I loathe with all my heart the first of men who slew A human fellow-being when the earth was new. My spirit shrinks from him who for primeval raids Made sharp the world’s first arrow, honed the first of blades. For sure that soul rose up from Hades black as sin That first conceived the thought by murdering to win. He was by Furies nurtured who with savage lust First ground gunpowder, first a bullet cast. He waged his war against all human kind and won, Oh, he has maimed all Nature with his baneful gun.
He who was first to hone with evil toil the steel To hold against his brother’s throat with barbarous zeal. Thou scourge, War, for the world! which the Almighty shook When in his willful blindness Man the Good forsook; Masked lunacy, thy foot is rough and weighs like lead, And where it treads, a sea of blood is shed!
We present this work in honor of the poet’s 100th birthday.
Mitsuye Yamada American b. 1923
Freedom at last in this town aimless I walked against the rush hour traffic My first day in a real city where
no one knew me.
No one except one hissing voice that said dirty jap warm spittle on my right cheek. I turned and faced the shop window and my spittle face spilled onto a hill of books. Words on display.
We present this work in honor of the poet’s 90th birthday.
Fay Zwicky Australian 1933 – 2017
Dead to the world I have failed you Forgive me, traveller.
Thirsty, I was no fountain Hungry, I was not bread Tired, I was no pillow
Forgive my unwritten poems: the many I have frozen with irony the many I have trampled with anger the many I have rejected in self-defence the many I have ignored in fear
unaware, blind or fearful I ignored them. They clamoured everywhere those unwritten poems. They sought me out day and night and I turned them away.
Forgive me the colours they might have worn Forgive me their eclipsed faces They dared not venture from the unwritten lines.
Under each inert hour of my silence died a poem, unheeded
A red glow. A furtive ray rocking the grove. Silky and shiny sateen is, unnerving the needles of the vast pine wood.
Sateen tainting carmine amid the grass and on the moss. Lit carmine burning in the hollow of the ivy. Carmine Carampangue of satiny blood smoothing the satin skin. The skin that strokes, snakes and seeks caressing the emerald with the tail of the dead, the sparkling of the green foliage lashed violently by the wind at the edge of the blue ell of the chasms, here at the beginning of the valley.
Sateen is made of blood and shiny and of treacherous velvet the fabric of the figures that now flame in the sun like knife light. Terrified under the splendor, in the blades cut by the beam, figuring holy cavities amid the murmuring nets of the forest. What silence. Of green firmament or inner bell. The woman pricks up her ears in amazement. Flame is the dress that covers her, fire the stunning skirt.
The humid rips in the lamé, pure spell of reflection, turning into blood the green virginity of the forest. The lamé splits in the green, creating blue flares in its mirror. In the simile, the bristling of a millenary, radiant tapestry:
Long drool of a silenus, Beelzebub, crawls, and the forked garrulous currents of an agitated mob of curling snakes Oh, the Leontine and Egyptian eyes of hieratic herons and owls.
Everything is velvet.
The sinuous mane of an ancient woman the black silk of a vibrant butterfly the sacred muscles of nocturnal panthers.
Iridescent volcanoes curl their spit in the distance in the distance like large, huge comet tails.
The keys that don’t open doors are the keys that lock them, and keys tangled in chains have nothing but the drama of jingling. But the key that dies in my pocket reminds me it is time that I became a reasonable woman who lives in a house without keys, without doors.
I don’t sense the tortured depths of love when I contemplate with studied gaze the rare perfection of your head and your body, that Hellenic sculpture. As if, printed in your genteel figure sealed with august and manly nobility, in your bright clear gaze, the light of thought never shines. As I contemplate it without pain or desire, worthy model of an immortal artist, your magnificent beauty, so enchanting, only manages to inspire in my soul the calm admiration sparked by the beauty of a brute or of silver.
Our boat starts at night from the beach of Yen Kuang.
Great ships sail only for profit Only small boats come here because of your fame. The passers-by are embarrassed by your virtue. So in the night we steal by the place where you used to fish.
It is not enough for you to touch me with your hand love is touching me with everything, with woman and distance and a bunch of grapes. It is not enough that you take me under you and on top of you you have to drag me by feet and into nightmares as well. Love is not a relationship between two individuals like they told us but rather two universes melting, a mixture of water with water. It is to love women as if I were you, to lust after their breasts to be riven seeing their naked flesh to gasp when a woman lifts her hair with her hand to put it behind her and just as your heart weakens when you see a hanging fruit my heart weakens for the same reason. Without air between us we are breathless without the sun rising above me and above you we are eyeless. The idea: love makes woman a man and man a woman and makes water into love and love into life. I incarnate in you like I incarnate in light and soil and you incarnate in me like life and death. I assembled you only because I collected you from here and there: some of your heart I brought from a train station some of your eyes from glasses in bars some of your skin from a cemetery meanwhile you are here and not here.
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