Roman Holiday

In Rome at the New Year it is the custom to throw old things into the street.

Rome rattles and shakes
like a runaway breakdown truck.
All over Rome and round about
the New Year’s coming in!

Like Mills bombs, bottles
dropped from windowsills.
crash all over the place,
and what price that tough
shoving a bathtub onto a balcony?

Up on the Piazza di Spagna,
spinning like a flying saucer,
a husband is flung from his nuptial bed:
he’s obsolete and all but dead!

They’ve cornered a naked man in a bar,
‘Damn you squares!’, he bawls,
‘I need a change of suit:
last year’s is out of date’.

Dear town, we shall flounder and drown
In your cast-offs and metamorphoses;
your ancient asphalted roadways
gleam like the sloughed skins of pythons.
All the times you have shuffled them off,
but the speedometers show they’re still too slow
for Roman girls on Vespas!
So what next do you have in store for us?

The human race with roars and guffaws
is ridding itself of its rubbish,
do we all need overhauls?
Like Time itself we approach our hour

and stand, forgetting petty chores,
fully absorbed now by the future.
Do we regret what we’re discarding?
A reindeer’s dam, just after fawning,
looks loving and a little overcome.

Maybe the New Year will be rough,
with a few good days for flying in it?
Don’t worry: it won’t be the end of the world
– and the more fun we’ll have saying goodbye to it.

We fly through the air like apples off branches.
This fuss is already rather a bore,
though later, at least, I have something to live for:
– towards the middle of the windy day,
in her lopsided winter villa she’ll say
(once she’s gallopped through that thriller)
that she’s cold when I’m not with her,
she’s cold without me is what she’ll say…

And past other worlds
into darkness, deadpan as a croupier,
our pale planet whirls –
cooped in its shell like an embryo bird.
It’s hatching out now, look!
What to become? A warbler?
Or a black thing, a baby rook
blasted off the wing by atomic warheads?

I only hope the weather keeps fine
for all these darling creatures…
Over Rome – and all the world what’s more –
the New Year’s coming in…
…with tangerines and amorous passes,
and right till dawn the women’s bodies
– like electric bulbs in lampshades –
glowing through their dresses.

Closing Statement

Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine
Moroccan
1941 – 1995

once the poem satiates itself on the ivory honey of tarantulas
& the albumen of a bogus star
exploding hopelessly under the coke of my assemblies
once the berbers post-total-fantasia
fling what calabashes they have into the void of rifles
a conspiracy of eagles hatched by the true figure
of discovery & joy
will display my humid fever like april is
milky from almond & torrent

once the widowers stir the ashy heart of the minaret
once the children embrace scorpions by the hook
the prose of exile will have tempered such that it suffices
to snip its umbilical cord from this anxiety of mine
& sever the oars slapping the dorsal spine of my fatigue
to its delirious point

I’m laying you out
little nostalgia-worlds
in the shipwrecking gaze of the dead
still fit
to recite from the chapters of audacious crime
the arachnids’ closing statement

The Museum

A clamor, in the distance. A crowd running under the rain beating
down, between the canvases the sea wind set clattering.

A man passes crying something. What is he saying? What he
knows! What he has seen! I make out his words. Ah, I almost
understand!

I took refuge in a museum. Outside the great wind mixed with
water reigns alone from now on, shaking the glass panes.

In each painting, I think, it’s as if God were giving up on finishing
the world.

Address

“Where is the friend’s house?” asked the horseman just at dawn.
The Heavens paused.
A wayfarer took the bright branch from his lips,
conferred it on the darkness of the sands,
pointed with his finger to a poplar tree and said,
“Just before that tree
there is a garden path greener than God’s dreams.
In it there is love as wide as the blue wings of true friendship.
You go on to the end of the path that takes up again
just beyond maturity,
then turn toward the flower of loneliness.
Two steps before the flower,
stop at the eternal fountain of earthly myth.
There a transparent terror will seize you,
and in the sincerity of the streaming heavens
you will hear a rustling.
High up in a pine tree,
you will see a child
who will lift a chick out of a nest of light.
Ask him,
‘Where is the friend’s house?’”

Are You an Echo?

In honor of the Japanese holiday, Greenery Day, we present this work by one of Japan’s great modern poets.

If I say, “Let’s play?”
you say, “Let’s play!”

If I say, “Stupid!”
you say, “Stupid!”

If I say, “I don’t want to play anymore,”
you say, “I don’t want to play anymore.”

And then, after a while,
becoming lonely

I say, “Sorry.”
You say, “Sorry.”

Are you just an echo?
No, you are everyone.

Recuerdo

Edna St. Vincent Millay
American
1892 – 1950

We were very tired, we were very merry—
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.
It was bare and bright, and smelled like a stable—
But we looked into a fire, we leaned across a table,
We lay on a hill-top underneath the moon;
And the whistles kept blowing, and the dawn came soon.

We were very tired, we were very merry—
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry;
And you ate an apple, and I ate a pear,
From a dozen of each we had bought somewhere;
And the sky went wan, and the wind came cold,
And the sun rose dripping, a bucketful of gold.

We were very tired, we were very merry,
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.
We hailed “Good morrow, mother!” to a shawl-covered head,
And bought a morning paper, which neither of us read;
And she wept, “God bless you!” for the apples and pears,
And we gave her all our money but our subway fares.

The Aftermath

Above all, after climaxes the most intense
In our close-knit uniting, frenzied, barbarous,
Reclining side by side, gasping for breath, I sense
The abyss that severs us;

In silence we recline, not understanding why,
After such pent-up fury, longed-for, deep, insane,
So suddenly we find ourselves apart and lie
As separate selves again;

You are beside me but your gaze does not reveal
That eagerness I answered with a fire unknown,
You are a helpless beast gorged with its meal,
A corpse sculpted in stone;

You sleep and do not stir — how can another know
What dream has quieted your restless mind?
But through me yet great gusts of yearning blow
Leaving their mark behind;

I cannot cease from living, O my dearest love!
My warlike frenzy underneath its peaceful air
In desperation searches round me and above
To find a passage there!

And still you lie content! The throbbing ecstasy
Of sadness coursing through my limbs, and that profound
Confusion, nothing of all this in you I see.
My love, my only love! Between yourself and me
There is no common ground.

Lights Like Poets

The evening empties, inexplicably.
Places no longer receive us,
toss us out, to the elements. There’s
cold and wind. Sounds
linger, trembling in the air,
don’t know to disappear.
And then a poet
the usual one, somewhere,
takes a blank sheet of paper, totals up
the void (consoled by
the fine arabesque of his writing
on silence), drafts
an image, a lovely
turn of phrase perhaps, perhaps
fleeting, no matter.
No one will know the other half
of his day, falling into shadow,
the real, the not written, what was
knocking at the doors of everything beautiful
like a beggar. And who knows
if the snow, the star,
are also the void’s
merciful stories, and you,
you, too, lights
of autumn, lit up
houses, so many other
beggar poets?

Marginal Note

A ray of light, to an oblique observer,
Remains invisible in pure dry air;
But shone into a turbid element
It throws distracting side-gleams everywhere

And is diminished by what takes the eye.
So poetry that moves by chance collision
Scatters its brightness at each random mote
And mars the lucid order of its vision.

The purest meditation will appear
Faint or invisible to those who glance
Obliquely at its unreflected beam.

Hinkler in Italy

In honor of ANZAC Day, we bring you this work from Tasmania’s greatest poet.

Bertha Southey Brammal
Australian
1878 – 1957

High on the shoulders of the Apennines,

Where only grey wolves roam,
They found our Hinkler ‘mid the twisted pines,
Ten thousand miles from home.

Only the pale stars, and the wailing winds,
That lay the pine trees low,
Knew where he slept through the long winter nights,

Wrapped in his shroud of snow.

Poets Corner

Celebrating a world of written and spoken verse

20th Century Poems