Puppy and I

We present this work in honor of the 65th anniversary of the poet’s death.

A.A. Milne
Scots
1882 – 1956

 

I met a Man as I went walking:
We got talking,
Man and I.
“Where are you going to, Man?” I said
(I said to the Man as he went by).
“Down to the village, to get some bread.
Will you come with me?” “No, not I.”

I met a horse as I went walking;
We got talking,
Horse and I.
“Where are you going to, Horse, today?”
(I said to the Horse as he went by).
“Down to the village to get some hay.
Will you come with me?” “No, not I.”

I met a Woman as I went walking;
We got talking,
Woman and I.
“Where are you going to, Woman, so early?”
(I said to the Woman as she went by).
“Down to the village to get some barley.
Will you come with me?” “No, not I.”

I met some Rabbits as I went walking;
We got talking,
Rabbits and I.
“Where are you going in your brown fur coats?”
(I said to the Rabbits as they went by).
“Down to the village to get some oats.
Will you come with us?” “No, not I.”

I met a Puppy as I went walking;
We got talking,
Puppy and I.
“Where are you going this nice fine day?”
(I said to the Puppy as he went by).
“Up to the hills to roll and play.”
“I’ll come with you, Puppy,” said I.

The Death of Don Quixote

We present this work in honor of the 40th anniversary of the poet’s death.

John Glassco
Canadian
1909 – 1981

 

I

So this is what it is,
The world of things, arrested.
The music in my brain has stopped.
The armies are simply sheep, the giants windmills,
Dulcinea a cow-girl,
Mambrinus’ helmet a barber basin –
And the priest is delighted,
Fussing over me as I lie here
After my marvellous interminable journeys,
Shorn of my armour, extenuated,
Now in my five wits, restored,
Ready to make a good death.
– Rosinante and Dapple are dead too
Where are their bones?

Are we all as dead as my Amadis
Who slew so many giants, indomitable?
I who modelled my endeavour, who tried…

Yes, this is what it is to be alive,
To die, to cease
To force a folly of the world.

II

The trees beyond the window are blowing green
The long road white in the distance, the sunshine,
There are flowers at my window
What do I know?

Well, that nothing partakes of reality,
And I too am simply Alonso Quixano the Good,
The wise gentleman, the resorted,
Lying in my bed, tended
By my loving people, ready
To make a good death…

I appear to have killed myself
By believing in some other God:
Or perhaps it was the drubbings did forme,
The horseplay, the jokes
Wore out my silly casing of flesh.
In any event, as I lie here,
The withdrawal of the vision,
The removal of the madness,
The supplanting of a world of beauty
By God’s sticks and stones and smells
Are afflictions, I find, of something more absurd
Than any book of chivalry.

III

O my God
I have lost everyting
In the calm of my sanity
Like a tree which regards itself
In still water
Seeing only another tree,
Not as when the crazy winds of heaven blew
Turning in to a perpetual fountain
Of shaken leaves,
The image of an endless waltz of being
So close to my heart I was always asking
Why should we not dance so far ever, be always
Trees tossed against the sky?
Why are we men at all if not to defy
This painted quietude of God’s world?

Well, everything must have en end.
I have had my day
I have come home
I see things as they are.
My ingenious creator has abandoned me
With the insouciance of a nobleman
The flickeness of an author
The phgelm of an alguazil-

Only Sancho is faithful unto death
But in his eyes I discern the terrible dismay
For he sees that mine are at last a mirror of his own.

Since I Am Corruptly Fallen

Ann Griffiths
Welsh
1776 – 1805

Since I am corruptly fallen,
Straying from you constantly,
To ascend your sacred mountain
Is the right of rights for me.
There on high your veils are riven,
Every cover nullified,
There above all worldly nothings
Is your glory magnified.

Oh to drink on high forever
Where redemption’s waters flow,
Drink until I thirst no longer
For the fading world below,
Live in wait for my Lord’s coming,
Wakeful for the coming night
When I swiftly open to him
In his image, in his sight.

Translation by A.Z. Foreman

The Almond Blossoms of Chao Village

We present this work in honor of Chinese New Year.

Bai Juyi
Chinese
772 – 846

 

For fifteen long years,
Times without number
I have come
To see the red almond-blossoms
Open in the spring.

Now I am growing old—
I am all of seventy-three,
And it is hard for my old legs
To come thus far.

I fear that this time
Is the last,
And I have come
To bid the red blossoms of the almond
A long farewell.

Refugee Mother and Child

Chinua Achebe
Nigerian
1930 – 2013

 

No Madonna and Child could touch
that picture of a mother’s tenderness
for a son she soon would have to forget.
The air was heavy with odours

of diarrhoea of unwashed children
with washed-out ribs and dried-up
bottoms struggling in laboured
steps behind blown empty bellies. Most

mothers there had long ceased
to care but not this one; she held
a ghost smile between her teeth
and in her eyes the ghost of a mother’s
pride as she combed the rust-coloured
hair left on his skull and then –

singing in her eyes – began carefully
to part it… In another life this
would have been a little daily
act of no consequence before his
breakfast and school; now she

did it like putting flowers
on a tiny grave.

Fatality

Rubén Darío
Nicaraguan
1867 – 1916

The tree is happy because it is scarcely sentient;
the hard rock is happier still, it feels nothing:
there is no pain as great as being alive,
no burden heavier than that of conscious life.

To be, and to know nothing, and to lack a way,
and the dread of having been, and future terrors…
And the sure terror of being dead tomorrow,
and to suffer all through life and through the darkness,

and through what we do not know and hardly suspect…
And the flesh that temps us with bunches of cool grapes,
and the tomb that awaits us with its funeral sprays,
and not to know where we go,
nor whence we came!

Translation by Lysander Kemp