From a Lofty Peak How Terrible to Behold

We present this work in honor of the poet’s 230th birthday.

From a lofty peak how terrible to behold
The murky tempests far below,
And in the vast solitudes
The flash of the magnificent lightning.

Popocatepetel and Orizaba,
Crush the ground with their enormous massiveness,
And their cuspises of ice and lava
Are enveloped in a dense cloud.

There the deer, with antlered forhead,
Cross the woods with graceful bounds,
And among the pines and elevated cliffs
The waters dash in torrents.

How awe-inspiring are thine immense volcanoes
With their ponderous rocks ;
Among thy wooded mountains roar the tempest,
And their stormy summit is a crater.

Globules of fire are hurled from their mouths ;
Columns of smoke and grand flashes of fire ;
Burning sulphur, glowing sands,
Black pitch and calcined stones.

Then the foundation of the blue mountains
Trembles, and from this furnace
The rude and tremendous shaking
Extends for a hundred leagues around.

The great God of all nations said,
When distributing His treasures over the land,
“Let Mexico have silver and gold,”
And poured on thee His affluent gifts.

Translation by Ernest S. Green

The Wing of Separation

We present this work in honor of Dia de Andalucia.

Ibn Darraj Al-andalusi
Arab Andalusian
958 – 1030

The wing of separation
Bore me away;
The fluttering heart was dismayed
And bore away her senses.
Had she but seen me,
When my soul was intent on speeding the journey by night,
When my sounding steps
Held converse with the demons of the desert—
When I wandered through the waste
In the shadows of night,
While the roar of the lion was heard
From his lair among the reeds—
When the brilliant Pleiades circled,
Like dark-eyed maidens in the green woods;
And the stars were borne round
Like wine-cups,
Filled by a fair maid
And served by a watchful attendant—
When the Milky Way
Was as the gray hairs of age
Upon the head of gloomy night;
And the ardor of my resolution,
And the piercer of darkness
Were equally terrible;
When the eyelids of the stars
Were closed for weariness—
Ah, then she had known
That fate itself obeyed my will
And that I was worthy of the favor of Ibn Aâ mir.

Translation by J.B. Trend

An Honored and Sincere Friend

Once I thought that God has
A home near the clouds, full of glory—
Like a king has a castle in a children’s story.
With diamond bricks and gold the castle was made,
The base of its towers, ivory and crystal laid.

I thought that You sit on Your throne with pride.
While the Moon, a tiny glimmer on Your robe, rides.
The pattern of Your robe, the moonbeams draw.
A small jewel in Your crown, every star I saw.
Our sun was no more than a button on Your vest.
The sky, a small part of Your coat, so I guessed.
But no one has seen where You live or rest.

I thought that You did not want us to know.
I was so sad for this image of God here below.
My thoughts in prayer were out of fear, it’s true—
Of what a very angry God might do.
Prayer was like memorizing a lesson in school,
Reviewing geometry or math, without any rules.
Prayer was the punishment of a principal, who
Wanted answers to questions no one knew,
Or told you to form tenses of verbs no one used.

Then one night with my father, hand in hand,
We walked down a village road in our land.
There we saw a welcoming home.
I asked without waiting, “Whose is it, do you know?”
“It is God’s noble house,” my father replied.
“We can stay here awhile and pray inside.
We can pray here in quiet, beyond the sight of men,
We can make ourselves fresh and clean again.
We will talk with our conscience and learn what to do.”
“But does that angry God have a home here too?!”
To my question my father replied,
“Yes, God’s home is in our hearts, it is inside.
God’s house is covered with carpet soft and bright.
God is a mirror in our hearts full of light.
God is forgiving and hatred does not know. . .”
And suddenly I knew my love for this God would grow.
This familiar and kind God is mine, and will be—
A friend closer than myself to me.
Close to me as my very own life.
A good and an honored Friend
In Whom I delight.

Translation by Frozan

To the Mountain

We present this work in honor of the poet’s 130th birthday.

Just as soon as Mass is over,
Put our pious airs away;
And with luncheon in our baskets,
To the mountain! To the mountain!
To the mountain for the day!

Hark, the bells of glory ringing
From the belfries of the Spring!—
Sun and sky! — oh, what a blessing
After gloomy days, they bring!

How the water o’er the mill-wheel
Rumbles furious and fast,
Bursting through a thousand echoes
Until — there — ‘tis gone at last!

For the woods our hearts are hungry;
Every bird hears us reply;
Incense seems to sweep our bosoms—
To the mountain! To the mountain!
To the mountain, let us hie!

Every grotto holds a secret;
Every cleft its creed and rite;
On the slopes is scattered grandeur—
Hawthorn flowers and crags in sight!

On the peaks the wind is hymning,—
Heaven is nigh — the town, far down;
Ah, why should not human dwellings
All the free-world mountains crown?—

At the nightfall — with our baskets
Empty — to the town we haste;
All the mountains fill with shadows,—

Spirits of the dreaded waste!

Translation by Roderick Gill

Bright Star

We present this work in honor of the 200th anniversary of the poet’s death.

Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art—
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature’s patient, sleepless Eremite,

The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors—

No—yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,

Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever—or else swoon to death.

Jasmine Blossom

We present this work in honor of the poet’s 125th birthday.

Suryakant Tripathi Nirala
Indian
1896 – 1961

On a vine in a lonely grove
Slept a fortune-filled Jasmine Blossom—
A pure, tender-bodied lass
Lost in dreams of love,
Eye closed, lax—in a leaf-bed
On a spring night;
In some far off land
Was the wind called Malaya
Who left this pining lover.
With grieving came the memory of sweet touch,
A memory of a moonlight-laved midnight,
A memory of his beloved’s trembling, tender form—
What then? The wind
Crossed lakes, rivers, groves,
Bush-creeper masses, deep mountain-woods,
Arrived where he had played
With the budding bloom.

She was sleeping,
How could she know of her lover’s coming?
The Nayak kissed her cheeks,
Cradel-like the vine-strand began to swing.
Even then she didn’t awaken,
Asked no pardon,
Wide slumber-curved eyes stayed shut,
Perhaps drunk with youth’s wine—
Who can say?

Brutal, the Nayak
Worked sheer barbarity—
With gusty blasts
Jerked the lovely, tender body around,
Crushed the round white cheeks;
The damsel started—
Turned a startled glance all around,
Spied her lover by her bed,
Smiled shyly—blossomed—
Having played the game of love
With the wooer.

Choose Life

We present this work in honor of the poet’s 125th birthday.

Choose life instead of those prisms with no depth even if their colors are purer
Instead of this hour always hidden instead of these terrible vehicles of cold flame
Instead of these overripe stones
Choose this heart with its safety catch
Instead of that murmuring pool
And that white fabric singing in the air and the earth at the same time
Instead of that marriage blessing joining my forehead to total vanity’s
Choose life

Choose life with its conspiratorial sheets
Its scars from escapes
Choose life choose that rose window on my tomb
The life of being here nothing but being here
Where one voice says Are you there where another answers Are you there
I’m hardly here at all alas
And even when we might be making fun of what we kill
Choose life

Choose life choose life venerable Childhood
The ribbon coming out of a fakir
Resembles the playground slide of the world
Though the sun is only a shipwreck
Insofar as a woman’s body resembles it
You dream contemplating the whole length of its trajectory
Or only while closing your eyes on the adorable storm named your hand
Choose life

Choose life with its waiting rooms
When you know you’ll never be shown in
Choose life instead of those health spas
Where you’re served by drudges
Choose life unfavorable and long
When the books close again here on less gentle shelves
And when over there the weather would be better than better it would be free yes
Choose life

Choose life as the pit of scorn
With that head beautiful enough
Like the antidote to that perfection it summons and it fears
Life the makeup on God’s face
Life like a virgin passport
A little town like Pont-á-Mousson
And since everything’s already been said
Choose life instead

Translation by Zack Rogow and Bill Zavatsky

The Parakeets

We present this work in honor of the poet’s 70th birthday.

They talk all day
and when it starts to get dark
they lower their voices
to converse with their own shadows
and with the silence.

They are like everybody
—the parakeets—
all day chatter,
and at night bad dreams.

With their gold rings
on their clever faces,
brilliant feathers
and the heart restless
with speech…

They are like everybody,
—the parakeets—
the ones that talk best
have separate cages.

Translation by W.S. Merwin

The Dusky Swallows Will Return

We present this work in honor of the poet’s 185th birthday.

Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer
Spanish
1836 – 1870

The dusky swallows will return
To hang their nests beneath thy eaves,
And playing to their nestlings call
As once they called of old.

But those who checked their flight
To gaze upon the beauty and my joy,
Who learnt our names—Ah Love!
They—will return no more!

The twining honeysuckles once again
Shall scale thy garden walls;
And once again at eve, more beautiful,
Their flowers will unfold.

But those of yore, begemmed with dews
Whose drops we watched together
Tremble and fall like tears of bright day,
They—will return no more!

Once more within thine ears, the words
Of burning love shall sound,
And from its slumber deep, perchance
Thy heart will wake.

But spellbound, speechless, kneeling low,
As saints before their altars are adored,
As I have loved thee—oh! deceive thee not!
Thus shall none love thee more!

Translation by Mary A. Ward

Against Constancy

Tell me no more of constancy,
The frivolous pretense
Of cold age, narrow jealousy,
Disease, and want of sense.

Let duller fools, on whom kind chance
Some easy heart has thrown,
Despairing higher to advance,
Be kind to one alone.

Old men and weak, whose idle flame
Their own defects discovers,
Since changing can but spread their shame,
Ought to be constant lovers.

But we, whose hearts do justly swell
With no vainglorious pride,
Who know how we in love excel,
Long to be often tried.

Then bring my bath, and strew my bed,
As each kind night returns;
I’ll change a mistress till I’m dead—
And fate change me to worms.

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