How could it be possible that I, tousled, might be reduced to dust,
Might lay down my indefatigable body like a log?
If all my twenty awkward years
Boom like the thick trees—to live!…
To live! To be torn into shreds by the winds,
To be shed to the ground with the hot leaves,
But only to feel how the arteries push,
To bend with pain, to be whipped-up by frenzy.
Waxen whores and young Anabaptists
cross paths beneath this window in the Tremol Hotel.
I sleep here.
I eat in this gold and hibiscus dining room.
Every night I dance with Zulita.
Every morning the man at the next table wishes me good day.
This is in the Tremol Hotel, beneath whose windows
the paths cross
of waxen whores and young Anabaptists.
But I have a soul as tender as marshmallows,
and my eyes flash on and off like the intermittent neon signs.
That’s why I love this hotel, this little rest, a locket of serenity.
Across the street, a sad sidewalk and a public clock drawn my eye each year,
and thereupon I invent a tenderness old and ripe.
In the Tremol Hotel, no one know me yet,
in spite of my familiarity with its doors and its swallows.
No one, maybe not even aviators,
can treasure as I do
these post-card memories.
We present this work in honor of the poet’s 75th birthday.
Rough, wet winds
parch my agonised face
as if salting the wound of
Bulhoek
Sharpeville
Soweto,
unbandage strip by strip
the dressings of Hope;
I wade my senses
through the mist;
I am still surviving
the traumas of my raped soil
alive and aware;
truths jump like a cat leaps for fish
at my mind;
I plod along
into the vortex
of a clear-borne dawn
The Moon’s the North Wind’s cooky.
He bites it, day by day,
Until there’s but a rim of scraps
That crumble all away.
The South Wind is a baker.
He kneads clouds in his den,
And bakes a crisp new moon that… greedy
North… Wind… eats… again!
In honor of Gandhi Jayanti, we present this work by one of India’s most thoughtful poets.
In Madurai,
city of temples and poets,
who sang of cities and temples,
every summer
a river dries to a trickle
in the sand,
baring the sand ribs,
straw and women’s hair
clogging the watergates
at the rusty bars
under the bridges with patches
of repair all over them
the wet stones glistening like sleepy
crocodiles, the dry ones
shaven water-buffaloes lounging in the sun
The poets only sang of the floods.
He was there for a day
when they had the floods.
People everywhere talked
of the inches rising,
of the precise number of cobbled steps
run over by the water, rising
on the bathing places,
and the way it carried off three village houses,
one pregnant woman
and a couple of cows
named Gopi and Brinda as usual.
The new poets still quoted
the old poets, but no one spoke
in verse
of the pregnant woman
drowned, with perhaps twins in her,
kicking at blank walls
even before birth.
He said:
the river has water enough
to be poetic
about only once a year
and then
it carries away
in the first half-hour
three village houses,
a couple of cows
named Gopi and Brinda
and one pregnant woman
expecting identical twins
with no moles on their bodies,
with different coloured diapers
to tell them apart.
Scarlet blood and yellow bile
Feed our life, and all we do;
Malignant fate has given us
Hearts insatiable as wolves,
Teeth and claws we use to maul
And tear our mothers and our fathers;
No, we do not stone our neighbors,
Our bullets rip their hearts in two.
Oh! Better not to think like this?
Very well, then – as you wish.
Then hand me universal joy,
Like bread and salt upon a dish.
We present this work in honor of the poet’s 100th birthday.
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 poet’s 95th birthday.
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.
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.’
The ore in the crucible is pungent, smelling like acrid wine,
It is dusky red, like the ebb of poppies,
And purple, like the blood of elderberries.
Surely it is a strong wine – juice distilled of the fierce iron.
I am drunk of its fumes.
I feel its fiery flux
Diffusing, permeating,
Working some strange alchemy…
So that I turn aside from the goodly board,
So that I look askance upon the common cup,
And from the mouths of crucibles
Suck forth the acrid sap.
Poets Corner 