We present this work in honor of the Canadian holiday, National Aboriginal Day.
Marilyn Dumont
Canadian
b. 1955
Betty, if I set out to write this poem about you it might turn out instead to be about me or any one of my female relatives it might turn out to be about this young native girl growing up in rural Alberta in a town with fewer Indians than ideas about Indians in a town just south of the ‘Aryan Nations’
It might turn out to be about Anna Mae Aquash, Donald Marshall, or Richard Cardinal, it might even turn out to be about our grandmothers beasts of burden in the fur trade skinning, scraping, pounding, packing left behind for ‘British Standards of Womanhood,’ left for white-melting-skinned women, not bits-of-brown women left here in this wilderness, this colony.
Betty, if I start to write a poem about you it might turn out to be about hunting season instead about ‘open season’ on native women it might turn out to be about your face young and hopeful staring back at me hollow now from a black and white page it might be about the ‘townsfolk’ (gentle word) townsfolk who ‘believed native girls were easy’ and ‘less likely to complain if a sexual proposition led to violence’
In honor of Argentina’s National Flag Day, we present this work by one of the most cutting-edge Argentine poets.
Francisco Urondo Argentine 1930 – 1976
I am left with only a few friends and those here are usually far and I am left an aftertaste I keep within close reach as if a firearm. I will use it for noble things: for defeating the enemy—God willing—, for speaking modestly about threatening possibilities.
I hope bitterness won’t intercept forgiveness, that distant wind of affections I am trying to describe: I hope the rigor of this will not convert into the thick glass of the dead, though I am curious to know the things they’ll have to say of me, after my death: to know which were your versions of love, of those tangential meetings, because my friends tend to be signals of my life, by tragic luck, giving me all that isn’t here. Prematurely, with one foot on each lip of the crevice that opens before me, at the feet of glory, I salute you all, hold my nose and let the abyss surround me.
Sundays too my father got up early and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold, then with cracked hands that ached from labor in the weekday weather made banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking. When the rooms were warm, he’d call, and slowly I would rise and dress, fearing the chronic angers of that house,
Speaking indifferently to him, who had driven out the cold and polished my good shoes as well. What did I know, what did I know of love’s austere and lonely offices?
We present this work in honor of the poet’s 30th birthday.
Elvira Sastre
Spanish
b. 1992
If you had met me pure, without a bad conscience, without sorrow in my dreams, without bites from others rooted in my shoulders.
Would you have bathed me in the morning light, licked the sleep from my eyes, stroked my insomnia, caressed my wrinkled hands with your teeth?
And if I had dressed up in something to look like you, if I had lied to you telling you my truths, if I had told you that you were the only one and not the first.
Would you have undressed me with your eyes closed and your expert hands, kissed me while I told you about my life, placed your name and mine on a pedestal and made this a love between equals?
And if I had sold myself as the love of your life,
if I had bought you as the love of mine.
Would we have fallen in love like someone who loves herself loving the one she loves?
We present this work in honor of the South African holiday, Youth Day.
Ingrid Jonker South African 1933 – 1965
I am with those who abuse sex because the individual doesn’t count with those who get drunk against the abyss of the brain against the illusion that life once was good or had beauty or sense against the garden parties of falsehood against the silence that beats into the temples with those who poor and old race against death the atom-bomb of the days and in shacks count the last flies on the walls with those stupefied in institutions shocked with electric currents through the cataracts of the senses with those who have been depraived of their hearts like the light out of the robot of safety with those coloured, african dispossessed with those who murder because every death confirms anew the lie of life And please forget about justice it doesn’t exist about brotherhood it’s deceit about love it has no right
We present this work in honor of the poet’s 155th birthday.
Konstantin Balmont Russian 1867 – 1942
The light will burn and darken, then burn with stronger blaze, But unreturning darkens the sheen of youthful days. Glow then, and be enkindled, the while thou still art young, Let ever more undwindled the heart’s loud chords be strung, That something be remembered in waning years of woe, That chill old-age be lighted by that decayless glow, Born of exalted fancies, and headstrong youth’s ado, Heedless, but full of splendour, heedless and hallowed, too.
Ay, tear her tattered ensign down!
Long has it waved on high,
And many an eye has danced to see
That banner in the sky;
Beneath it rung the battle shout,
And burst the cannon’s roar; —
The meteor of the ocean air
Shall sweep the clouds no more.
Her deck, once red with heroes’ blood,
Where knelt the vanquished foe,
When winds were hurrying o’er the flood,
And waves were white below,
No more shall feel the victor’s tread,
Or know the conquered knee; —
The harpies of the shore shall pluck
The eagle of the sea!
Oh, better that her shattered hulk
Should sink beneath the wave;
Her thunders shook the mighty deep,
And there should be her grave;
Nail to the mast her holy flag,
Set every threadbare sail,
And give her to the god of storms,
The lightning and the gale!