We present this work in honor of the 50th anniversary of the poet’s death.
Jean Sénac Algerian 1926 – 1973
I love you that’s true I love you that’s false crows on my tongue wage war with swallows we’ve got blackness inside our backs But if one day the beloved or the beauty comes along we find our spinning tops again sunlight scars the water All around the air thins we throw a shovel of earth on the thighs the ivy comes into focus Migratory pleasures you bequeath to the heart decaying nymphs and we go on living gropingly under the waves like crayfish I love you for you I write poems to stop thinking drunk on images I invent margins to prolong you If I had at least your name to speak o my unknown my madwoman of the streets honored in my veins like a king by his empire My needle of gold missing in the hay!
We present this work in honor of the 40th anniversary of the poet’s death.
José Bergamín Spanish 1895 – 1983
The soul is memory; the body, forgetting. If memory, through words, is the soul of history, will history also contain through the word, a body of forgetting?
We present this work in honor of the poet’s 100th birthday.
Álvaro Mutis Colombian 1923 – 2013
Tequila is a clean flame that clambers up the walls and shoots over tiled roofs, relief to despair. Tequila isn’t for sailors because it blurs the navigational instruments and dismisses the wind’s tacit orders. But tequila, on the other hand, enraptures those returning by train and those driving the train, because it stays faithful and blind in its loyalty to the rails’ parallel delirium and to hurried greetings in the stations where the train pauses to testify to its inscrutable destination, errant, subject to the inevitable laws. There are trees under whose shadow it is wonderful to drink it with the parsimony of those who preach in wind and other trees where tequila can’t stand the shade that dims its powers and in whose branches it stirs up a flower blue as the warnings on bottles of poison. When tequila waves its fringed, serrated flag, the battle halts and armies return the order they intended to impose. Often two squires accompany it: salt and lime. But it is always ready to start the conversation without any more help than its lustrous clarity. From the start, tequila doesn’t recognize borders. But there are propitious climates just as certain hours suggest it, knowing full well: to fix the time when night arrives at its stores, in the splendor of an afternoon without obligations, in the highest pitch of doubt and hesitation. It is then when tequila offers us its consoling lesson, its infallible joy, its unreserved indulgence. Also, there are foods that call for its presence: those springing from the ground from which it, too, was born. Inconceivable if they didn’t bond with millenary certainty. To break that pact would be a grave breach with dogma prescribed to allay the rough job of living. If “gin smiles like a dead girl,” tequila spies on us with the green eyes of a prudent sentry. Tequila has no history, no anecdote confirming its birth. It is so from the beginning because it is the gift of the gods and, usually, when they promise something they aren’t telling tales. That is the office of mortals, children of panic and habit. Such is tequila and so it will be keeping us company all the way to the silence from which no one returns. Praise be, then, until the end of our days and praise the daily effort toward denying that end.
We present this work in honor of the poet’s 155th birthday.
Edgar Lee Masters American 1868 – 1950
I have known the silence of the stars and of the sea, And the silence of the city when it pauses, And the silence of a man and a maid, And the silence of the sick When their eyes roam about the room. And I ask: For the depths, Of what use is language? A beast of the field moans a few times When death takes its young. And we are voiceless in the presence of realities — We cannot speak.
A curious boy asks an old soldier Sitting in front of the grocery store, “How did you lose your leg?” And the old soldier is struck with silence, Or his mind flies away Because he cannot concentrate it on Gettysburg. It comes back jocosely And he says, “A bear bit it off.” And the boy wonders, while the old soldier Dumbly, feebly lives over The flashes of guns, the thunder of cannon, The shrieks of the slain, And himself lying on the ground, And the hospital surgeons, the knives, And the long days in bed. But if he could describe it all He would be an artist. But if he were an artist there would be deeper wounds Which he could not describe.
There is the silence of a great hatred, And the silence of a great love, And the silence of an embittered friendship. There is the silence of a spiritual crisis, Through which your soul, exquisitely tortured, Comes with visions not to be uttered Into a realm of higher life. There is the silence of defeat. There is the silence of those unjustly punished; And the silence of the dying whose hand Suddenly grips yours. There is the silence between father and son, When the father cannot explain his life, Even though he be misunderstood for it.
There is the silence that comes between husband and wife. There is the silence of those who have failed; And the vast silence that covers Broken nations and vanquished leaders. There is the silence of Lincoln, Thinking of the poverty of his youth. And the silence of Napoleon After Waterloo. And the silence of Jeanne d’Arc Saying amid the flames, “Blessed Jesus” — Revealing in two words all sorrows, all hope. And there is the silence of age, Too full of wisdom for the tongue to utter it In words intelligible to those who have not lived The great range of life.
And there is the silence of the dead. If we who are in life cannot speak Of profound experiences, Why do you marvel that the dead Do not tell you of death? Their silence shall be interpreted As we approach them.
We present this work in honor of the Moroccan holiday, Revolution Day.
Ahmed Barakat Moroccan 1960 – 1994
Long live the general Down with the general
The voices were the same voices that were of old
Distributing their pain of longing On reed grown in the wind
These loud voices Are they her voices?
Long live the general Down with the general
Is this the female inhabiting the holy lands The owner of the old territory And the guardian of jars full of names? And the flag tattooed with the surprised blood Is it her flag?
Blood is the only wanderer in the whole land From desert to desert And from the desert to the firmaments of Arabic
Long live the general Down with the general
The wandering blood Is the same blood left on the padlocks Since very long And on the keys Hanging In the void
And the door Which is heavy Like a corpse
Long live the general Down with the general
Let the birds lay their eggs In the mouth of the cannon
We present this work in honor of the poet’s 75th birthday.
Constance Dima Greek b. 1948
What are you going to do in a dusty landscape they asked seeing me leave hastily with a longing for escape I would like – I replied – to lose myself inside the Parthenon to become his image to defy death
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