Each has left something undone.
•
Did the palo verde blush yellow all at once?
Today’s edges are so sharp
they might cut anything that moved.
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The way a lost word
will come back unbidden.
You’re not interested in it now,
only in knowing where it’s been.
