Tuesday, January 02, 2024

One Grass-Sewn Wound

from vesper 
By Iryna Shuvalova

...
in the end every wound is simply a ditch
a groove in the ground from which a long stubborn root has been torn
a burrow from which a fox has been smoked and chased endlessly through rainy fields
a rut carved by a helpless wheel in a sodden road

soon the wind the rain will come for it and the grass the grass
the birch goosefoot dog-grass burdock hemlock will sew the uneven edges together
the earth will lick its grazed memory
with its coarse green tongue

and so we too
forget to hate as we sleep
and simply grow like grass
covering the earth
with our clinging brittle
superfluous
love 


 ~ Translated by Uilleam Blacker | More

Saturday, August 12, 2023

One Townslept Night

What the lover said
By Allur Nanmullaiyar

If one can tell morning
from noon from listless evening,
townslept night from dawn, then one's love
is a lie.

If I should lose her
I could proclaim my misery in the streets
riding mock-horses on palmyra-stems in my wildness:
but that seems such a shame.

But then,
living away from her,
living seems such a shame.  

--Translated A.K. Ramanujan ~ Book

Tuesday, August 08, 2023

One Translated Prayer

I prayed for relief from suffering; I received suffering.
Who can say my prayers were not heard? They were
Translated, edited--

…They were taken in, studied like ancient texts.
Perhaps they were ancient texts.

 --Louise Gluck

Tuesday, June 20, 2023

One Collapsed Wall

from Genesis 
By Romeo Oriogun 

Within the first light of my birth
I was named after a war.
My mother placed a pinch of sugar on my tongue
To sweeten every darkness I will walk through,
Then she rubbed hibiscus flower on my palms,
Which means son be tender even after the collapse of my walls.

....I have wished death on my shadow from behind the cover of bushes
& saw it die & still the earth keeps building
...

Tuesday, April 11, 2023

One Contrived Collision

Picasso....like the best poets, loved contriving collisions that forced new meanings to emerge. 

--Sebastian Smee

Tuesday, March 28, 2023

One Labyrinthine Dance

from The Crane Dance
By Yannis Ritsos

...at Delos they stopped,
Theseus and the young Athenians, and stepped
up to the altar of horns to dance a puzzle-
dance, its moves unreadable except to those who'd walked
the blank meanders of the labyrinth.
And this was midday: a fierce sun, the blaze
of their nakedness, the glitter of repetitions, a dazzle
rising off the sea, the scents of pine and hyacinth...

... Nowadays, we don't think much
about Theseus, the Minotaur, Ariadne on the beach
at Naxos, staring out at the coming years.
But people still dance that dance: just common folk,
those criss-cross steps that no one had to teach,
at weddings and wakes, in bars or parks,
as if hope and heart could meet, as if they might
even now, somehow, dance themselves out of the dark.

-- Translated by David Harsent ~ Book

Tuesday, February 21, 2023

One Blinding Ganglion

Looking for your light,
I went out:

it was like the sudden dawn
of a million million suns,

a ganglion of lightnings
for my wonder.

O Lord of Caves,
if you are light,
there can be no metaphor.

--Allama Prabhu, translated by A. K. Ramanujan

Tuesday, January 17, 2023

One Hard Hive

from Inside the Apple
By Yehuda Amichai

I trust your voice
because it has lumps of hard pain in it
the way real honey
has lumps of wax from the honeycomb.

--Translated by Chana Bloch ~ Book

Monday, November 14, 2022

One Heaven-Pushed Bolt

A Translation from Petrarch (He is Jealous of the Heavens and the Earth) 

By J. M. Synge 


What a grudge I am bearing the earth that has its arms about her, and is holding that face away from me, where I was finding peace from great sadness. 

What a grudge I am bearing the Heavens that are after taking her, and shutting her in with greediness, the Heavens that do push their bolt against so many. 

What a grudge I am bearing the blessed saints that have got her sweet company, that I am always seeking; 

and what a grudge I am bearing against Death, that is standing in her two eyes, and will not call me with a word.

Tuesday, August 30, 2022

One Lasting Treegraft

what matters is that you shape with care
the clay on your humming potter's wheel (selah)
when the black plague then seeps in
it comes too late
a couple of centuries go by and the girls
will then enjoy the bright-colored bowl
 
....

what matters is that you graft the right slip
onto the right tree (selah)
if the executioners then knock on the door
they come too late
a few ice-ages pass and the youngsters will then savor your delicious apricots 

....

 --Hans Magnus Enzensberger, translated by Edouard Roditi

Tuesday, July 19, 2022

One Pained Caterpillar

from One of the Butterflies 
By W.S. Merwin

...it seems I cherish
only now a joy I was not aware of
when it was here although it remains
out of reach and will not be caught or named
or called back and if I could make it stay
as I want to it would turn into pain

Tuesday, June 07, 2022

One Trillion Particles

The poet’s mind is in fact a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together. 

 --TS Eliot

Tuesday, April 26, 2022

One High-Stakes Negotiation

Every great poet lives between two worlds. One of these is the real, tangible world of history, private for some and public for others. The other world is a dense layer of dreams, imagination, fantasms. It sometimes happens--as for example in the case of W.B. Yeats--that this second world takes on gigantic proportions, that it becomes inhabited by numerous spirits, that it is haunted by Leo Africanus and other ancient magi.

These two territories conduct complex negotiations, the result of which are poems. Poets strive for the first world, the real one, conscientiously trying to reach it, to reach the place where the minds of many people meet; but their efforts are hindered by the second world, just as the dreams and hallucinations of certain sick people prevent them from understanding and experiencing events in their waking hours. Except that in great poets these hindrances are rather a symptom of mental health, since the world is by nature dual, and poets pay tribute with their own duality to the structure of reality, which is composed of day and night, sober intelligence and fleeting fantasies, desire and gratification.

There is no poetry without this duality, though the second, substitute world is different for each outstanding creative artist.

--Adam Zagakewski, Introduction to The Collected Poems of Zbigniew Herbert

Tuesday, April 05, 2022

One Hidden Attic

from Miguel

By Cesar Vallejo

...I can hear Mama yell
"Boys! Calm down!" We'd laugh, and off I'd go
to hide where you'd never look...under the stairs,
in the hall, the attic...Then you'd do the same.
Miguel, we were too good at that game.
Everything would always end in tears.

No one was laughing on that August night
you went to hide away again, so late
it was almost dawn. But now your brother's through
with this hunting and hunting and never finding you.
The shadows crowd him. Miguel, will you hurry
and show yourself? Mama will only worry.

--Translated by Don Paterson

Tuesday, February 08, 2022

One Unlocked Snail

A gate made all of twigs

With woven grass for hinges

For a lock...this snail

Issa, translated by Peter Beilenson

Tuesday, January 25, 2022

One Yoke-Yearning Horse

 from Tithonus
By Alfred, Lord Tennyson
 
Once more the old mysterious glimmer steals
From thy pure brows, and from thy shoulders pure,
And bosom beating with a heart renew'd.
Thy cheek begins to redden through the gloom,
Thy sweet eyes brighten slowly close to mine,
Ere yet they blind the stars, and the wild team
Which love thee, yearning for thy yoke, arise,
And shake the darkness from their loosen'd manes,
And beat the twilight into flakes of fire.

Tuesday, November 09, 2021

One Validated Witch


Long Years apart - can make no Breach 
A second cannot fill — 
The absence of the Witch does not 
Invalidate the spell — 

 --Emily Dickinson

Tuesday, October 26, 2021

One Loosened Leaf

Day in Autumn 
By Rainer Maria Rilke

After the summer's yield, Lord, it is time
to let your shadow lengthen on the sundials
and in the pastures let the rough winds fly.

As for the final fruits, coax them to roundness.
Direct on them two days of warmer light
to hale them golden toward their term, and harry
the last few drops of sweetness through the wine.

Whoever's homeless now, will build no shelter;
who lives alone will live indefinitely so,
waking up to read a little, draft long letters,   
and, along the city's avenues,
fitfully wander, when the wild leaves loosen.

~Translated by Mary Kinzie

Tuesday, October 12, 2021

One Enduring Rhyme

Je ne sais comment je dure,
Car mon dolent cœur fond d'ire,
Et plaindre n'ose, ni dire
Ma douloureuse aventure,
Ma dolent vie obscure.

Rien, hors la mort, ne désire;
Je ne sais comment je dure.
Il me faut, par couverture,
Chanter que mon cœur soupire
Et faire semblant de rire;

Mais Dieu sait ce que j'endure.
Je ne sais comment je dure.

--Christine de Pisan

Tuesday, June 08, 2021

One Dominated Dream

...men, finding in the raptures of the higher poetry a condition of exaltation, to which they have no parallel in their own experience, besides the spurious resemblance of it in dreams and fevers, impute a state of dreaminess and fever to the poet. But the true poet dreams being awake. He is not possessed by his subject, but has dominion over it.

--Charles Lamb

Tuesday, January 19, 2021

One Rent Rind

The pillar perish’d is whereto I leant,
The strongest stay of my unquiet mind;
The like of it no man again can find,
From east to west still seeking though he went,
To mine unhap. For hap away hath rent
Of all my joy the very bark and rind:
And I, alas, by chance am thus assign’d
Daily to mourn, till death do it relent.
But since that thus it is by destiny,
What can I more but have a woeful heart;
My pen in plaint, my voice in careful cry,
My mind in woe, my body full of smart;
And I myself, myself always to hate,
Till dreadful death do ease my doleful state.

--Thomas Wyatt