In honor of Revolution Day, we present this work by one of contemporary Mexico’s cleverest poets.
Francisco Hinojosa Mexican b. 1954
Having just heard, my love, that you won a seat by popular vote, I am overwhelmed with joy for you and your electorate and because I know you well I am sure you will legislate with courage and devotion making your voters feel represented forget these household chores a while you don’t have a spouse for nothing and focus on the legislative charge assigned you receive the citizens’ demands attend the sessions ascend the podium assert your views hear out your committee chairman be yourself and above all legislate, legislate, legislate our bed will not feel the void caused by all those nights you work late, legislating you will receive a salary and they will give you bonds and business trips and cell phones and chauffeurs and try, my love, not to be corrupted try to stay honest because you, Honorable Representative woman of laws and convictions our advocate you are our voice in Congress although I did not vote for you forgive me but I never thought you’d win.
We present this work in honor of the poet’s 60th birthday.
Jackie Kay Scots b. 1961
How they strut about, people in love, How tall they grow, pleased with themselves, Their hair, glossy, their skin shining. They don’t remember who they have been.
How filmic they are just for this time. How important they’ve become – secret, above The order of things, the dreary mundane. Every church bell ringing, a fresh sign. How dull the lot that are not in love. Their clothes shabby, their skin lustreless; How clueless they are, hair a mess; how they trudge Up and down the streets in the rain,
remembering one kiss in a dark alley, A touch in a changing room, if lucky, a lovely wait For the phone to ring, maybe, baby. The past with its rush of velvet, its secret hush Already miles away, dimming now, in the late day.
We present this work in honor of the Moroccan holiday, Green March Day.
Mohammed Bennis Moroccan b. 1948
A White Bird
A breath condenses Even density can be pleasant Each wall widens its cracks And retains the call A height that remains a height Springs that have gathered the winds of the fields
A Red Bird
It may have travelled the river in one night The road may have guided it through the upper layers I ponder the mystery of its redness Then forget the sky That has taken it There
A Green Bird
There are sleeping feathers before me Feathers that blast me with the fire of distance And feathers without a body that bend And collect In a point Between us speech is fluttering
A Blue Bird
So drunk in the evening it’s almost unable to return It would prefer that departure go on Without departure Reflections Of light in the pool Grow longer
A Black Bird
Each thing wants to emulate it Water in the pots Words on their birthdays Caravans across borders A girl not yet wet with dew
But the thrush Emulates only Itself It stays on branches of joy
A Yellow Bird
That window remains open for it as they sit face to face and the bird stays because of an approaching silence until without even pecking the grains it soars just as its past did just as its future will at dawn
A Colorless Bird
Elated it chirps on one of the nights of solitude Before it flies Where light unites with vibration A draft that startles Its visitor with a wing whose recurrent glitter Is ever-changing and I can see it from a distance It flies So that what I see Is this thing that resembles nothing distant
In honor of Republic Day, we present this work by one of modern Turkey’s most prominent poets.
Birhan Keskin Turkish b. 1963
Pass through me, I’ll remain, I’ll wait, pass through me, but where you pass through me I cannot know.
I was told, there’s a ripe fruit behind the curtain of patience, the world will teach you both patience, and the ripe fruit’s taste.
They said, you waited like these trees, a vision like these trees, sorrowful like these trees.
I was opened, I was closed, opened, closed, I saw those who went as much as those who came, where is the end of patience, where the grief-stricken ass, where the audacious fruit, where is the garden?
If only someone would come… if only someone would see… someone had come… opened… stayed she stays with me still.
For how long this emptiness rings within me, who slayed the garden’s merry widow, the mulberry opposite me? I glanced with it the most, wanted so much just once for it to speak.
Were it all up to me I’d have kept quiet longer, yet I creaked wearily, lest the rusted lock of my tongue be undone, a stray line somewhere be hummed, the worms inside me crawl.
I saw it all, I saw it all, the end of patience! if someone would come, would see, would see, now, the wind is swaying me.
We present this work in honor of the poet’s 70th birthday.
Maria Negroni Argentine b. 1951
Am I that woman in the dance raising inexperience like light addressing herself like a feather to her most elusive whereness? Strange flower growing soft out of the frame of language trying on sandals and flinging into writing unscathed by writing.
Winding the body’s lexicon it hit me in the takeaway shown my treasure in nothing I wavered: submit or escape it’s a question of what is lost in the beat of a voluptuous skirt what battle is evaded what dire endearing enemy abandoned.
Strange as if lit from within with the indicative expounding from neckline to poem curve I learned to conjugate affairs but for what if the nitty-gritty of nothing like eternity consisted in leaving me naked doubtlessly an odd privilege.
What if time were lawless? Where do you keep what wasn’t? They go on like this and that you never know what kills you and January sun and you just came just like a breath and worked me to confine my body’s surrounds to the exacting beauty of lack.
And I who’d thought to interject geography as flamboyant sun retrace my past in slip-ups sweet-talking myself tough and even pin on you a trinket clinched knees sissy feet which you’ll interpret as expertise but is just a pretense for hurt.
If together where the belly bends if I contracted and opened for you if something like a sky disclosed to what encloses inside blue if you drew me so disposed if I existed where you lost me if a spasm and other orphandoms if imperfection is a gift.
Contrary to the clock hands too long in two voices unreleased you walk me through my legs to tumult with no predicate while I angle for the occasional avails of female cunning tattooing the flipside of language digits an animal won’t give up.
Night is a house to wander with Spanish moss poison I mean, to look for looseness beyond your foremost failure maybe that was the attraction out of all you gave me and got how you tossed me into boleos heart antsy the secret clear.
All equally alone (Between) the sound and the inertia
Sometimes I only want A contact The time Enough to feel like I’m doing something Something that makes me special (Someone that makes me special)
I take off the armor I remain exposed, I remain in doubt What I was pretending to be Melts in my feet I take off the armor I remain exposed, I remain in doubt There’s only organs and skin And so I let myself fall My feet are tired from running
Of crystal The city
I watch as The secret life Collapses Brilliant courage
All equally alone The carry the bones on the outside
We present this work in honor of the poet’s 60th birthday.
Mariela Griffor Chilean b. 1961
A torturer does not redeem himself through suicide. But it does help. – Mario Benedetti
The boys from the neighbourhood, some of them, stay behind the mud and the rain.
I ask myself what has become of Romero, Quezada, Coleman? Did their bodies and souls escape deterioration?
Did they go into the army to do their duty as soldiers of the fatherland, the ones who protect us from hate and foreign tyrants?
Did they climb like the General by usurping through disloyalty, lies, secret codes and finally through money?
Did they have families and continue living in the city as if nothing had happened?
Or did they sell their modest houses, move to another neighbourhood where no one knows anything about them?
There they will come in the evening and will wash the remnants of dried blood from their fingers.
Will they look for their wives, give them a kiss, touch their bodies with those same hands?
Will their daytime nightmares be cast upon those who know nothing of where they come at the end of the night?
Will they return their heads, smashed by the memories they left in the cells, streets, apartments to a soft warm pillow that washes away their sacrileges?
What happened to the men I knew and never saw again?
Did they turn themselves into men hungry for justice or did they leave little by little in silence?
Did they put on their clothes in the morning without knowing whether they would return in the evening to their dear ones?
Did they learn to kill in clandestine training or did they become more men with the passing of these hard times?
Did they love like those pure men I met on those evenings when to play was all our universe?
We present this work in honor of the South African holiday, Heritage Day.
Rustum Kozain
South African
b. 1966
Somewhere in some dark decade stands my father without work, unknown to me and my brother deep in the Paarl winter and a school holiday. As the temperature drops, he, my father, fixes a thermos of coffee, buys some meat pies and we chug up Du Toit’s Kloof Pass in his old 57 Ford, where he wills the mountain – under cold cloud, tan and blue rockface bright and wet with rain – he wills these to open and let his children in, even as he apologises – my strict and angry fearsome father – even as he apologises for his existence then and there his whereabouts declared to the warden or ranger in government issue, ever-present around the next turn or lazing in a jeep in the next lay-by: “No sir, just driving. Yes, sir, my car.”
At the highest point of the pass we stop to eat, and he, my father, this strict and angry, fearsome father, my father whom I love and his dark face, he pries open a universe that strangely he makes ours, that is no longer mine: a wily old grey baboon, well-hid against salt-and-pepper rock, eyeing us; some impossibly magnificent bird of prey rarely seen, racing to its nest as the weather turns. And we are up there close I think to my father’s God, the wind howling and cloud rushing over us, awed and small in that big car swaying in the gale.
Silence. A sudden still point as the universe pauses, inhales and gathers its grace. Then, the silent, feather-like fall of snowflakes as to us it grants a brief bright kingdom unseen by the ranger. And for some minutes a car with three stunned occupants rests on a mountain top outside the fast ever-darkening turn of our growing up; too brief to light the dark years when I would learn:
how the bright, clear haunts of crab and trout where we swim in summer now in winter a brown rage over rock; how mountain and pine and fynbos or the mouse-drawn falcon of my veld; the one last, mustard-dry koekemakranka of summer that my father tosses through the air to hit the ground and puff like a smoke bomb; and once, also in summer somewhere, a loquacious piet-my-vrou; or the miraculous whirligig of waterhondjies streaking across a tea-coloured pool cradled by tan rock and fern-green fern; my first and only owl, large and mysterious in a deep stand of pine, big owl we never knew were there until you swooped away, stirred by our voices; how I too would be woken and learn that this tree and bird, this world the earth and this child’s home already fell beyond his possessives.
And how, once north through the dry Bushmanland with its black rock, over a rise in the road, the sudden green like the strange and familiar sibilants in Keimoes and Kakamas. And the rush of the guttural was the water over rock at Augrabies. The Garieb over rock at Augrabies, at Augrabies where the boom swings down, the gate-watch tight-lipped as a sermon: “Die Kleurlingkant is vol” as he waves through a car filled with bronzed impatient white youth laughing at us, at my father, my father my silent father in whom a gaze grows distant and the child who learns this pain past metaphor. How like a baboon law and state just turned its fuck-you arse on us and ambled off.
Poets Corner 