We present this work in honor of the poet’s 105th birthday.
Slimane Azem Algerian 1918 – 1983
When I found her crouched under a rock she was in deep mourning— “Was it the eagle that struck her,” I wondered, “or was she scared of the owl?” But it was the hunters who broke her wings! When she raised her eyes to look up at me I saw her swollen eyelids as she sighed & confided her pain: “My babies have just flown away into exile!” Where have they gone? Injustice leaves a bitter taste in the mouth— when it strikes it spares no one! “What’s the use of crying now?” said I in a consoling tone. “You’re just rekindling your old pains! Even far away they won’t forget you— make sure you won’t either, for you should always remember that these times of blind oppression are never to be forgotten! Someday’ll come when you’ll be happy again— that day you’ll know your little ones won’t stand your absence any more!” “It broke my heart to see them fly away,” said she—giving a moan! “It’s the fear of the hunters that made them fly away & disperse into the skies. I’m scared their exile’ll last forever, for how could they return? How I wish I could be more patient! Will they forget their old mother, who’d toiled for them all her life?”
Times are hard! Thus our lord has decided! This is how the world goes round! Today our fists are tied, but the little ones’ll soon fly back home as sure as any pain will not last & must— someday—come to an end!
We present this work in honor of the 55th anniversary of the poet’s death.
León Felipe Spanish 1884 – 1968
I don’t know much, it’s true. I can only tell you what I’ve seen. And I’ve seen: that the cradle of man is rocked with stories… that the anguished cries of man are smothered with stories… that the moan of man is stifled with stories… that the bones of man are buried with stories… And the fear of man has invented all the stories. I know very few things, it’s true. But they’ve put me to sleep with all the stories… And I know all the stories.
We present this work in honor of the poet’s 140th birthday.
William Carlos Williams American 1883 – 1963
Of asphodel, that greeny flower, like a buttercup upon its branching stem- save that it’s green and wooden- I come, my sweet, to sing to you. We lived long together a life filled, if you will, with flowers. So that I was cheered when I came first to know that there were flowers also in hell. Today I’m filled with the fading memory of those flowers that we both loved, even to this poor colorless thing- I saw it when I was a child- little prized among the living but the dead see, asking among themselves: What do I remember that was shaped as this thing is shaped? while our eyes fill with tears. Of love, abiding love it will be telling though too weak a wash of crimson colors it to make it wholly credible. There is something something urgent I have to say to you and you alone but it must wait while I drink in the joy of your approach, perhaps for the last time. And so with fear in my heart I drag it out and keep on talking for I dare not stop. Listen while I talk on against time. It will not be for long. I have forgot and yet I see clearly enough something central to the sky which ranges round it. An odor springs from it! A sweetest odor! Honeysuckle! And now there comes the buzzing of a bee! and a whole flood of sister memories! Only give me time, time to recall them before I shall speak out. Give me time, time. When I was a boy I kept a book to which, from time to time, I added pressed flowers until, after a time, I had a good collection. The asphodel, forebodingly, among them. I bring you, reawakened, a memory of those flowers. They were sweet when I pressed them and retained something of their sweetness a long time. It is a curious odor, a moral odor, that brings me near to you. The color was the first to go. There had come to me a challenge, your dear self, mortal as I was, the lily’s throat to the hummingbird! Endless wealth, I thought, held out its arms to me. A thousand tropics in an apple blossom. The generous earth itself gave us lief. The whole world became my garden! But the sea which no one tends is also a garden when the sun strikes it and the waves are wakened. I have seen it and so have you when it puts all flowers to shame. Too, there are the starfish stiffened by the sun and other sea wrack and weeds. We knew that along with the rest of it for we were born by the sea, knew its rose hedges to the very water’s brink. There the pink mallow grows and in their season strawberries and there, later, we went to gather the wild plum. I cannot say that I have gone to hell for your love but often found myself there in your pursuit. I do not like it and wanted to be in heaven. Hear me out. Do not turn away. I have learned much in my life from books and out of them about love. Death is not the end of it. There is a hierarchy which can be attained, I think, in its service. Its guerdon is a fairy flower; a cat of twenty lives. If no one came to try it the world would be the loser. It has been for you and me as one who watches a storm come in over the water. We have stood from year to year before the spectacle of our lives with joined hands. The storm unfolds. Lightning plays about the edges of the clouds. The sky to the north is placid, blue in the afterglow as the storm piles up. It is a flower that will soon reach the apex of its bloom. We danced, in our minds, and read a book together. You remember? It was a serious book. And so books entered our lives. The sea! The sea! Always when I think of the sea there comes to mind the Iliad and Helen’s public fault that bred it. Were it not for that there would have been no poem but the world if we had remembered, those crimson petals spilled among the stones, would have called it simply murder. The sexual orchid that bloomed then sending so many disinterested men to their graves has left its memory to a race of fools or heroes if silence is a virtue. The sea alone with its multiplicity holds any hope. The storm has proven abortive but we remain after the thoughts it roused to re-cement our lives. It is the mind the mind that must be cured short of death’s intervention, and the will becomes again a garden. The poem is complex and the place made in our lives for the poem. Silence can be complex too, but you do not get far with silence. Begin again. It is like Homer’s catalogue of ships: it fills up the time. I speak in figures, well enough, the dresses you wear are figures also, we could not meet otherwise. When I speak of flowers it is to recall that at one time we were young. All women are not Helen, I know that, but have Helen in their hearts. My sweet, you have it also, therefore I love you and could not love you otherwise. Imagine you saw a field made up of women all silver-white. What should you do but love them? The storm bursts or fades! it is not the end of the world. Love is something else, or so I thought it, a garden which expands, though I knew you as a woman and never thought otherwise, until the whole sea has been taken up and all its gardens. It was the love of love, the love that swallows up all else, a grateful love, a love of nature, of people, of animals, a love engendering gentleness and goodness that moved me and that I saw in you. I should have known, though I did not, that the lily-of-the-valley is a flower makes many ill who whiff it. We had our children, rivals in the general onslaught. I put them aside though I cared for them. as well as any man could care for his children according to my lights. You understand I had to meet you after the event and have still to meet you. Love to which you too shall bow along with me- a flower a weakest flower shall be our trust and not because we are too feeble to do otherwise but because at the height of my power I risked what I had to do, therefore to prove that we love each other while my very bones sweated that I could not cry to you in the act. Of asphodel, that greeny flower, I come, my sweet, to sing to you! My heart rouses thinking to bring you news of something that concerns you and concerns many men. Look at what passes for the new. You will not find it there but in despised poems. It is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there. Hear me out for I too am concerned and every man who wants to die at peace in his bed besides.
We present this work in honor of the 50th anniversary of the poet’s death.
Victor Jara Chilean 1932 – 1973
There are five thousand of us here. In this small part of the city. Five thousand. How many of us are there in all In the cities and in all the country? Here we are, ten thousand hands Who plant the seeds and keep the factories running. So much humanity, hungry, cold, panicked, in pain, Under moral duress, terrified out of their minds! Six of ours lost themselves In the space of the stars. One man dead, one man beaten worse than I ever thought It was possible to beat a human being. The other four wanted to free themselves of all their fear. One jumped into the void. Another beat his head against the wall. But all had the fixed look of death in their eyes. What fear is provoked by the face of fascism! They carry out their plans with the utmost precision, not giving a damn about anything. For them, blood is a medal. Killing is an act of heroism. My God, is this the world You created? Is this the product of Your seven days of wonders and labour? In these four walls, there is nothing but a number that does not move forward. That, gradually, will grow to want death. But my conscience suddenly awakens me And I see this tide without a pulse And I see the pulse of the machines And the soldiers, showing their matronly faces, full of tenderness. And Mexico, Cuba, and the world? Let them cry out of this ignominy! We are ten thousand fewer hands that do not produce. How many of us are there throughout our homeland? The blood of our comrade the President pulses with more strength than bombs and machine guns. And so, too, will our fist again beat. Song, how hard it is sing you when I have to sing in fear! Fear like that in which I live, and from which I am dying, fear. Of seeing myself amidst so much, and so many endless moments In which silence and outcry are the targets of this song. What have never seen before, what I have felt and what I feel now Will make the moment break out…
We present this work in honor of the Nicaraguan holiday, the Battle of San Jacinto.
Salomón de la Selva Nicaraguan 1893 – 1959
You take the street on which the large church fronts And go some twenty blocks and up a hill And past the three-arch bridge until you come To Guadalupe, where the houses are No stately Spanish buildings, flat and lazy, As in the center of the town you see them — Heavy with some three centuries upon them, Accustomed to the sunlight and the earthquakes, To sudden dawns, long days and sudden sunsets, Half bored, you fancy, by these ways of nature — But little things, ugly almost, and frail, With low red roofs and flimsy rough-cut doors, A trifle better than an Indian hut, Not picturesque, just dreary commonplace — As commonplace and dreary as the flats Here, in your cities, where your poor folks live — And yet, you notice, glad the sun is shining, And glad a cooling wind begins to blow, Too glad, too purely, humbly glad to say it; And all the while afraid of the volcanoes, Holding their breath lest these should wake to crush them. Look through these doors and see the walls inside With holy pictures, saints and angels, there, Sold to my people, reverenced by them; Look through these doors and see the children, playing Or wrangling, just as children will elsewhere; Look through these doors and see the women, sewing, Setting their tables, doing the thousand things Hardly worth noticing, that women do Around their houses, meaning life to them. And if you listen you may hear them singing — Not anywhere are better songs than theirs. It’s nothing thrilling! Tourists do not care, And if you hire a common guide he’ll never Think of directing you, to see this mere Unhonored dailiness of people’s lives That is the soil the roots of beauty know.
Yet, if you wish to know my country — it’s there.
The old Cathedral that the Spaniards built, With hand-carved altars for two thousand saints; The ruined fortress where they say that Nelson, Who was a pirate then, lost his left eye Fighting a woman, all that tourists see — That’s what my country used to be, not now. The “dear” hotel, with palm-trees in the courtyard, And a self-playing piano drumming rags; The shops of German, English and French owners; The parlors of the ruling class, adorned With much the same bad taste as in New York — That’s not my country either! But the rows Of ugly little houses where men dwell, And women — all too busy living life To think of faking it — that is my country, My Nicaragua, mother of great poets. And when you see that, what? Just this: Despite Newspaper revolutions and so forth, The different climate and the different Traditions and the different grandfathers, My people are pretty much the same as yours: Folks with their worries and their hopes about them, Working for bread and for a something more That ever changes, hardly twice the same; Happy and sad, the very joy and sorrow Your people feel; at heart just plainly human: And that is worth the journey to find out.
We present this work in honor of the poet’s 80th birthday.
Michael Ondaatje Canadian b. 1943
A girl whom I’ve not spoken to or shared coffee with for several years writes of an old scar. On her wrist it sleeps, smooth and white, the size of a leech. I gave it to her brandishing a new Italian penknife. Look, I said turning, and blood spat onto her shirt.
My wife has scars like spread raindrops on knees and ankles, she talks of broken greenhouse panes and yet, apart from imagining red feet, (a nymph out of Chagall) I bring little to that scene. We remember the time around scars, they freeze irrelevant emotions and divide us from present friends. I remember this girl’s face, the widening rise of surprise.
And would she moving with lover or husband conceal or flaunt it, or keep it at her wrist a mysterious watch. And this scar I then remember is a medallion of no emotion.
I would meet you now and I would wish this scar to have been given with all the love that never occurred between us.
We present this work in honor of the 55th anniversary of the poet’s death.
Pablo de Rokha Chilean 1894 – 1968
To Winett
Oh, peoples! I am like the total fuck up of the world. The song face to face with Satan himself, dialogues with the tremendous science of the dead, and my pain spurts blood at the city.
Even my days are what remains of enormous antiques, Baby, last night “God” cried between worlds that go like this, alone, and you say: “I love you”, when you talk with “your” Pablo, without ever hearing me. The man and the woman reek of tomb; my body crumples onto the brute earth the same as the red coffin of the wretched.
A total enemy, I howl through the streets, A horror more barbarous, more barbarous, more barbarous than the baying of a hundred dogs left to die.
Poets Corner 