I have a need for your voice, a longing for your company, and an ache of melancholy for the absence of signs of arrival. Patience requires my torment, the urgent need for you, heron of love, your solar mercy for my frozen day, your help, for my wound, I count on. Ah, need, ache and longing! Your kisses of substance, my food, fail me, and I’m dying with the May. I want you to come, the flower of your absence, to calm the brow of thought that ruins me with its eternal lightning.
We present this work in honor of the poet’s 75th birthday.
Yusef Komunyakaa
American
b. 1947
On Fridays he’d open a can of Jax After coming home from the mill, & ask me to write a letter to my mother Who sent postcards of desert flowers Taller than men. He would beg, Promising to never beat her Again. Somehow I was happy She had gone, & sometimes wanted To slip in a reminder, how Mary Lou Williams’ ‘Polka Dots & Moonbeams’ Never made the swelling go down. His carpenter’s apron always bulged With old nails, a claw hammer Looped at his side & extension cords Coiled around his feet. Words rolled from under the pressure Of my ballpoint: Love, Baby, Honey, Please. We sat in the quiet brutality Of voltage meters & pipe threaders, Lost between sentences… The gleam of a five-pound wedge On the concrete floor Pulled a sunset Through the doorway of his toolshed. I wondered if she laughed & held them over a gas burner. My father could only sign His name, but he’d look at blueprints & say how many bricks Formed each wall. This man, Who stole roses & hyacinth For his yard, would stand there With eyes closed & fists balled, Laboring over a simple word, almost Redeemed by what he tried to say.
When fixed his gaze upon the stone, The artist saw a nymph inside, And fire ran through vein his own – He flew to her in all his heart.
But though full of strong desire, He’s now overcome the spell: The chisel, piecemeal and unhurried, From his high goddess, sanctified, Removes a shell after a shell.
In the sweet and vague preoccupation More than a day or a year will pass; But from the goddess of his passion, The fallen veil will not be last,
Until, perceiving his desire, Under the chisel’s gentle caress, And answering by a gaze of fire, Sweat Galatea brings entire The sage into a first embrace.
I’m not concerned with the bloodiest wars of the world I’m not bound to its decline towards the silliest of its abysses Battle-fronts, public interests, the peaceful histories of nations, killers of Jesus Christ, the right wing, its extreme the north, its nearest side.
Concerned am I with the primordial matter of darkness, the exiles of clay descending from the dynasties of fools, the dwellers of the underground halls where the river is my sleeping place, the seven skies prayer-rugs to my sinful soul, and women are shadows to some lust, or the groaning of a fighter dying close to his military equipment, his hand on his heart and his eyes bulging out of his cheeks.
The Athenian boy in person, the boy climbing the stairs of betrayal, the grandson of Father Kairos, discovered at once that wisdom is the refuse of the mills of stupidity, that the horizon is narrower than the gate of Troy, and that nothing deserves dying for, far away from the perfume of Venus, closer to the mirage of victory
He, then, wished he had extra breath to wed his burnished sword to fire, and roam the earth. His guide the astrolabe of desire and lust his refuge.
And wished the heart broadened a little to contain Aphrodite’s splendor that is close to the borders of extreme drunkenness.
And wished God gave him the earth as a present so that the islands of language become his own moons, and he become the Lord. To him letters and the howdah of meaning bow. To him the windmills appear.
And when he realized that death is the chant of the moment he put fire in his coffin and mounted the cloud of his exhausted heart.
The Athenian boy in person, the runaway of the Acropolis The boy whose footsteps I pursue, the ever-travelling boy. His shadow became a cloud of questions.
We present this work in honor of the 205th anniversary of the poet’s death.
Usman dan Fodio Nigerian 1754 – 1817
Leave us alone with recalling what Father used to do… Leave us alone with relying on what Is practised in the east; These are grounds for those who Stayed astray from Sunnah Leave us with the idea that it is Practised at Medina Both Mecca and Medina are inferior to the Sunnah.
From golden showers of the ancient skies, On the first day, and the eternal snow of stars, You once unfastened giant calyxes For the young earth still innocent of scars:
Young gladioli with the necks of swans, Laurels divine, of exiled souls the dream, Vermilion as the modesty of dawns Trod by the footsteps of the seraphim;
The hyacinth, the myrtle gleaming bright, And, like the flesh of woman, the cruel rose, Hérodiade blooming in the garden light, She that from wild and radiant blood arose!
And made the sobbing whiteness of the lily That skims a sea of sighs, and as it wends Through the blue incense of horizons, palely Toward the weeping moon in dreams ascends!
Hosanna on the lute and in the censers, Lady, and of our purgatorial groves! Through heavenly evenings let the echoes answer, Sparkling haloes, glances of rapturous love!
Mother, who in your strong and righteous bosom, Formed calyxes balancing the future flask, Capacious flowers with the deadly balsam For the weary poet withering on the husk.
Poets Corner 