We present this work in honor of the 30th anniversary of the poet’s death.
Audre Lorde American 1934 – 1992
Coming together it is easier to work after our bodies meet paper and pen neither care nor profit whether we write or not but as your body moves under my hands charged and waiting we cut the leash you create me against your thighs hilly with images moving through our word countries my body writes into your flesh the poem you make of me.
Touching you I catch midnight as moon fires set in my throat I love you flesh into blossom I made you and take you made into me.
We present this work in honor of the poet’s 130th birthday.
Guo Moruo Chinese 1892 – 1978
The street lights are on in a distance As if numerous stars show. The bright stars loom in the above As if numerous street lights glow. I believe there must be a beautiful market street In that aerial heaven with cloud clear. The goods displayed on that street Must be rarities which we don’t have here. You see, that shallow Milky Way Must be not very wide. The cowherd and weaving lady separated by it Must be able to visit each other on a ride. I believe at this moment along that street Sauntering there must be they. If you doubt, please look at that shooting star, Which may be the lantern they are taking on their way.
I had seen coconut trees and tamarinds and mangos the white sails drying in the sun the smoke of breakfast across the sky at dawn and fish jumping in the net and a girl in red who would go down to the shore and come up with a jug and pass behind a grove and appear and disappear and for a long time I could not sail without that image of the girl in red and the coconut trees and tamarinds and mangos that seemed to live only because she lived and the white sails were white only when she lay down in her red dress and the smoke was blue and the fish and the reflection of the fish were happy and for a long time I wanted to write a poem about that girl in red and couldn’t find the way to describe the strange things that fascinated me and when I told my friends they laughed but when I sailed away and returned I always passed the island of the girl in red until one day I entered the bay of her island and cast anchor and leaped to land and now I write these lines and throw them into the waves in a bottle because this is my story because I am gazing at coconut trees and tamarinds and mangos the white sails drying in the sun and the smoke of breakfast across the sky and time passes and we wait and wait and we grunt and she does not come with ears of corn the girl in red.
We present this work in honor of the poet’s 80th birthday.
Mamoni Raisom Goswami Indian 1942 – 2011
Oh Pakistan, celestial land! Give us your heart! And take our heart in return! Once we shared the same sky! Sky with the same sun! We shared the same pain like twins on the battlefield to remove the dust.
Now our flesh is ripped apart By that meandering barbed-wire fence! Oh they have drawn that dividing line on a flimsy paper! That line of agony and tears Can anyone draw that line In our raw flesh, inside our heart?
Friends! Be happy where you are… now! Memory never fades, poets say distance only purifies it… We sat under the same tree, Enjoyed the fragrance of the same flower Till that time like a dagger cut those rivers into several pieces! Destroyed the mountains and flower gardens where we had played!
And those banks where we had counted those fig-coloured waves! Like the honey laden lips of the damsels! We wore the same clothes woven by our mothers! We shivered in winter and in summer our sweat slid down our backs
We enjoyed the same wine from the poems of Ghalib Momin and Zauk We cried together in pain! Under the blood stained sky.
Oh Pakistan! Celestial land Give us your heart And take our heart in return! No we need not speak now Only silence speaks in a clear voice. Oh Pakistan! Silence can bring the fragrance of a mother’s soul Silence can reveal. The heavenly beauty of Sutlej, Chenab, and the Red River Of the East! Silence can be loud like a million voices Oh Pakistan! Celestial land! Our eyes misted by the Smoke of blossoming gun powder! Our soul wounded by the unknown fires! May these eyes now witness the new Sunrise On the banks of Sutlej, Chenab, and in the Red River of the East! Oh Pakistan, celestial land! Give us your heart! And take our heart in return
We present this work in honor of the 75th anniversary of the poet’s death.
Óscar Castro Zúñiga Chilean 1910 – 1947
I.
I will start to live in each rose And in each lily that your eyes will see And in every bird trill I’ll sing your name So that you‘ll never forget me.
II.
If you cry as you contemplate the stars And your soul fills with impossibilities, It’s because my loneliness has come to kiss you So that you’ll never forget me.
III.
I will paint a rose colored horizon And I will paint blue wallflowers And I will guild the moon on your hair So that you’ll never forget me.
IV.
If asleep you sweetly walk Through a world of diaphanous gardens, Think of my heart that dreams of you, So that you’ll never forget me.
V.
And if some evening, at a far away altar, You hold another’s hand, and you are blessed, When the golden ring is placed on your finger, My soul will be an invisible tear In the eyes of the moribund Christ So that you’ll never forget me!
We present this work in honor of the Turkish holiday, Republic Day.
Yahya Kemal Beyatli Turkish 1884 – 1958
The great Itri has of old been called The Patron of our music; How he leads the people far and near, That conqueror of the day-break, On how many holiday mornings early Rattling the heavens with their voices massed together, Have they chanted the magnificent Tekbir. From Budapest to Iraq, even unto Egypt, From the furthest conquered lands, The breeze free-flowing o’er the homeland, Brought with it sound from every blossoming spring. This man of genius collected them So that from the plane trees he heard us, Heard our tale of seven centuries. In his music flowed on one hand Faith, On the other, all of Life; From every side that brightness of the city, the Bosphorus Flowed with the blue Tunca, and proud Euphrates. With what voices, with our sky and earth, With our sadness, our passion, our victories, Flowed that creation, which resembled us. How many times have I listened to the Neva-Kâr, A refrain which is both broad and lively: While scattering the secrets of the mode Neva, Brightness shines from the horizons of the Orient; Drunk with every syllable of his words, By night, one by one they set out, Toward the dawn go fifty million souls. But Chance and Fortune enviously Have hidden more than a thousand of his works, As his inheritance there remain to us but twenty. His Hymn to the Prophet, most awesome and profound, Then appear the flute and kettle-drum, And while the turning of the dervishes grows wilder, His liturgy ascends the seven-tiered Celestial Throne. He who was the master of a splendid world Of voice and string, Remains to us a mystery. Our learned men know not, who was he? Who hides his works today? Are they a treasure kept by Eternity? Does someone know? Where might they be today? Death, which covers up such music Leaves no consolation to mankind. My heart still is blind As in exile it passes many hours, It falls into a pleasant revery: Perhaps those compositions are yet played, On an Ocean which never ship shall pass.
To pose in my hand – I invite the landscape, invite it to call itself into question, and then give to it a dream of abyss for ingestion, in the spiral hand of heavens with a human shape.
That by loosening the moorings in the river the mountain to its marbles will speak so that a frozen sigh leading to its peak might hold the worth of fruit in a double summer.
To the cloud, I might proselytize the risks posed by height and morning light, then argue that the low tide is not on the rise, but rather every hour, set alight.
To make a shadow tame within a rosebush, at its very gut (To add to love what is subtracted on its name and feed the remains to a dovecote of naught).
What if the sea might abandon its pearls and then step out its shell… ! What would happen to these frothy swirls if instead of splashing all over, they lay forgotten?
Who knows if the stone that at every turn is a wonder, to join the exact exedra would be prone, fountain-garden-love-tumbler.
What if the benign lane that comes, goes and is, becomes impassable on account of a blunder without aim: a magnetic waterfall that rendered it pliable.
Will the trees be able to put in motion all their elementary schools of chirping? (I feel my desires go mixing and mingling Like townspeople at a wedding celebration).
Over there, the river is a boy, but it is a man here, One that gathers dark leaves in a creek. Everybody calls him by his name, without sneer and strokes him like a dog, one that is meek.
Which season should my guests want to get off at? In autumn or in springtime? Or will they wait till the foliage speaks of harvests like an angel announcing apples at its prime?
And when the guests finally arrive – within myself –, the gentleness to which every corner of my being attests shall leave them alone and, as a sign of happiness, will show a set of ten fingers that rests untouched but by poetry, alone.
Poets Corner 