Horses coming Resurrection

We present this work in honor of the Moroccan holiday, Revolution Day.

Do not open the windows wide…
Outside… there are things
With no names,
Transcending the space in the air .
The trees bow its length to it,
The sun… shrinks to itself…
It was blinded by its light
She backed up sighing
Outside…
The dust assumes the forms of humans,
Licking the buildings… the pavement
Ivy climbing…
The small café at the end of the street
Do not open the windows wide…
Let them be closed.
The descents of Tatars are coming
The bells are tolled from afar…
And the sky is growls and rumbles
The windmills…
Hardly stop
Electricity poles on the wall
Bend…
Crackling and neighing
Horses struck by panic,
And they chose to leave
Do not open the windows wide ..
Your dreams may fall
On the pavement
And the climbing bulldozer may smash you
Or your heavy bodies may fall.
Do not ask about a beloved who did not return
Nor a kid of yours in school
Do not buy morning bread…
Nor Newspaper
Do not greet your neighbor as usual…
Do not fix the clock’s hands
No, no do not open the windows
Hide behind it on oblique chairs
Enjoy polishing an old coat
Or caress the backs of luxurious cats
Or sip evening tea
Or laugh on the impact of an insipid joke
Do not open wide the windows wide…
Swarms of swallows
Kidnap their small bodies,
And flee dripping
The tree shake their roots,
Wishing they would to fly.
But they only swallow their disappointments
And remain a witness of current events
Crackle of imminent thunder
The specters of the death…
Leaving their long slumber
Grumbling… And moaning
As if… horses of resurrection
Are coming

from Hieroglyphs

We present this work in honor of the Moroccan holiday, Allegiance Day.

A ghost
You attend to the ruby time
No east will rise in you or west
A niche
Drowned in blue rustle shrouded by the Kingdom
A clay horizon
Eternity
Dangling like a bunch of grapes
For a hand that drifts away
And dies

A stone
Forgets its master
Was he
Here
Or was he there
A stone above a stone
Rises to watch you
The comer
No one
Is still awake but you

A silence attends to me
And for you my guest
There will be a night of papyri
And a night of
Ageless
Distances
Arriving in hissing scents
The night’s end
And beginning
Are identical
Friezes are becoming one
Under the feet of the river’s dusk
Intoxication echoes resonate inside me
And fade away

Translation by James Kirkup

The Flower and the Hummingbird

“I have a hummingbird!”
said the flower.

He wraps me in his fine beak
and his wounding tongue.

Shakes me with the tireless beating of his wings.
I pulse in his rushing heart.
Sleep on the heights
of his forest.

As a flower,
I rest
on the blinding brightness
of his plumage.

My hummingbird
hurls himself against the bell tower of my body.
Rips petals from my flesh.
Invents a song
with the music of his unblinking eyes
and the fierceness of his flight.

He flies through the garden.

Comes and goes
among the flowered paths,
searching for the abyss
of bitter honey.

He dies and is reborn
where frost falls, covering the world
of my pollen.

Soundless Berry

Before she pressed her wild dusky eyes
the heightened sliced dust inside got out
stroked her brows unadorned, unarmed naked face
stripped to living ecstasy, her wisdoms open again and again
wakening and awakening, penetrating the ears
like gentle very fresh, cool sea water
before she hugged the light of the unreal
displayed like a freshly sharpened knife,
piercing, loud
truly, then the deep like a blade tore open her eyes,
wild, yawning monsters:
came out, raw, below hell, from the cluttered
further down debility of the decay
the first time, replanting her eyes
she saw a little ornament between her limbs, ripening
here the gentle unblemished shelter sat fresh
faraway,
deep at the open, new and green
folding back her quiet door, wakes the
relaxed tree, sparkling with eternal warmth
passing on worlds,
Passing on worlds on the world
where worlds breathe
not perishing self, not worldly worth
not dry leaves,
painted with mud
Low down
Unbending, engendered soundless berry
flood with fog.

Balloons

In honor of Revolution Day, we present this work by one of contemporary Egypt’s most evocative poets.

To know the strength of things, sometimes we need to break them.
To know we want some things, sometimes we need to lose them.
Craving certainty, how many friends did you call liars?
Attaining certainty, you lost your friends.
How many balloons did you burst inflating them beyond their limit?
Discovering that limit, you found regret.

I now know why I burst balloons:
I longed for something never-ending –
or with an end I’d never reach.
Walls that have my back.
Walls that will stay standing, even when I knock them down.
Something certain that, when tested, will not break.

Translation by Nariman Youssef

Friends?

We present this work in honor of the poet’s 65th birthday.

She is my friend. No, she was my friend –
Over time, we went our separate ways.

She became richer when her father died;
I became poorer when my parents retired.

When she moved to the coast, another inconvenience:
The distance between our homes.

When she visits the city, she worries about the safety of her car outside my home.
When I travel for work not too far from the coast, I cannot afford to travel to hers.

Although we still chat, the content builds walls between us;
Her holidays longer, the number of her white friends larger.

Although she still plans on learning an indigenous language,
I—her preferred practice ground—have become an absence.

She was my friend when we were anti-apartheid activists.
What are we today? The common enemy has yet to surface.

Etherial Material

We present this work in honor of Argentine Independence Day.

My children are by far my greatest revolution.

Twice I orbited complete
like a gravid planet
around the sun. I wrote new names
in the celestial script, with disquiet,
alarm, sedition.

I toasted them with other women,
with whisky and with beer,
in the planet where we women drink a toast
to things that grow, and despite them.

Happy and ill-fated, I made of my revolution
a conquest, and an open wound
of those times when I orbited complete.

I keep it fresh to let enter me
a certain unrecognisable family air
that now my children exhale
as naturally as can be.

Translation by Julie Wark

A different parrot

We present this work in honor of the poet’s 70th birthday.

07-04-22 Rodriguez — Reina María Rodríguez
Cuban
b. 1952

Naturally, Flaubert’s parrot
could not be called Chucho,
his author wouldn’t stick him
with a name like that.
From which follows the importance of names.
But in the stories last night
—the reconstruction of a postcard
which we were creating to
resemble Christmas—
chess pieces
nearly dismembered
in the children’s hands
before midnight,
they had to pull out the parrot
with his blue half-exposed
chest feathers
and the nun who comes
when he sings
“o whore, o whore, o whore,”
and her face colors
all the way to the wine
all the way to believing herself so
—though she wasn’t—
with the pleasure of
momentarily
believing herself something she is not,
spilling
shame into the alien
cup.
Is it true that after an outcry
they erupt – the things we believed ourselves to be?

The parrot Loulou “…used to descend the stairs
by setting the curve of her beak
on the steps.”
Then she disappeared forever
and her owner, Felicity, never
got over it,
or the nun either.
The family blames themselves
and they still make the sign of the cross,
for they didn’t train him to the level
of the occasion:
he was not Flaubert’s parrot
who upheld a name
with her hauteur – her meaning –
just an ordinary parrot
named, to his disadvantage,
Chucho.

Translation by Kristin Dykstra

Precious Mahogany

06-23 Watson — Brigitte Zacarías Watson
Nicaraguan
b. 1961

I tried to defend you,
I thought there might be
Someone else who loved you
As I love you.

Here I am, beneath you
Caressing your precious timber,
Protecting you with my hands
From those who claim to love you.

Lies!
They see you bleed and they laugh as they stuff their pockets

With dollars, from your suffering.

Translation by Jessica Powell

Helen Betty Osborne

We present this work in honor of the Canadian holiday, National Aboriginal Day.

06-21 Dumont — Marilyn Dumont
Canadian
b. 1955

Betty, if I set out to write this poem about you
it might turn out instead
to be about me
or any one of
my female relatives
it might turn out to be
about this young native girl
growing up in rural Alberta
in a town with fewer Indians
than ideas about Indians
in a town just south of the ‘Aryan Nations’

It might turn out to be
about Anna Mae Aquash, Donald Marshall, or Richard Cardinal,
it might even turn out to be
about our grandmothers
beasts of burden in the fur trade
skinning, scraping, pounding, packing
left behind for ‘British Standards of Womanhood,’
left for white-melting-skinned women,
not bits-of-brown women
left here in this wilderness, this colony.

Betty, if I start to write a poem about you
it might turn out to be
about hunting season instead
about ‘open season’ on native women
it might turn out to be
about your face young and hopeful
staring back at me hollow now
from a black and white page
it might be about the ‘townsfolk’ (gentle word)
townsfolk who ‘believed native girls were easy’
and ‘less likely to complain if a sexual proposition led to violence’

Betty, if I write this poem.

Poets Corner

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21st Century Poems