We present this work in honor of the poet’s 710th birthday.
With my jewels and with my crown I surpass the most beautiful,
And before me the stars of the zodiac all bow down …
It is as though I had received the gift of that bounty which
Flows from the hand of my lord Abu al-Hajjaj
When you were a kid we celebrated
your graces and ups and downs; as a little man
your ingenious good taste and daring.
Now that you use your Cervantes,
your French, your Péguy, everything you previously
learned, heard and wrote
in praise of tyranny,
let us celebrate your crime.
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.
We present this work in honor of the poet’s 100th birthday.
Because I was alone
I want to think of you as alone.
That you didn’t go, that you slept.
That you left me without leaving,
and that you needed me
to be able to be happy.
Anyway, I’ve recovered
my place in the world: you came back,
you became reachable
You give me back the time,
the pain, the ways, happiness,
the voice, the body, the soul,
life, and death, and what lives
beyond death.
You give me back everything
locked up in the appearance
of a woman, your self, the one I love.
You came back little by little, you woke
and weren’t surprised
to find me beside you.
And I could almost see the last step
of the secret you climbed
while sleeping, as you opened
—slowly, quietly—your eyes
inside my eyes that kept
the deathwatch over you.
We present this work in honor of the poet’s 180th birthday.
Behold the pilgrim
How painful and changed!
Slowly leaning on his staff
How lonely he goes on his way!
On his first morning,
Joyful and singing soul
I leave home, like the dawn
The proud little bird leaves its nest.
Air and light, life and flowers,
I search the vast and cold
Region that the innocent fantasy
It adorned with magical glows.
See the world, hear the noise
of the big cities,
And only vanity of vanities
Find everywhere your afflicted spirit
Matter gives to his crying
How much the man offers him;
The laughter on her lips no longer blooms,
And I forget the native voice of the song.
He became thoughtful;
The clouds and the waves
His confidants are, and he deals alone
The most spare and most elusive site.
To his grief he answers
in the silent night,
The declining star weary
And in the maternal pielago it hides.
Vuelve, return to your center!
Nature to the unhappy
cry out; _Go back!_ a voice also tells him
Who always talks to him, friend, inside,
Oh sad! in the distance
See the days gone by
And to enjoy their joys again
Concentrate revived hope.
Impossible! madness!…
When was he able to his source
Reverse the miserable torrent
What tasted of the seas the bitterness?
It’s up the hill
With bad insurance I pass;
From setting sun to scant glow
The valley of childhood is mastered.
Ouch! that shady valley
that the paternal house
take shelter; that rumor with which it accompanies
Its soft tumbles the sacred river;
That embalmed aura
let your temples pray,
To a sick heart that wishes
Your old loneliness, do not say anything?
The poor pilgrim
He neither hears, nor sees, nor feels;
Of the Homeland the image in his mind
There is no longer anything but a divine ideal.
Invisible touches
And his eyelids close
Pious angel, and the illusion banishes,
And the sweet smile returns to his mouth.
What a silent farewell!
Who dead would believe him?
Looking at the true Homeland!
He is sleeping the dream of life!
We present this work in honor of the 150th anniversary of the poet’s death.
Whene’er Don Juan has a feast at home,
I am forgotten as if at Rome;
But he will for funerals me invite,
To kill me with the annoyance quite:
Well, so be it!
Celeste, with thousand coy excuses,
Will sing the song that set she chooses,
And all about that her environ,
Though like an owl, call her a Siren:
Well, so be it!
A hundred bees, without reposing,
Work their sweet combs, with skill enclosing;
Alas! for an idle drone they strive,
Who soon will come to devour the hive:
Well, so be it!
Man to his like moves furious war,
As if were not too numerous far
Alone the medical squadrons straight
The world itself to depopulate!
Well, so be it!
There are of usurers heaps in Spain,
Of catchpoles, hucksterers, heaps again,
And of vintners too, yet people still
Are talking of robbers on the hill:
Well, so be it!
In vain may the poor, O Conde! try
Thy door, for the dog makes sole reply;
And yet to spend thou hast extollers,
Over a ball two thousand dollars:
Well, so be it!
Enough today, my pen, this preaching;
A better time we wait for teaching:
If vices in vain I try to brand,
And find I only write upon sand,
Well, so be it!
We present this work in honor of the poet’s 115th birthday.
Playing hide and seek
The seed is hidden.
(Deep in the earth
a blind star beats.)
How scared you must feel
inside the dark land!
(The children look for her and she
beats deep, hidden.)
But they call her the trills
the sun and spring;
shy she looks out and soon
add two green wings.
We present this work in honor of the 60th anniversary of the poet’s death.
Body of stone, morose body
In woolens like the walls of the universe,
Body like the birthdays of the races,
Like edifices overwhelmingly innocent,
Like the shyest waterfalls
White as the night, while the mountain
Rips up manic shapes,
Pains like fingers
And pleasures like fingernails.
Not knowing where to go, where to go back to,
Seeking those merciful winds
That wear away the wrinkles in the earth,
That bless those desires cut out at the roots
Before flowering.
Their great blossom, like a child.
Lips want that flower
Whose fist, kissed by the night,
Opens the doors of oblivion lip by lip.
Translation by Reginald Gibbons
We present this work in honor of the 105th anniversary of the poet’s death.
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.
Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.—
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
Having caroused far into the night
In the moonlit capital,
I returned home and in my bed,
Behold four legs.
Two were mine;
Whose are the other two?
Formerly two were mine;
What shall be done now they are taken?
Poets Corner 