We present this work in honor of the 130th anniversary of the poet’s death.
Herman Melville American 1819 – 1891
When ocean-clouds over inland hills Sweep storming in late autumn brown, And horror the sodden valley fills, And the spire falls crashing in the town, I muse upon my country’s ills— The tempest bursting from the waste of Time On the world’s fairest hope linked with man’s foulest crime.
Nature’s dark side is heeded now— (Ah! optimist-cheer disheartened flown)— A child may read the moody brow Of yon black mountain lone. With shouts the torrents down the gorges go, And storms are formed behind the storm we feel: The hemlock shakes in the rafter, the oak in the driving keel.
We present this work in honor of the poet’s 100th birthday.
Cintio Vitier Cuban 1921 – 2009
I will appoint things, the sound heights that see play the wind, the deep porches, screens closed shade and silence. And the internal sacred, the gloom that ply the dusty offices, the wooden man, the night wood of my body when sleeping. The poverty of the place, and the dust where the footsteps of my father made a will, the clear and decisive stone places, bare shadow, always the same. Not forgetting the piety of the fire, in bad weather the distant home, nor the joyful sacrament of rain, the humble cup of the park. Neither you wonderful wall, noon and indigo skies and endless. With the building of the summer look, my love will remember the paths to where they escape the greedy Sundays, Mondays and return with bowed head. I will appoint things, so slowly, that when I lose the Paradise of the road, and oblivion me turn into a dream, I can call them suddenly with the dawn.
We present this work in honor of the South African holiday, Heritage Day.
Rustum Kozain
South African
b. 1966
Somewhere in some dark decade stands my father without work, unknown to me and my brother deep in the Paarl winter and a school holiday. As the temperature drops, he, my father, fixes a thermos of coffee, buys some meat pies and we chug up Du Toit’s Kloof Pass in his old 57 Ford, where he wills the mountain – under cold cloud, tan and blue rockface bright and wet with rain – he wills these to open and let his children in, even as he apologises – my strict and angry fearsome father – even as he apologises for his existence then and there his whereabouts declared to the warden or ranger in government issue, ever-present around the next turn or lazing in a jeep in the next lay-by: “No sir, just driving. Yes, sir, my car.”
At the highest point of the pass we stop to eat, and he, my father, this strict and angry, fearsome father, my father whom I love and his dark face, he pries open a universe that strangely he makes ours, that is no longer mine: a wily old grey baboon, well-hid against salt-and-pepper rock, eyeing us; some impossibly magnificent bird of prey rarely seen, racing to its nest as the weather turns. And we are up there close I think to my father’s God, the wind howling and cloud rushing over us, awed and small in that big car swaying in the gale.
Silence. A sudden still point as the universe pauses, inhales and gathers its grace. Then, the silent, feather-like fall of snowflakes as to us it grants a brief bright kingdom unseen by the ranger. And for some minutes a car with three stunned occupants rests on a mountain top outside the fast ever-darkening turn of our growing up; too brief to light the dark years when I would learn:
how the bright, clear haunts of crab and trout where we swim in summer now in winter a brown rage over rock; how mountain and pine and fynbos or the mouse-drawn falcon of my veld; the one last, mustard-dry koekemakranka of summer that my father tosses through the air to hit the ground and puff like a smoke bomb; and once, also in summer somewhere, a loquacious piet-my-vrou; or the miraculous whirligig of waterhondjies streaking across a tea-coloured pool cradled by tan rock and fern-green fern; my first and only owl, large and mysterious in a deep stand of pine, big owl we never knew were there until you swooped away, stirred by our voices; how I too would be woken and learn that this tree and bird, this world the earth and this child’s home already fell beyond his possessives.
And how, once north through the dry Bushmanland with its black rock, over a rise in the road, the sudden green like the strange and familiar sibilants in Keimoes and Kakamas. And the rush of the guttural was the water over rock at Augrabies. The Garieb over rock at Augrabies, at Augrabies where the boom swings down, the gate-watch tight-lipped as a sermon: “Die Kleurlingkant is vol” as he waves through a car filled with bronzed impatient white youth laughing at us, at my father, my father my silent father in whom a gaze grows distant and the child who learns this pain past metaphor. How like a baboon law and state just turned its fuck-you arse on us and ambled off.
We present this work in honor of the poet’s 95th birthday.
Fereydoon Moshiri Persian 1926 – 2000
Indeed, if someday, someone asks me, “During your time on Earth, what did you do?” I’ll open my book of verse before him, I’ll hold my head up, laughing and crying, I’ll say that this seed is “newly sown,” It needs time to come to fruition and bloom.
Under this vast cerulean sky, With all my might, in very song, I evoked the revered name of love. Perhaps, by this weary voice, An oblivious someone was awakened, Somewhere in the four corners of this world.
I praised kindness, I battled against wickedness.
I suffered the “wilting of a single stem of flower,” I grieved the “death of a caged canary,” And, for people’s sorrows, I died a hundred times a night.
I’m not ashamed if at times, When one ought to have screamed from deep within, With Jesus-like patience, I kept my silence.
If I were to arm myself with a sword, To fight against the ignorant, Blame me not for taking the road to love. A sword in hand implies, A man may meet his demise.
We were passing through a bleak road, Where the darkness of ignorance was devastating! My belief in humanity was my torch! The sword was in devil’s hand! Words were my only weapon on this battlefield!
Even if my poetry could not kindle a fire in anyone’s mind, My heart, like firewood, burned from both sides. Read a page from my book of verse, and you may say: Can anyone burn worse than him?!
Many endless nights, I did not sleep, To retell humanity’s message from man to man, In the thorny land of animosity, My words were a breeze from the land of peace. But, perhaps, they should’ve been a mighty windstorm, To uproot all this wickedness.
Our elders had advised us in the past: “It is too late… too late… The soul of the Earth is so dark, Our strength, multiplied by hundred, Is no more than a lonely cry in a desert so vast!”
“Another Noah, there must be, Another great storm, too.”
“The world must be built anew, New humans within it, too”
Yet, this patient, solitary man, Carrying his backpack full of fervor, Still strides along, To draw a glimmer of light from the heart of this darkness, He places the candle of a poem here and there, He still hopes for the miracle that is man.
We present this work in honor of the 50th anniversary of the poet’s death.
Giorgos Seferis Greek 1900 – 1971
The day was cloudy. No one could come to a decision; a light wind was blowing. ‘Not a north-easter, the sirocco,’ someone said. A few slender cypresses nailed to the slope, and, beyond, the sea grey with shining pools. The soldiers presented arms as it began to drizzle. ‘Not a north-easter, the sirocco,’ was the only decision heard. And yet we knew that by the following dawn nothing would be left to us, neither the woman drinking sleep at our side nor the memory that we were once men, nothing at all by the following dawn.
‘This wind reminds me of spring,’ said my friend as she walked beside me gazing into the distance, ‘the spring that came suddenly in the winter by the closed-in sea. So unexpected. So many years have gone. How are we going to die?’
A funeral march meandered through the thin rain.
How does a man die? Strange no one’s thought about it. And for those who thought about it, it was like a recollection from old chronicles from the time of the Crusades or the battle of Salamis. Yet death is something that happens: how does a man die? Yet each of us earns his death, his own death, which belongs to no one else and this game is life.
The light was fading from the clouded day, no one decided anything. The following dawn nothing would be left to us, everything surrendered, even our hands, and our women slaves at the springheads and our children in the quarries. My friend, walking beside me, was singing a disjointed song: ‘In spring, in summer, slaves . . .’ One recalled old teachers who’d left us orphans. A couple passed, talking: ‘I’m sick of the dusk, let’s go home, let’s go home and turn on the light.’
We present this work in honor of International Talk Like a Pirate Day.
Robert Louis Stevenson Scots 1850 – 1894
Three of us afloat in the meadow by the swing, Three of us aboard in the basket on the lea. Winds are in the air, they are blowing in the spring, And waves are on the meadow like the waves there are at sea.
Where shall we adventure, to-day that we’re afloat, Wary of the weather and steering by a star? Shall it be to Africa, a-steering of the boat, To Providence, or Babylon, or off to Malabar?
Hi! but here’s a squadron a-rowing on the sea— Cattle on the meadow a-charging with a roar! Quick, and we’ll escape them, they’re as mad as they can be, The wicket is the harbour and the garden is the shore.
Poets Corner 