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.

Breaking Up with Captain Cook on Our 250th Anniversary

We present this work in honor of Waitangi Day.

Dear Jimmy,

It’s not you, it’s me.

Well,
maybe it is you.

We’ve both changed.

When I first met you
you were my change.

Well, your ride
the Endeavour
was anyway
on my 50-cent coin.

Your handsome face
was plastered everywhere.

On money
on stamps
on all my world maps.

You were so Christian
you were second to Jesus
and both of you
came to save us.

But I’ve changed.

We need to see other people
other perspectives
other world views.

We’ve grown apart.

I need space.

We’re just at different points
in our lives —

compass points

that is.

I need to find myself
and I can’t do that with you
hanging around all the time.

Posters, book covers, tea cozies
every year, every anniversary.

You’re a legend.

I don’t know the real you
(your wife did burn all your personal papers
but that’s beside the point.)

I don’t think you’ve ever really seen me.

You’re too wrapped up in discovery.

I’m sorry
but there just isn’t room
in my life
for the two of you right now:

you and your drama
your possessive colonising Empire.

We’re worlds apart.

I just don’t want to be in a thing right now.

Besides, my friends don’t like you.

And I can’t break up with them so…

The Fragrance of Violets

The violets that cover me
I anticipated their bleeding from time immemorial
But kept back what my blindness saw
So that I can breathe
I was in need of more wounds
To be worthy of this radiance
I was in need of more rambling
To realize
That only dreaming can pluck me out
Only the clouds can light me up.

I don’t remember when and how
I became crazy for these violets
I by chance saw myself joyful in their empty spaces
Feeding on their delights
In a wine-scented wedding of passion
Where I didn’t need a white dress
Since I was sheathed in the dewy morning
which led me to a hanging night
As if we had always been together
But suddenly parted because of a sin we didn’t commit
Then met again on the edge of a runaway life.
Yah!! many a branch dances in my body!
Many a madman’s language I master!
Many a bird inhabits my throat!
Whenever the tiny violet leaves whisper to me
My strings resonate!

Translation by Norddine Zouitni

Morning of the 7th of September, 1778

We present this work in honor of National Freedom Day.

Judith Sargent Murray
American
1751 – 1820

See the concomitants of baleful war,
Famine, and pestilence, and wild uproar!
Mark how they hover o’er Columbia’s head,
Mingling her heroes with the mighty dead!
Portentous omens with terrific glare!
Stamp on the breast the horrors of despair!
War, desolating war, stalks o’er the land,
And in his ranks appear a murd’rous band;
They shake the leaden spear and death pervades,
At whose dire touch undaunted valour fades!
The hostile grounds by slaughter covered o’er,
Mountains and vallies reek with human gore!
While agonized shrieks, and groans of death,
Torture the air and swell the ling’ring breath.
Dire is the scene, with various woes replete,
When rage and malice they insatiate meet.
Look down great God, our wand’ring steps explore,
The golden hours of harmony restore,
Give dark suspicion, baneful bird of night,
Far from our plains to wing its distant flight,
To climes congenial, some chaotic shore,
Where it can vex this younger world no more;
And when each hour shall be with concord crown’d,
When laughing confidence looks gaily round,
Contentment will advance her fair domain,
And peace unrival’d o’er our borders reign.

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

Celestial-Fruit Lanterns

Spring comes to the room decorated with celestial-fruit lanterns.
Using them to light up her husband’s study, she entertains her in-laws even more.
In the inner chambers, the bride displays ingenuity
Offering her family novel and exquisite lanterns in place of soups.

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

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