We present this work in honor of the poet’s 225th birthday.
Nature is magic and a dream in beauty and charm,
The black stone and the dry grass look golden.
Through a thousand springs gushes forth, a thousand tongues say it
“Whoever dies today, he dies one thousand times”.
Now we are far apart
one from the other
my heart has dried up
but my tears keep falling.
In losing you my days
have turned black.
When I was with you
even my nights were white.
It’s as though we never spent
that night together
with no third presence
save our two selves made one,
a night our lucky star
caused even gossips
who would spy on us
to turn away their eyes.
We were two secrets
held by the heart of darkness
until the tongue of dawn
threatened to denounce us.
Translation by Cola Franzen
We present this work in honor of the Ching Ming Festival.
Though life is brief, feeling is everlasting;
That is why man wants to live long.
The sun and moon follow the stars.
The whole world loves this name.
The dew is cold, and the warm wind drops;
The air is penetrating, the day bright.
The departing swallow leaves no shadow;
The returning wild goose brings a lingering cry.
Wine can wash away a hundred woes,
And chrysanthemums set a pattern for old age.
Why should I, a hermit,
Gaze vacantly at the change of seasons?
The ministers are ashamed of their empty grain jars.
The autumn chrysanthemums are alone in their beauty.
I alone sing while fastening my garments.
A feeling of melancholy stirs deep within me.
It is true that there is much amusement in living,
But in idling is there no accomplishment?
We present this work in honor of the poet’s 165th birthday.
Rose with dark eyes,
mirror of your nothingness,
rose with dark eyes,
make us believe in the mystery,
hypocrite flower,
flower of silence.
Rose the colour of pure gold,
oh safe deposit of the ideal,
rose the colour of pure gold,
give us the key of your womb,
hypocrite flower,
flower of silence.
Rose the colour of silver,
censer of our dreams,
rose the colour of silver,
take our heart and turn it into smoke,
hypocrite flower,
flower of silence.
Though I die and die again a hundred times,
That my bones turn to dust, whether my soul remains or not,
Ever loyal to my Lord, how can this red heart ever fade away?
We present this work in honor of the 75th anniversary of the poet’s death.
Do not let your head tilt forward
Nevermind my heart, never mind
Don’t let them hear you’re crying
Nevermind my heart, nevermind
Crazy waves outside
Come and lick the walls
These sounds distract you
Nevermind my heart, nevermind
Even if you can’t see the sea
Turn your look upwards
The sky is like the sea
Nevermind my heart, nevermind
When your troubles rear up
Send a reproach to Allah
There are still days to see
Nevermind my heart, nevermind
Bullets finish by shooting
Roads end by walking
Your sentence finishes by serving
Nevermind my heart, nevermind
We present this work in honor of the poet’s 100th birthday.
A siren sang, and Europe turned away
From the high castle and the shepherd’s crook.
Three caravels went sailing to Cathay
On the strange ocean, and the captains shook
Their banners out across the Mexique Bay.
And in our early days we did the same.
Remembering our fathers in their wreck
We crossed the sea from Palos where they came
And saw, enormous to the little deck,
A shore in silence waiting for a name.
The treasures of Cathay were never found.
In this America, this wilderness
Where the axe echoes with a lonely sound,
The generations labor to possess
And grave by grave we civilize the ground.
We present this work in honor of the 565th anniversary of the poet’s death.
From Calatrava as I took my way
At holy Mary’s shrine to kneel and pray,
And sleep upon my eyelids heavy lay,
There where the ground was very rough and wild,
I lost my path and met a peasant child:
From Finojosa, with the herds around her,
There in the fields I found her.
Upon a meadow green with tender grass,
With other rustic cowherds, lad and lass,
So sweet a thing to see I watched her pass:
My eyes could scarce believe her what they found her,
There with the herds around her.
I do not think that roses in the Spring
Are half so lovely in their fashioning:
My heart must needs avow this secret thing,
That had I known her first as then I found her,
From Finojosa, with the herds around her,
I had not strayed so far her face to see
That it might rob me of my liberty.
I questioned her, to know what she might say:
“Has she of Finojosa passed this way?”
She smiled and answered me: “In vain you sue,
Full well my heart discerns the hope in you:
But she of whom you speak, and have not found her.
Her heart is free, no thought of love has bound her,
Here with the herds around her.”
We present this work in honor of the 130th anniversary of the poet’s death.
Chortle, laugh, in a laughter of storm
like a clown who, lanky and nervous,
laughs, in an absurd laughter, inflated
with violent irony and pain.
With that atrocious and bloody guffaw—:
rattle the jester’s bells, convulsing.
Jump, puppet: jump, clown, pierced
by the stertor of this slow agony—
You’re asked for an encore, and that’s not to be sneered at.
Come on! Tighten the muscles up, tighten up
in these macabre steel pirouettes…
And though you fall on the ground, quivering,
drowned in your hot and seething blood,
laugh! Heart, saddest of clowns.
We present this work in honor of the 50th anniversary of the poet’s death.
Filled with myself, walled up in my skin
by an inapprehensible god that is stifling me,
deceived perhaps
by his radiant atmosphere of light
that hides my drained
conscience,
my wings broken into splinters of air,
my listless groping through the mire;
filled with myself—gorged—I discover my essence
in the astonished image of water,
that is only an unwithering cascade,
a tumbling of angels fallen
of their own accord in pure delight,
that has nothing
but a whitened face
half sunken, already, like an agonized laugh
in the thin sheets of the cloud
and the mournful canticles of the sea—
more aftertaste of salt or cumulus whiteness
than lonely haste of foam pursued.
Nevertheless—oh paradox—constrained
by the rigor of the glass that clarifies it,
the water takes shape.
In the glass it sits, sinks deep and builds,
attains a bitter age of silences
and the graceful repose of a child smiling
in death, that deflowers
a beyond of disbanded
birds.
In the crystal snare that strangles it,
there, as in the water of a mirror,
it recognizes itself;
bound there, drop with drop,
the trope of foam withered in its throat.
What intense nakedness of water,
what water so strongly water,
is dreaming in its iridescent sphere,
already singing a thirst for rigid ice!
But what a provident glass—also—
that swells
like a star ripe with grain,
that flames in heroic promise
like a heart inhabited by happiness,
and that punctually yields up
to the water
a round transparent flower,
a missile eye that attains heights
and a window to luminous cries
over that smoldering liberty
oppressed by white fetters!
Poets Corner 