Heartaches of the Lagoon

My early unforgettable years I lived them
Close to the sea,
There by the shallow and calm sea,
There by the open and boundless sea.

And every time that my budding, early life
Comes back to me,
And I see the dreams and hear the voices
Of my early life there by the sea,

You, oh my heart, feel the same old yearning:
If I could live again,
Close to the shallow and calm sea,
There by the open and boundless sea.

Was it really my destiny, was it my fortune,
I haven’t met another
A sea within me as shallow as a lake,
And like an ocean boundless and big.

And, lo! In my sleep a dream brought her
Close again to me,
The same there shallow and calm sea,
The same there boundless and open sea.

Yet, thrice be alas! A grief was poisoning me,
A powerful grief,
A grief that you did not lighten, my dream
Of my great early love, my home by the sea.

What storm, I wonder, was raging in me,
And what whirlwind,
That couldn’t put it to rest, or lull it to sleep
My wonderful dream of my home by the sea.

A grief that is unspoken, an unexplained grief,
A powerful grief,
A grief not quenched even within the paradise
Of our early life close to the boundless sea.

Erotic Sonnet V

We present this work in honor of the 45th anniversary of the poet’s death.

My life goes on as usual, why dear friend would you ask:
awake and a horror, I head for the bath
and with Helena Rubinstein lotions and creams
staunch the wrinkles, mend the seams.

I go to work. But is it work?
the monthly bulletin, year after year…
then lunch with the oddball
Minister fate has assigned me here.

Sometimes I give my usual class;
sleepily arrive at my office;
there, I’ve completed my official tasks.

Now it’s home sweet home and fare you well;
my guts are bored
by my usual clientele.

Black Woman

I still smell the foam of the sea they made me cross.
The night, I can’t remember it.
The ocean itself could not remember it.
But I don’t forget the first gull I made out in the distance.
High, the clouds, like innocent eye-witnesses.
Perhaps I have not forgotten my lost coast,
nor my ancestral language.
The left me here and here I have lived.
And because I worked like an animal,
here I came to be born.
How many Mandinga epics did I look to for strength.

I rebelled.

His Worship bought me in a public square.
I embroidered His Worship’s coat and bore him a male child.
My son had no name.
And His Worship died at the hands of an impeccable English lord.

I walked.

This is the land where I suffered
mouth-in-the-dust and the lash.
I rode the length of all its rivers.
Under its sun I sowed seeds, gathered crops,
but did not eat the harvests.
A slave barracks was my house.
I myself brought stones to raise it up,
but I sang to the natural rhythm of native birds.

I rose up.

In this same land I touched the wet blood
and decayed bones of many others,
brought to this land, or not, the same as I.
I no longer imagined the road to Guinea.
Was it to Guinea? To Benin?
To Madagascar? Or Cape Verde?

Landscapes

In honor of Coptic Christmas, we present this work by one of the 20th century’s premier Egyptian poets.

Behind faces and gestures
We remain mute
And spoken words heavy
With what we ignore or keep silent
Betray us

I dare not speak for mankind
I know so little of myself

But the Landscape

I see as a reflection
Is also a lie stealing into
My words I speak without remorse
Of this image of myself
And mankind my unequaled torment

I speak of Desert without repose
Carved by relentless winds
Torn up from its bowels

Blinded by sands
Unsheltered solitary
Yellow as death
Wrinkled like parchment
Face turned to the sun.

I speak
Of men’s passing
So rare in this arid land
That it is cherished like a refrain
Until the return
Of the jealous wind

And of the bird, so rare,
Whose fleeting shadow
Soothes the wounds made by the sun

And of the tree and the water
Named Oasis
For a woman’s love

I speak of the voracious Sea
Reclaiming shells from beaches
Waves from children

The faceless Sea
Its hundreds of drowned faces
Wrapped in seaweed
Slippery and green
Like creatures of the deep

The reckless Sea, unfinished story,
Removed from anquish
Full of death tales

I speak of open valleys
Fertile at men’s feet
Overgrown with flowers

Of captive summits

Of mountains, of clear skies
Devoured by untamed evergreens

And of trees that know
The welcome of lakes
Black earth
Errant pathways

Echoes of the faces
Haunting our days.

Nocturne

Out of the turmoil mustered up by day
We may not free our hands, nor turn our heads to pray—
So tight the knot our sunlight ties.

So firm the hold of voices, thoughts are drowned
The river’s chant is lost, in the splintering gunshot sound:
Or from its song the essence dies.

Brightness was all, when earth lay primitive
Fair to the hands’ fresh touch, ready to burst and live:
Now in her womb corrosion lies.

Therefore we search alone the shuttered dark
Where faces of the dead shine luminous, a spark
Of lightning from encircled skies.

Therefore we seek the peace of broken ground
After the wars have buried all the young, and found
Dark remedy for shining eyes…

Therefore we hide our faces; make no sound.

Betrayal

We present this piece in honor of the 60th anniversary of the poet’s death.

Sometimes I see, caught in a snare,
One with a foolish lovely face,
Who stands with scattered moon-struck air
Alone, in a wild woody place

She was entrapped there long ago.
Yet fowler none has come to see
His prize; though all the tree-trunks show
A front of silent treachery.

And there she waits, while in her flesh
Small joyless teeth fret without rest.
But she stands smiling in the mesh,
The while she is duped and dispossest.

I know her name; for it is told
That Beauty is a prisoner,
And that her gaoler, bleak and bold,
Scores her fine flesh, and murders her.

He slays her with invisible hands,
And inly wastes her flesh away,
And strangles her with stealthy bands;
Melts her as snow day after day.

Within his thicket life decays
And slow is changed by hidden guile;
And nothing now of Beauty stays,
Save her divine and witless smile.

For still she smiles, and does not know
Her feet are in the snaring lime.
He who entrapped her long ago,
And kills her, is unpitying Time.

Letter to NY

In your next letter I wish you’d say
where you are going and what you are doing;
how are the plays and after the plays
what other pleasures you’re pursuing:

taking cabs in the middle of the night,
driving as if to save your soul
where the road gose round and round the park
and the meter glares like a moral owl,

and the trees look so queer and green
standing alone in big black caves
and suddenly you’re in a different place
where everything seems to happen in waves,

and most of the jokes you just can’t catch,
like dirty words rubbed off a slate,
and the songs are loud but somehow dim
and it gets so teribly late,

and coming out of the brownstone house
to the gray sidewalk, the watered street,
one side of the buildings rises with the sun
like a glistening field of wheat.

—Wheat, not oats, dear. I’m afraid
if it’s wheat it’s none of your sowing,
nevertheless I’d like to know
what you are doing and where you are going.

The Darkling Thrush

In honor of the New Year, we begin with this selection that was written on the day of the turn of the 20th century.

I leant upon a coppice gate
When Frost was spectre-grey,
And Winter’s dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
Had sought their household fires.

The land’s sharp features seemed to be
The Century’s corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
Seemed fervourless as I.

At once a voice arose among
The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.

So little cause for carolings
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware.

Poets Corner

Celebrating a world of written and spoken verse

20th Century Poems