Careless Heart

We present this work in honor of the poet’s 85th birthday.

Do not leave me alone
Open your eyes
Look, your youth is gone.
I want to be twenty years old
I want to be thirty years old
I want to be this year’s flower when spring comes
Do not leave me alone
Open your eyes
Look, your youth is gone.
How soon will the winter cold come?
It comes and covers the snow with flowers
Nothing has colored Hanam anymore
My white hair is a sign.
How many memories of love in this white hair
The heart falls in love again
This is a hope
How many memories of love
In this white hair
My heart will fall in love again, that’s a hope.
I wanted to be the owner of the gift
whose garden has flowers and nightingales
Like the days of youth again
Be happy and be a firecracker.
How many memories of love
In this white hair
My heart falls in love again…
This is a hope
How many memories of love
In this white hair
My heart will fall in love again, that’s a hope.
Do not leave me alone
Open your eyes and see, your youth is gone.
I want to be twenty years old
I want to be thirty years old
I want to be this year’s flower when spring comes
Do not leave me alone
Open your eyes
Look, your youth is gone.

My Pain Endures

My pain endures and my eyes shed tears every day;
separation causes unbearable pain that has no reason to be!
Her name’s engraved in my burning heart;
I found no cure or counsel for my pain!
My hair’s turning white, O lord, after separation
from those I love and wish to be with again!
Such separation’s made my heart bleed
and tears run down my cheeks all day long!
I miss them so much I’m wasting away in despair;
my tears rage like ocean waves against these sad days!
All this is so unfair I wasted my life
wandering in lands of exile and feeling low!

Translation by Abdelfetah Chenni

Not All the Time

In honor of Greek Independence Day, we present this work by one of modern Greece’s most independent poets.

I ignore poetry
– not all the time –
when the blood throbs on walls
when pottery falls to pieces
and life uncoils
like thread in a bobbin
I spit at my sorrow and completely
ignore poetry
when colours plague my soul
yellow blue and orange
I withhold my hate and calmly
ignore poetry
when your eyes tie my stomach
into knots

What’s more
– not all the time –
I ignore poetry
when it becomes a quaint ambition

a rare find
on a love-bench in a future hall.

Song at the Flank of Morning

We present this work in honor of Dia de la Memoria.

Hummingbirds buzz
in the morning’s red branch. Wonder of wonders!

Today, young gravedigger, I buried
a hundred days and nights like dead birds.
I yank this yoke of hours from my shoulders.
And today, unfleeing heart, my hand destroys a hundred dawns
withered as herbs pressed in your daybook.

An inscription scatters
on the tomb of time.

This morning strands of road
whip-cracked under my drunken heels.
I come from night: like two green fruits
my eyes dangle over the world.

Bell-ringer of distances: underfoot
a path, faded away and avoided, sprouts
like a fugue tree.
And taut as a slingshot, it shoots
pebbles from sleep into the fragile air.

Today the first morning of the world
has risen between two nights.
Who woke that lark, time harvested,
that slept on your dry branch?

Oh, heart, red bobbin
undone in the dripping day’s palm:
a door, as yet unopened, creaked!
And a king happier than the word sun
fills our shoes with blue coins.

Happiness!
A girl drinks up all the sky in the well.
Her wind apron unclad her…

A spider-thrush appeared and tangled the whole hill
in the threads of its songs.

There, where the iron stirrups are kept,
Life! sang the reed-colored men…

My happiness escapes
and trembles the light’s fresh branch.

Bare-heeled boy riding the flank of morning,
my happiness, that digger of silence, will shake
the tree that sprouts the most birds.

Ah, it is taller, the air’s dome,
and it coins our voices, free-timbred, unique.
My nerve-tree is end-rooted in morning.

I am the test of the unfledged world.
My hands, fused to rudders of sun,
guide this day under tender skies.
My steps tie this net of roads.

Hand of the sling-shooting god,
you were tossed like the nimblest stone from his sling.
Long scream in the bracketed silence;
companion of the curving night’s road, that is how you rise.

Wordless friend,
let your voice unravel the oldest face.

My hands, hollowed by the rudders of sun,
guide this day through the wind.
I arrived from morning: like two green fruits
my eyes dangle over the world.

I have seen distance on its knees
like a god to whom no one brings gifts,
and death, gentler than a llama skin,
molds itself to the shape of our dreams…

Hunter of happiness:
I tie a hundred bleeding birds to my waist.

The Wild Side in Me

In the brittle twig forest with diamonds for eyes
I’m as moonstruck as a paper dog howling at a paper moon.
The night is kept ajar for all the rampant fairy tales
that will trick me out of the land of the living.
But it is neither goblins nor wicked spells that
liberate the mazed woods. I wake in the black
undergrowth locked by fright that the stage is set.
My frozen limbs are struck by the achromatic sight.
Whom do I call for? Who lies beside me in bed?
If I think of the moods of the sea, affluent and amok
I am no longer high and dry stranded by injury
but as firm as a rock in the watery night.
Three birthday candles drip bright wax upon my fingers.
one for the ocean one for the mountain and one for me.

Carpe Diem

Postumus, tomorrow you’ll live, tomorrow you say.
When is it coming, tell me, that tomorrow?
How far off, and where, and how will you find it?
In Armenia, or Parthia, is it concealed then?
Your tomorrow’s as old as Nestor or Priam.
How much would it cost you, tell me, to buy?
Tomorrow? It’s already too late to live today:
He who lived yesterday, Postumus, he is wise.

Translation by A.S. Kline

Morning

We present this work in honor of the South African holiday, Human Rights Day.

You are too naked for touching.
If I stroke your brown skin
as you sleep you may break. I irritate
your long dreams. I depress your awakening. I am
no good for you in your alien habitation.

Waiting for you to wake I wait
for a return from a long voyage, not knowing
what scurvy violence you bring back
to embarrass my clean house. Wherever I sow
perfection it grows into weeds. O my beautiful

How time changes the clean seed, how the corruption
of absence on my body, my damp hands. Awake
I am in sleep also, treacherous and lonely.
I don’t know where to go, where to find rest.
Come back.

from The Athanor

We present this work in honor of Tunisian Independence Day.

A mask left me stranded at the beginnings of the world
and my delible ashes for a long while swirled
in the depths of Punic Tophets.
And my powerless breath wore itself out, for a long time
at the pediments of Roman glory.
O my lifeblood, my Numidian vigor.
There has always been roaming, always the wind,
And the exultation of sands as vain armies of crystal.
And the damp shelter of hillside caves in the steppes of exile.
And bare tufts, always there, in the hollow of a summer brought forth.
Always, always, the tenacious, fragile dream
of a riverbank where to land is to be reborn
naked, reconciled,
and living
at the pace of swaying palm trees.

Translation by Patrick Williamson

The Blackbird of Derrycairn

We present this work in honor of the 50th anniversary of the poet’s death.

Stop, stop and listen for the bough top
Is whistling and the sun is brighter
Than God’s own shadow in the cup now!
Forget the hour-bell. Mournful matins
Will sound, Patric, as well at nightfall.

Faintly through mist of broken water
Fionn heard my melody in Norway.
He found the forest track, he brought back
This beak to gild the branch and tell, there,
Why men must welcome in the daylight.

He loved the breeze that warns the black grouse,
The shouts of gillies in the morning
When packs are counted and the swans cloud
Loch Erne, but more than all those voices
My throat rejoicing from the hawthorn.

In little cells behind a cashel,
Patric, no handbell gives a glad sound.
But knowledge is found among the branches.
Listen! That song that shakes my feathers
Will thong the leather of your satchels.

Oh Liberty, I Wait for Thee

We present this work in honor of the poet’s 115th birthday.

Oh Liberty! I wait for thee
To break this chain and dungeon bar;
I hear thy spirit calling me
Deep in the frozen North, afar,
With voice like God’s, and visage like a star.

Long cradled by the mountain wind,
Thy mates the eagle and the storm,
Arise! and from thy brow unbind
The wreath that gives its starry form,
And smite the strength that would thy grace deform!

Yes, Liberty! thy dawning light,
Obscured by dungeon bars, shall cast
Its splendor on the breaking night,
And tyrants, flying pale and fast,
Shall tremble at thy gaze and stand aghast!

Poets Corner

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