Robert Mezey, 'Vetus Flamma'

[duathir.livejournal.com]

Vetus Flamma

That love that once was nearest to my heart
And pressed against my arm and forehead too
Is gone and you went with it. We are two.
You have your legends, I have an empty heart,
And in the quieted pounding of this heart
I hear the future I awaken to.
Night falls each dawn and stays a week or two
And all there is to eat is my own heart.

I nurse a broken love, a broken word,
And cannot bring myself to say your name,
But keep the smallest remnant of your word
To ornament my door with what was lost.
Unaging ghost, you never said your name—
You only came to wrestle, and I lost.

by Robert Mezey

Unsaid, by Dana Gioia

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

Unsaid

So much of what we live goes on inside—
The diaries of grief, the tongue-tied aches
Of unacknowledged love are no less real
For having passed unsaid. What we conceal
Is always more than what we dare confide.
Think of the letters that we write our dead.

by Dana Gioia

Catullus 101 + 85

[faith-less-one.livejournal.com]

I looked, and neither of these poems are under the "Catullus" tag, which made me sad. The first, (101) is one of my favourite poems, and I cried the first time I translated it. This is my own translation.

101

Carried through many lands and many waters,
I come, brother, to this sad funeral,
So that I might bestow funeral gifts at last
And, in vain, might talk to your silent ashes.
Since Fortuna snatched you away from me.
O wretched brother, taken undeservedly from me,
Now, however, take these sad funeral things,
In the ancient ways passed down from our ancestors,
All wet with a brother's tears.
And for all time, brother, hail, and farewell.

( And the Latin )

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85 is one of the best known Catullus poems, and remarkable for it's ability to put forward a massive amount of emotion in only 2 lines. Again, this is my translation.

85

I hate and I love. Perhaps you are wondering why I do this?
I do not know, but I feel it happening, and I am tortured.

Odi et amo. Quare id faciam, fortasse requiris.
nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior.

(BTW - go here, you will not be disappointed!)

John Keats, 'This Living Hand'

[duathir.livejournal.com]

This Living Hand

This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb,
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
That thou wouldst wish thine own heart dry of blood
So in my veins red life might stream again,
And thou be conscience-calmed—see here it is—
I hold it towards you.

by John Keats

To Be Read In the Interrogative

[kadzeno.livejournal.com]

Have you seen
Have you truly seen
the snow the stars the felt steps of the breeze
Have you touched
really have you touched
the plate the bread the face of that woman you love
so much
Have you lived
like a blow to the head
the flash the gasp the fall the flight
Have you known
known in every pore of your skin
how your eyes your hands your sex your soft heart
must be thrown away
must be wept away
must be invented all over again

(by Julio Cortazar transl. by Stephen Kessler)

Edwin Arlington Robinson, 'Souvenir'

[duathir.livejournal.com]

Souvenir

A vanished house that for an hour I knew
By some forgotten chance when I was young
Had once a glimmering window overhung
With honeysuckle wet with evening dew.
Along the path tall dusky dahlias grew,
And shadowy hydrangeas reached and swung
Ferociously; and over me, among
The moths and mysteries, a blurred bat flew.

Somewhere within there were dim presences
Of days that hovered and of years gone by.
I waited, and between their silences
There was an evanescent faded noise;
And though a child, I knew it was the voice
Of one whose occupation was to die.

by Edwin Arlington Robinson