We present this work in honor of the poet’s 110th birthday.

 

Write as you will
In whatever style you like
Too much blood has run under the bridge
To go on believing
That only one road is right.

In poetry everything is permitted.

With only this condition of course,
You have to improve the blank page.

Translation by Miller Williams

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

 

A night of rain. A perfume sad
Exhales from the moistened ground.
My pensive heart, with fragrance come
From thee, was wrapped around.

Beneath the shade, thy glance so full
Of understanding deep,
That used to fall like music soft
Upon my dreams in sleep.

A rainy night. With the voice of the rain
Thy voice conjoined would come,
A loving cradle song to soothe
Old yearnings for my home.

Good night. What tenderness, so full
Of pity and of grief untold,
Thy hands gave me, as we took leave,
Thy little hands, ice-cold!

We present this work in honor of the poet’s 195th birthday.

 

When I’m reaching the last page
of the tragicomedy of my life,
I look back at the starting point
with the pain of those who expect nothing.

So much noble ambitions that was chimera!
What a beautiful faded illusion!
Sown is the path traveled
with the flowers of that spring!

But in this gloomy, somber hour,
of severe truth and disenchantment,
of supreme pain and agony,

it is my greatest regret, in my brokenness,
not having loved more, I who believed…
I who thought I had loved so much!

 

We present this work in honor of MLK Day.

 

Gorée Island, Senegal

This devil’s place that wasn’t built by demons
but by men like us
civilized enlightened the flower and cream of the West

The sea onto which the Door of the Voyage With No Return
is not the sea of liberty is not the sea of the infinite
This is the perversion of the sea

From here the ancestors of Martin Luther King
Rosa Parks Duke Ellington Toni Morrison left

They were seized tortured chained
by flesh-and-blood fates that wove their destinies
with barbed wire

We present this work in honor of the 95th anniversary of the poet’s death.

 

Who could fall asleep, as a child falls asleep;
smile between dreams to the dream of pain;
and dream of friends and dream of affection;
and slowly sink into a greater dream.

And walk through life sleepwalking,
eyes wide open on an inner world,
with sealed lips, eternally mute,
attentive only to the rhythm of your own heart…

And go through life without leaving a trace…
To be the poor stream that evaporates in the sun…
and lose one night, as a star dies,
that burned thousands of years, and that nobody saw it…

 

Under the sky born after the rain,
I hear the quiet slap of oars against the water
and I’m thinking: happiness is nothing
but the quiet slap of oars against the water.
Or maybe it’s nothing but the light
on a small boat, appearing and disappearing
on the dark swell of years
slow as a funeral supper.
Or the light of a house discovered behind the hill
when we’d thought nothing remained but to walk and walk.
Or the gulf of silence
between my voice and the voice of someone
revealing to me the true names of things
simply by calling them up: poplars, roofs.
The distance between the clinking of a bell
on a sheep’s neck at dawn
and the thud of a door closing after a party.
The space between the cry of a wounded bird out on the marsh
and the folded wings of a butterfly
just over the crest of a wind-swept ridge.
That was happiness:
drawing random figures in the frost,
fully aware they’d hardly last at all,
breaking off a pine bough on the spur of the moment
to write our names in the damp ground,
catching a piece of thistledown
to try and stop the flight of a whole season.
That’s what happiness was like:
brief as the dream of a felled sweet acacia tree
or the dance of a crazy old woman in front of a broken mirror.
Happy days pass as quickly as the journey
of a star cut loose from the sky, but it doesn’t matter.
We can always reconstruct them from memory,
just as the boy sent out to the courtyard for punishment
collects pebbles to form resplendent armies.
We can always be in the day that’s neither yesterday nor tomorrow,
gazing up at a sky born after the rain
and listening from afar
to a quiet slap of oars against the water.

Translation by Dave Bonta

We present this work in honor of the 50th anniversary of the poet’s death.

 

When I die I want your hands on my eyes:
I want the light and the wheat of your beloved hands
to pass their freshness over me one more time
to feel the smoothness that changed my destiny.

I want you to live while I wait for you, asleep,
I want for your ears to go on hearing the wind,
for you to smell the sea that we loved together
and for you to go on walking the sand where we walked.

I want for what I love to go on living
and as for you I loved you and sang you above everything,
for that, go on flowering, flowery one,

so that you reach all that my love orders for you,
so that my shadow passes through your hair,
so that they know by this the reason for my song.

Translation by Nicholas Lauridsen

We present this work in honor of the 50th anniversary of the poet’s death.

 

There are five thousand of us here.
In this small part of the city.
Five thousand.
How many of us are there in all
In the cities and in all the country?
Here we are, ten thousand hands
Who plant the seeds and keep the factories running. So much humanity, hungry, cold, panicked, in pain,
Under moral duress, terrified out of their minds!
Six of ours lost themselves
In the space of the stars.
One man dead, one man beaten worse than I ever thought
It was possible to beat a human being.
The other four wanted to free themselves of all their fear.
One jumped into the void.
Another beat his head against the wall.
But all had the fixed look of death in their eyes.
What fear is provoked by the face of fascism!
They carry out their plans with the utmost precision, not giving a damn about anything.
For them, blood is a medal.
Killing is an act of heroism.
My God, is this the world You created?
Is this the product of Your seven days of wonders and labour?
In these four walls, there is nothing but a number that does not move forward.
That, gradually, will grow to want death.
But my conscience suddenly awakens me
And I see this tide without a pulse
And I see the pulse of the machines
And the soldiers, showing their matronly faces, full of tenderness.
And Mexico, Cuba, and the world?
Let them cry out of this ignominy!
We are ten thousand fewer hands that do not produce.
How many of us are there throughout our homeland?
The blood of our comrade the President pulses with more strength than bombs and machine guns.
And so, too, will our fist again beat.
Song, how hard it is sing you when I have to sing in fear!
Fear like that in which I live, and from which I am dying, fear.
Of seeing myself amidst so much, and so many endless moments
In which silence and outcry are the targets of this song.
What have never seen before, what I have felt and what I feel now
Will make the moment break out…