When You Come
When you come to me, unbidden,
Beckoning me
To long-ago rooms,
Where memories lie.
Offering me, as to a child, an attic,
Gatherings of days too few.
Baubles of stolen kisses.
Trinkets of borrowed loves.
Trunks of secret words,
I CRY.
~Maya Angelou
~~When Someone Stays Too Long~~
Shut Lips
Her fragrance! Where does it come from?
I guess that a poppy lives inside her body.
As she seldom opens her mouth,
the petals that are being blown out
flutter slowly between her and me.
This, however, can be beautiful.
She shuts her lips for a long time
and so I stay by her side for as long.
The Secret
It happened in secret,
smelling like sugared toys.
A wound-up doll still chimes
long after it should have stopped.
There is a low drumming
behind our backs.
When everyone is asleep
in the night, the forest grows.
At dusk, a scarlet iris blooms.
From somewhere underground,
the smell of mushrooms rises.
As soon as words are spoken,
the opaque window cracks
and the magic show is over.
The door to the attic slides open
to reveal
a dust-sat inner space.
The Moon and the Stone
The stone that is getting cold
was found when I wandered through the dark woods
and put on the window sill.
The stone that is getting cold
has shone in the dark room
and brightened my brow when I gazed upon it.
Under its round light,
I have forgiven my darkness
and silence rolled into a tender ball.
Did a wild cat sleep with its head on the stone?
The stone that is getting cold
has raised the cat’s dream into soap bubbles.
Purple rain falls
and the axe of a thunderbolt
cuts down trees in the forest;
meanwhile, my hand
is getting cold on the stone.
I soon come to wonder
about all the rest, the dark side
of a half-moon.
I write down
a fresh dead body of fish,
traces of water drops evaporating on a leaf,
a black body of a freight train
flushing steam,
the grey hair of old men and old women
entangled in the drainage vent,
bright heaps of snow
that lie on the rubbish truck,
the moon in a finger-sized pool
in a crack on the pavement brick.
I am making a list of favorite complexes.
As a worm squirming in
the toilet bowl of a hospital,
it is too late for anyone
aged thirty-five to die
and, in the coming fall,
gold leaves will fall silently as well.
~ Lee Sung-Mi
translated from the Korean by Gwee Li Sui
The citizen
I went into the toolshops
in all innocence
to buy a simple hammer
or some vague scissors.
I should never have done it.
Since then and restlessly
I devote my time to steel,
to the most shadowy tools:
hoes bring me to my knees,
horseshoes enslave me.
I am troubled all week,
chasing aluminium clouds,
elaborate screws,
bars of silent nickel,
unnecessary door-knockers,
and now the toolshopsare aware of my addiction—
they see me come into the cave
with my wild madman’s eyes
and see that I pine for
curious smoky things
which no one would want to buy
and which I only goggle at.
For in the addict’s dream
sprout stainless steel flowers,
endless iron blades,
eye-droppers of oil,
water-dippers of zinc,
saws of marine cut.
It’s like the inside of a star,
the light in these toolshops—
there in their own splendour
are the essential nails,
the invincible latchkeys,
the bubbles in spirit levels
and the tangles of wire.
They have a whale’s heart,
these toolshops of the port—
they’ve swallowed all the seas,
all the bones of ships,
waves and ancient tides
come together there
and leave behind in that stomach
barrels which rumble about,
ropes like gold arteries,
anchors as heavy as planets,
long and intricate chains
like intestines of the whale itself
and harpoons it swallowed, swimming
east from the Gulf of Penas.
Once I entered, I never left
and never stopped going back;
and I’ve never got away from
the aura of toolshops.
It’s like my home ground,
it teaches me useless things,
it drowns me like nostalgia.
What can I do? There are single men
in hotels, in bachelor rooms;
there are patriots with drums
and inexhaustible fliers
who rise and fall in the air.
I am not in your world.
I’m a dedicated citizen,
I belong to the toolshops.
~ Pablo Neruda
A Song and the Sultan
Mahmoud Darwish
It was no more than the description of a burst of rain
and handkerchiefs of lightning which burned the secret of trees—
then why did they resist her?
When she said that something different from this water
runs in the river
and the people of the shore are statues and other things,
why did they torture her?
When she told them the forest was abounding with secrets
and the moon was stabbed with a carving knife
and the blood of the nightingale was on that stone, abandoned,
why did they resist her?
Why did they torture her?
When she said, my country is a mountain of sweat
and on the small bridge a man is dying
and darkness burning
the Sultan was angry
and the Sultan is an imaginative creature.
He said, “The fault is in the mirror
so let your singer be silent
and let my kingdom from the Nile to the Euphrates be.”
and he shouted, “Put that poem in prison!”
The torture room, for security,
is a thousand times better than an anthem or a newspaper.
Go and tell the Sultan
that the wind cannot be wounded by the shake of a sword
that millions of trees can become green
in the cupped hand of a single letter.
But the Sultan was angry, and the Sultan is everywhere
on stamps, in psalms,
and on his forehead is the tattoo of hunting.
He shouted, “It is ordered!
Execute this poem!”
Execution Square is the best anthology for obstinate sons.
Go and tell the Sultan
that lightning cannot be imprisoned in a corncob
that songs are the logic of the sun
and the history of sheaves
and the nature of earthquakes.
That songs like tree trunks may die in one land
but sprout in every country
The blue sun was an idea
the Sultan tried to submerge
but it became the birthday of an ember
and the red sun has become an ember
which the Sultan in vain imprisoned
and suddenly the fire
is a revolution!
The voices of blood
have taken the tone of a tempest
and the pebbles of the Square are becoming
like open wounds
and I laugh, awed by the birth of the wind.
When the Sultan resisted me
I grasped the key of the morning
and groped my way with the lamps of wounds.
Oh how wise I was when I gave my heart
to the call of the tempest!
Let the tempest roar,
O let the tempest roar . . . !
—Translated from Arabic by Rose Styron
Bricks
If you want a brick you should get
a brick, to mend a wall
or to fill up a hole
in a herringbone floor.
A brick: a solid that lives in three
dimensions; heavy, it feels
rough or porous, and, if left piled up
with others long enough, will become
a nest for centipedes, spiders, earwigs.
A brick that exists, that if split by a hammer
will sound tack just once, a beautiful sound,
a brick-sound, snappy, precise.
A brick is worth more than the words
that imitate it, resting
one on top of the other.
With poetry, I would like to make bricks.
World Histories
In time, history crumbles
into stories,
each ending so tragically, that the reader,
in the case that
he is no statistician,
turns the page,
pausing, at length,
before he reads secular
misunderstandings
in to the book.
Elbows propped in the cover,
he stares into the future,
a sphinx on the graves,
over the hollow groves
infiltrating into the present
as always the dark
past.
Gilded Letters
Excerpts
~~Hijab Imtiaz Ali
I saw my friend’s pale face and said: All you gain from love is listlessness and shadows. Eradicate the word from the world’s literature. Love spreads sorrow, struggle, conflict: it never gifts a moment of grace. Look, read the poem carefully: where you see love’s ink smudging the lines, erase the verse.
But my words made her shiver and in the garden she looked like a sliver of light cast by the moon on the grass. She answered: How would we live then in this darkness? What would life’s upheavals mean to us? You perhaps can bear the darkness in a house without candles: but then you wouldn’t be able to read the world’s sacred texts, nor even — crazy as you are — would you see that in the book of songs beside your lute there are so many unsung melodies.
I smiled when I heard her response, and pulled my blue silk shawl with its pattern of painted ships around my shoulders. Tonight she’d compared love to light. It was a charming notion.
Autumn Morning
That morning her face was pale and the sound of the wind was mournful like the echo of a dirge sung by a man sitting in a dark cave. I didn’t say a word to her nor did she try to speak because we both agreed that two women in love should never talk to each other on bad-weather mornings. I stood by the window silent for a while counting the sea’s mottled waves as she sat quiet on the couch plucking music from broken strings.
~~~translated from the Urdu by Aamer Hussein
In the Hot Wind
Excerpts
~~Celia Dropkin
I Sing You
You didn’t sow a child in me,
you sowed yourself.
Now you grow in me, every day
more defined, larger.
There’s already no more room for me in me,
and my soul lies like a dog at your feet
becoming weaker and weaker
but, as I die through you, as before,
I sing you my serenades.
My Hands
My hands, two little bits
of my body I’m never
ashamed to show. With fingers—
the branches of coral,
fingers—two nests
of white serpents,
fingers—the thoughts
of a nymphomaniac.
I Absorbed
I absorbed the sky,
the woods of my old home.
I bathed in drifts of snow
in the fields of that home.
By the foot of the old ranch,
I came under the moon’s spell.
On our wide river, my oars
stole gold from the moon.
By the old castle,
my young lust quietly sated itself.
And because of all this
I am able to write down
a few words of love for you.
The Border
The border between life and death is so thin—
as thin as the difference between greens
at dusk, which change under the sky’s blaze
from deep viridian to dead mold.
I stand on the edge of the charmed earth,
and if I reach out my hand I can touch death.
Of course I live a complete life—
yet how easily I can float it away.
When the sky is golden-red
the call from death can charm you;
the sea is blue and the tree is still green,
—the border between life and death is so thin.
~~~translated from the Yiddish by Faith Jones, Jennifer Kronovet and Samuel Solomon