Lovers

We present this work in honor of the poet’s 100th birthday.

Jorge Gaitán Durán
Colombian
1924 – 1962

We are like those that love each other.
When undressing we discover two monstrous
strangers who hug themselves gropingly,
scars with which the hateful desire
indicates those that restlessly love each other:
the boredom, the suspicion that invincibly ties us
to its network, like in the sin of two adulterous gods.
Enamored like two insane ones,
two bloodthirsty stars, two dynasties
that with hunger dispute a kingdom,
we want to be justice, we stalk ourselves ferociously,
we trick ourselves, we infer the vile insults
with which the sky affronts those that love each other.
Just to set us afire a thousand times
the embrace in the world are those that love each other
A thousand times we die each day.

Translation by Dina Moscovici

Hero-Worship

We present this work in honor of the poet’s 150th birthday.

A face seen passing in a crowded street,
A voice heard singing music, large and free;
And from that moment life is changed, and we
Become of more heroic temper, meet
To freely ask and give, a man complete
Radiant because of faith, we dare to be
What Nature meant us. Brave idolatry
Which can conceive a hero! No deceit,
No knowledge taught by unrelenting years,
Can quench this fierce, untamable desire.
We know that what we long for once achieved
Will cease to satisfy. Be still our fears;
If what we worship fail us, still the fire
Burns on, and it is much to have believed.

Monet Refuses the Operation

We present this work in honor of the poet’s 100th birthday.

Doctor, you say there are no haloes
around the streetlights in Paris
and what I see is an aberration
caused by old age, an affliction.
I tell you it has taken me all my life
to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
to soften and blur and finally banish
the edges you regret I don’t see,
to learn that the line I called the horizon
does not exist and sky and water,
so long apart, are the same state of being.
Fifty-four years before I could see
Rouen cathedral is built
of parallel shafts of sun,
and now you want to restore
my youthful errors: fixed
notions of top and bottom,
the illusion of three-dimensional space,
wisteria separate
from the bridge it covers.
What can I say to convince you
the Houses of Parliament dissolves
night after night to become
the fluid dream of the Thames?
I will not return to a universe
of objects that don’t know each other,
as if islands were not the lost children
of one great continent. The world
is flux, and light becomes what it touches,
becomes water, lilies on water,
above and below water,
becomes lilac and mauve and yellow
and white and cerulean lamps,
small fists passing sunlight
so quickly to one another
that it would take long, streaming hair
inside my brush to catch it.
To paint the speed of light!
Our weighted shapes, these verticals,
burn to mix with air
and change our bones, skin, clothes
to gases. Doctor,
if only you could see
how heaven pulls earth into its arms
and how infinitely the heart expands
to claim this world, blue vapor without end.

To the Historic Genízaro Tree

We present this work in honor of the 55th anniversary of the poet’s death.

I love you, old tree, because day and night
you generate mysteries and fate
in the voices of evening wind
or birds at dawn.

You adorn the main square
and your thoughts are more divine
than human ideas as you point us toward roads
with proud branches full of sound.

Jenísaro, all your old scars
are inscribed in your folios
the way time falls and keeps falling.
But your fresh and joyous leaves
sway in the highest reaches of infinity,
while humanity makes its way ahead.

Translation by Steven F. White

natural high

Jean “Binta” Breeze
Jamaican
1956 – 2021

My mother is a
red
woman

she
gets high
on clean children

grows
common sense

injects
tales
with heroines

fumes
over dirty habits

hits the sky
on bad lines

cracking meteors

my mother
gets red
with the sun.

I Take Into My Arms More Than I Can Bear to Hold

We present this work in honor of the 20th anniversary of the poet’s death.

I take into my arms more than I can bear to hold
I am toppled by the world
a creation of ladders, pianos, stairs cut into the rock
a devouring world of teeth where even the common snail
eats the heart out of a forest
as you and I do, who are human, at night

yet still I take into my arms more than I can bear to hold

I Keep Forgetting

We present this work in honor of Holocaust Remembrance Day.

I keep forgetting
the facts and statistics
and each time
I need to know them

I look up books
these books line
twelve shelves
in my room

I know where to go
to confirm the fact
that in the Warsaw Ghetto
there were 7.2 people per room

and in Lodz
they allocated
5.8 people
to each room

I forget
over and over again
that one third of Warsaw
was Jewish

and in the ghetto
they crammed 500,000 Jews
into 2.4 per cent
of the area of the city

and how many
bodies were they burning
in Auschwitz
at the peak of their production

twelve thousand a day
I have to check
and re-check

and did I dream
that at 4pm on the 19th January
58,000 emaciated inmates
were marched out of Auschwitz

was I right
to remember that in Bergen Belsen
from the 4th-13th of April 1945
28,000 Jews arrived from other camps

I can remember
hundreds and hundreds
of phone numbers

phone numbers
I haven’t phoned
for twenty years
are readily accessible

and I can remember
people’s conversations
and what someone’s wife
said to someone else’s husband

what a good memory
you have,
people tell me.

The Prisoner

When off from work he’d sit at home all day
atop his tin-bound wooden trunk and pout.
This town was too familiar, he’d complain:
he knew each square, each house inside and out.

Yes, he’d go somewhere far away, and soon:
maybe he’d try the hide trade in Siberia.
Mother would listen with a knowing grin
and never lift her head from her embroidery.

While we’d cling to his knees, climb higher, higher…
So many little hands, so tight our grip!
He would fall silent, and the little fire
would die out slowly in his meerschaum pipe…

Of course we knew he’d stay. No foreign country
would ever rob us of our papa. Still,
his melancholy eyes were always watching
the stunted cactus on the windowsill.

Translation by Boris Dralyuk

Tulips Bloom from Youths’ Blood

We present this work in honor of the 90th anniversary of the poet’s death

It’s the season of wine, meadows, and Rose
The court of spring is cleared of choughs and crows
Generous clouds now water Rey more freely than Khotan
The caged bird and I both long for our own land