How could it be possible that I, tousled, might be reduced to dust,
Might lay down my indefatigable body like a log?
If all my twenty awkward years
Boom like the thick trees—to live!…
To live! To be torn into shreds by the winds,
To be shed to the ground with the hot leaves,
But only to feel how the arteries push,
To bend with pain, to be whipped-up by frenzy.
Waxen whores and young Anabaptists
cross paths beneath this window in the Tremol Hotel.
I sleep here.
I eat in this gold and hibiscus dining room.
Every night I dance with Zulita.
Every morning the man at the next table wishes me good day.
This is in the Tremol Hotel, beneath whose windows
the paths cross
of waxen whores and young Anabaptists.
But I have a soul as tender as marshmallows,
and my eyes flash on and off like the intermittent neon signs.
That’s why I love this hotel, this little rest, a locket of serenity.
Across the street, a sad sidewalk and a public clock drawn my eye each year,
and thereupon I invent a tenderness old and ripe.
In the Tremol Hotel, no one know me yet,
in spite of my familiarity with its doors and its swallows.
No one, maybe not even aviators,
can treasure as I do
these post-card memories.
I ride in a decorated carriage,
My darling rides a blue-white horse.
Where should we tie the knot for our heart?
Under the Xiling pine and cypress.
We present this work in honor of the poet’s 75th birthday.
Rough, wet winds
parch my agonised face
as if salting the wound of
Bulhoek
Sharpeville
Soweto,
unbandage strip by strip
the dressings of Hope;
I wade my senses
through the mist;
I am still surviving
the traumas of my raped soil
alive and aware;
truths jump like a cat leaps for fish
at my mind;
I plod along
into the vortex
of a clear-borne dawn
The Moon’s the North Wind’s cooky.
He bites it, day by day,
Until there’s but a rim of scraps
That crumble all away.
The South Wind is a baker.
He kneads clouds in his den,
And bakes a crisp new moon that… greedy
North… Wind… eats… again!
In honor of German Unity Day, we present this work by one of Germany’s most celebratory poets.
Come, my soul, awake, ‘t is morning,
Day is dawning
O’er the earth, arise and pray;
Come, to Hime who made this splendour
Thou must render
All thy feeble pow’rs can pay.
Soul, thy incense also proffer;
Thou shouldst offer
Praise to Him, who from thy head
Kept afar the storms of sorrow,
And the morrow
Finds the night in peace hath fled.
Bid Him bless what thou art doing,
If pursuing
Some good aim; but if there lurks
Ill intent in thine endeavour,
May He ever
Thwart and turn thee from thy works.
From God’s glances shrink thou never,
Meet them ever;
Who submits him to His grace,
Finds that earth no sunshine knoweth
Such as gloweth
O’er his pathway all his days.
Wakenest thou again to sorrow,
Oh! then borrow
Strength from Him, whose sun-like might
On the mountain-summit tarries,
And yet carries
To the vales their mirth and light.
Pray that when thy life is closing,
Calm reposing
Thou mayst die, and not in pain;
That, the night of death departed,
Thou, glad-bearted,
Mayst behold the Sun again.
In honor of Gandhi Jayanti, we present this work by one of India’s most thoughtful poets.
In Madurai,
city of temples and poets,
who sang of cities and temples,
every summer
a river dries to a trickle
in the sand,
baring the sand ribs,
straw and women’s hair
clogging the watergates
at the rusty bars
under the bridges with patches
of repair all over them
the wet stones glistening like sleepy
crocodiles, the dry ones
shaven water-buffaloes lounging in the sun
The poets only sang of the floods.
He was there for a day
when they had the floods.
People everywhere talked
of the inches rising,
of the precise number of cobbled steps
run over by the water, rising
on the bathing places,
and the way it carried off three village houses,
one pregnant woman
and a couple of cows
named Gopi and Brinda as usual.
The new poets still quoted
the old poets, but no one spoke
in verse
of the pregnant woman
drowned, with perhaps twins in her,
kicking at blank walls
even before birth.
He said:
the river has water enough
to be poetic
about only once a year
and then
it carries away
in the first half-hour
three village houses,
a couple of cows
named Gopi and Brinda
and one pregnant woman
expecting identical twins
with no moles on their bodies,
with different coloured diapers
to tell them apart.
We present this work in honor of China’s National Day.
I gaze around in the west wind, sick at heart;
A sad season this of red smartweed and white reeds;
No sign is there of autumn by the bare fence round my plot.
Yet I dream of attenuated blooms in the frost.
My heart follows the wild geese back to the distant south,
Sitting lonely at dusk I hear pounding of washing blocks.
Who will pity me pining away for the yellow flowers?
On the Double Ninth Festival they will reappear.
Of metal
The city reflects
On my clothing
All equally alone
(Between) the sound and the inertia
Sometimes I only want
A contact
The time
Enough to feel like I’m doing something
Something that makes me special
(Someone that makes me special)
I take off the armor
I remain exposed, I remain in doubt
What I was pretending to be
Melts in my feet
I take off the armor
I remain exposed, I remain in doubt
There’s only organs and skin
And so I let myself fall
My feet are tired from running
Of crystal
The city
I watch as
The secret life
Collapses
Brilliant courage
All equally alone
The carry the bones on the outside
We present this work in honor of the poet’s 60th birthday.
A torturer does not redeem himself through suicide.
But it does help. – Mario Benedetti
The boys from the neighbourhood, some of them,
stay behind the mud and the rain.
I ask myself what has become of
Romero, Quezada, Coleman?
Did their bodies and souls
escape deterioration?
Did they go into the army
to do their duty as soldiers
of the fatherland, the ones
who protect us from hate and
foreign tyrants?
Did they climb like the General
by usurping through disloyalty,
lies, secret codes and
finally through money?
Did they have families and
continue living in the city
as if nothing had happened?
Or did they sell their modest houses,
move to another neighbourhood where
no one knows anything about them?
There they will come in the evening and
will wash the remnants of dried blood
from their fingers.
Will they look for their wives,
give them a kiss, touch their bodies
with those same hands?
Will their daytime nightmares
be cast upon those who
know nothing of where they
come at the end of the night?
Will they return their heads,
smashed by the memories they left
in the cells, streets, apartments to a soft warm
pillow that washes away their sacrileges?
What happened to the men
I knew and never saw again?
Did they turn themselves into
men hungry for justice or did
they leave little by little in silence?
Did they put on their clothes
in the morning without knowing
whether they would return in
the evening to their dear ones?
Did they learn to kill in clandestine training or
did they become more men with the
passing of these hard times?
Did they love like those
pure men
I met on those evenings
when to play was
all our universe?
Poets Corner 