Zeus - Laura Kasischke

[circleofharmony.livejournal.com]

ZEUS
All night I ride my motorcycle up
and down the dirt
road between your house and town. Just

as sleep’s about to slip
its loose white sack
over your nose and mouth, I’m
back, kicking
up the gravel with my tires—for

I am dust and sound, and nobody
fucks with dust, and silence
has a price. I

have a long grey pony-tail
and a jacket
with Meet Your Maker embroidered on the back.

For now, you can’t quite fathom that, though

you think hard, late at night, when
sleep won’t come, and know
in the empty notebook
of your heart that

where thought ends, there’s God. And

you’re no longer young. The night

sky’s a big mouth,
opened wide. At least
two times you would have died

if it hadn’t been for my rough kindness. That

time in Vegas with the gun, and

what was that other one? Passes

understanding,
doesn’t it? Or

maybe I’m just out here having fun. Maybe

if you lived
on a little lake, I’d
ride my jet ski on it every night. I’d

wear a Hawaiian shirt, and I’d
be young and blond. In any case, sleep will come

soon enough. Tonight

you can lie awake in the dark
and thank your lucky stars
that I chose your dirt road
to ride my motorcycle on.

--Laura Kasischke

I found this poem in the Winter 2004/05 edition of the Iowa Review.

(no subject)

[hellobomb.livejournal.com]

Giving Up Smoking

There's not a Shakespeare sonnet
Or a Beethoven quartet
That's easier to like than you
Or harder to forget.

You think that sounds extravagant?
I haven't finished yet -
I like you more than I would like
To have a cigarette.

- Wendy Cope

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee

[ravengirl.livejournal.com]

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,
One clover, and a bee,
And revery.
The revery alone will do,
If bees are few.


Emily Dickinson

The Coromandel Fishers

[simpletwice.livejournal.com]

The Coromandel Fishers - Sarojini Naidu

Rise, brothers, rise; the wakening skies pray to the morning light,
The wind lies asleep in the arms of the dawn like a child that has cried all night.
Come, let us gather our nets from the shore and set our catamarans free,
To capture the leaping wealth of the tide, for we are the kings of the sea!

No longer delay, let us hasten away in the track of the sea gull's call,
The sea is our mother, the cloud is our brother, the waves are our comrades all.
What though we toss at the fall of the sun where the hand of the sea-god drives?
He who holds the storm by the hair, will hide in his breast our lives.

Sweet is the shade of the cocoanut glade, and the scent of the mango grove,
And sweet are the sands at the full o' the moon with the sound of the voices we love;
But sweeter, O brothers, the kiss of the spray and the dance of the wild foam's glee;
Row, brothers, row to the edge of the verge, where the low sky mates with the sea.

Jacques Prévert

[rejectomorph]

This poem has been posted to this community before, in a different translation, and accompanied by the original French version.

Click this link to compare them.


Quicksands

by Jacques Prévert

      Demons and wonders
        Winds and tides
    The sea already backward rides
             And you
  Like sea-weed in the wind's soft loving
In the sand of the sheet are dreaming and moving
      Demons and wonders
        Winds and tides
    The sea already backward rides
    But, in your half-opened eyes,
    Two small waves remain to keep
      Demons and wonders
        Winds and tides
    Two small waves to drown me deep.

–translated by Andrew Sinclair