(no subject)

[grammarfight.livejournal.com]

In The Village Of My Ancestors

Someone embraces me
Someone looks at me with the eyes of a wolf
Someone takes off his hat
So I can see him better

Everyone asks me
Do you know how I'm related to you

Unknown old men and women
Appropriate the names
Of young men and women from my memory

I ask one of them
Tell me for God's sake
Is George the Wolf still living

That's me he answers
With a voice from the next world

I touch his cheek with my hand
And beg him with my eyes
To tell me if I'm living too

–Vasko Popa



Cross-posted at grammarfight

Do not stand at my grave and weep

[the-xtina.livejournal.com]

Do not stand at my grave and weep,
I am not there, I do not sleep.
I am a thousand winds that blow,
I am the softly falling snow.
I am the gentle showers of rain,
I am the fields of ripening grain.
I am in the morning hush,
I am in the graceful rush
Of beautiful birds in circling flight,
I am the starshine of the night.
I am in the flowers that bloom,
I am in a quiet room.
I am in the birds that sing,
I am in each lovely thing.
Do not stand at my grave and cry,
I am not there. I do not die.

- Unknown, attributed to Mary Frye.

A Moment

[ophelia67.livejournal.com]

Across the highway a heron stands
in the flooded field.  It stands
as if lost in thought, on one leg, careless
as if the field belongs to herons.
The air is clear and quiet.
Snow melts on the second fair day.
Mother and daughter,
we sit in the parkinglot
with doughnut and coffee.
We are silent
For a moment the wall between us 
opens to the universe;
then closes.
And you go on saying
you do not want to repeat my life.

Ruth Stone

Gacela of the Dark Death - Federico García Lorca

[vowel-in-thug.livejournal.com]

I want to sleep the sleep of the apples,
I want to get far away from the busyness of the cemeteries.
I want to sleep the sleep of that child
who longed to cut his heart open far out at sea.

I don't want them to tell me again how the corpse keeps all its blood,
how the decaying mouth goes on begging for water.
I'd rather not hear about the torture sessions the grass arranges for
nor about how the moon does all its work before dawn
with its snakelike nose.

I want to sleep for half a second,
a second, a minute, a century,
but I want everyone to know that I am still alive,
that I have a golden manger inside my lips,
that I am the little friend of the west wind,
that I am the elephantine shadow of my own tears.

When it's dawn just throw some sort of cloth over me
because I know dawn will toss fistfuls of ants at me,
and pour a little hard water over my shoes
so that the scorpion claws of the dawn will slip off.

Because I want to sleep the sleep of the apples,
and learn a mournful song that will clean all earth away from me,
because I want to live with that shadowy child
who longed to cut his heart open far out at sea.

--translated by Robert Bly

request

[2much-estrogen.livejournal.com]

There is a poem out there. I thought it was by Sharon Olds or Dorianne Laux but apparently no go. It is about a woman who has just given birth and comes home with not only a baby but some serious damage down below. The last image, I think, is her lover standing guard over the nest of thorns. Anybody know what I'm talking about?

"Samson"
Diane Gilliam Fisher

Pillars is the walls of coal you leave
between rooms while you working
the rooms Boss had me explain it
to the Big Boss come down from Boston
on the train to lay eyes on things.
Boss didn’t call me by my name,

just holler, Come on over here, son.
Bragged how big I is, how strong
a colored boy get when he shovel and haul.
Didn’t ask me how my eye got gone?
coal shot out when I was pillar-drawing.
Didn’t ask my name, neither one.

I played along. Yessir, I told them,
them pillars is coal, they can get sold.
We come back in when the rooms is all mined
and pull them down, we don’t leave nothing
behind. I’ve knowed three men’s died that way,
nothing left of them but their names

roof don’t hold too long without no walls.
Bosses begin to edge back toward the hall.
I stood in their way. With my right hand
I pressed one pillar, the other with my left.
I explained To the mountain we all the same.
I pressed harder, and I told them my name.

Nova Scotia // Stephen Dunn

[iatrogenicmyth.livejournal.com]

Jellyfish washed up
like small blue parachutes
but it was the silent fishing of cranes
that signaled another time
had begun, another world.
I walked to the clam bed
with bucket and pitchfork
and before the sun had fallen
we had steamers
and Black Point darkened
slowly, layer upon layer.
The temperature dropped
into the fifties; how easily we fell
into that smug summer sleep
of people vacationing in the north.

One July, though, out of love
with each other,
we played Frisbee, perfecting
the sidearm, the between-the-legs.
In bed we did it this way,
then that, sad masters of technique.
Then a crane dragged
its damaged leg into the tall reeds,
snapped and hissed
when we got near, would not
let itself be saved.
In the morning
we found its neck ripped -
a weasel's work, pure mischief,
and we felt, no, we were sure
nothing we did or didn't do
could have changed a thing.

The End and the Beginning

[keonaa.livejournal.com]

After every war
someone has to clean up.
Things won’t
straighten themselves up, after all.
Someone has to push the rubble
to the sides of the road,
so the corpse-laden wagons can pass.

Someone has to get mired
in scum and ashes,
sofa-springs,
splintered glass,
and bloody rags.

Someone must drag in a girder
to prop up a wall.
Someone must glaze a window,
rehang a door.

 

( Photogenic it's not )

 

~ Wislawa Szymborska