Becoming

When the world unravels before you
and even your dreams are crumbling stones
when everything you dare to touch
is set on fire
and all around you is ash and smoke
remember this

rock bottom
is a perfect place for rebuilding
Remember that you are your mother’s daughter
your grandmothers answered prayers
a whole bloodline of women who bend
in response to raging winds
there is nothing broken here
nothing damaged or discarded
each scar is a badge of honor
every misstep is a victory dance
waiting to happen

You are a woman becoming
learning the complicated language
of forgiveness
the intricate lessons of the universe

Your heart is just a muscle
it needs exercise
and you were born for this sort of heavy lifting
you were born one part saint
one part warrior woman

Loving yourself without shame
is the most important thing
you will ever have to fight for

The Song of Exile

My homeland has many palm-trees
and the thrush-song fills its air;
no bird here can sing as well
as the birds sing over there.

We have fields more full of flowers
and a starrier sky above,
we have woods more full of life
and a life more full of love.

Lonely night-time meditations
please me more when I am there;
my homeland has many palm-trees
and the thrush-song fills its air.

Such delights as my land offers
Are not found here nor elsewhere;
lonely night-time meditations
please me more when I am there;
My homeland has many palm-trees
and the thrush-song fills its air.

Don’t allow me, God, to die
without getting back to where
I belong, without enjoying
the delights found only there,
without seeing all those palm-trees,
hearing thrush-songs fill the air.

Translation by Nelson Ascher

Jenny Kiss’d Me

We present this work in honor of Valentine’s Day.

Jenny kiss’d me when we met,
Jumping from the chair she sat in;
Time, you thief, who love to get
Sweets into your list, put that in!
Say I’m weary, say I’m sad,
Say that health and wealth have miss’d me,
Say I’m growing old, but add,
Jenny kiss’d me.

He Who Would True Valour See

We present this work in honor of Shrove Tuesday.

Who would true Valour see
Let him come hither;
One here will Constant be,
Come Wind, come Weather.
There’s no Discouragement,
Shall make him once Relent,
His first avow’d Intent,
To be a Pilgrim.

Who so beset him round,
With dismal Storys,
Do but themselves Confound;
His Strength the more is.
No Lyon can him fright,
He’l with a Gyant Fight,
But he will have a right,
To be a Pilgrim.

Hobgoblin, nor foul Fiend,
Can daunt his Spirit:
He knows, he at the end,
Shall Life Inherit.
Then Fancies fly away,
He’l fear not what men say,
He’l labour Night and Day,
To be a Pilgrim.

Lovers

We present this work in honor of the poet’s 100th birthday.

Jorge Gaitán Durán
Colombian
1924 – 1962

We are like those that love each other.
When undressing we discover two monstrous
strangers who hug themselves gropingly,
scars with which the hateful desire
indicates those that restlessly love each other:
the boredom, the suspicion that invincibly ties us
to its network, like in the sin of two adulterous gods.
Enamored like two insane ones,
two bloodthirsty stars, two dynasties
that with hunger dispute a kingdom,
we want to be justice, we stalk ourselves ferociously,
we trick ourselves, we infer the vile insults
with which the sky affronts those that love each other.
Just to set us afire a thousand times
the embrace in the world are those that love each other
A thousand times we die each day.

Translation by Dina Moscovici

Congratulations

We present this work in honor of National Foundation Day.

Hollow night,
Earth holds its breath hushed
and watches me blossom.
With roots so straight,
The flowers will not cease to bloom.
In a state of ignorance as to the why of arrival,
they bid you welcome.
Hearts singing out to the springtime.

Could the news have been true?
That I’d become colorful.
That on sturdy heels
I’d set out to walk
This fragrant terrain of blankness.
Was it true to the core?

In this wind-vanished now,
No one’s seen the face of spring unpainted.
As we stand erect, through our eyes
the pale flow of petals.
Applauding hands, I wrench them open,
To blow your name inside.
Your birth,
Your awakening—cause for celebration.

Let us love what enters our vision,
With such wicked earnestness
I will dye you the color of spring—
Congratulations.
Sunrise dances lovely into my throat.

I Prithee Send Me Back My Heart

We present this work in honor of the poet’s 415th birthday.

I prithee send me back my heart,
Since I cannot have thine;
For if from yours you will not part,
Why then shouldst thou have mine?

Yet now I think on’t, let it lie,
To find it were in vain;
For th’hast a thief in either eye
Would steal it back again.

Why should two hearts in one breast lie,
And yet not lodge together?
O love, where is thy sympathy,
If thus our breasts thou sever?

But love is such a mystery,
I cannot find it out;
For when I think I’m best resolv’d,
I then am most in doubt.

Then farewell care, and farewell woe,
I will no longer pine;
For I’ll believe I have her heart
As much as she hath mine.

Hero-Worship

We present this work in honor of the poet’s 150th birthday.

A face seen passing in a crowded street,
A voice heard singing music, large and free;
And from that moment life is changed, and we
Become of more heroic temper, meet
To freely ask and give, a man complete
Radiant because of faith, we dare to be
What Nature meant us. Brave idolatry
Which can conceive a hero! No deceit,
No knowledge taught by unrelenting years,
Can quench this fierce, untamable desire.
We know that what we long for once achieved
Will cease to satisfy. Be still our fears;
If what we worship fail us, still the fire
Burns on, and it is much to have believed.

Monet Refuses the Operation

We present this work in honor of the poet’s 100th birthday.

Doctor, you say there are no haloes
around the streetlights in Paris
and what I see is an aberration
caused by old age, an affliction.
I tell you it has taken me all my life
to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
to soften and blur and finally banish
the edges you regret I don’t see,
to learn that the line I called the horizon
does not exist and sky and water,
so long apart, are the same state of being.
Fifty-four years before I could see
Rouen cathedral is built
of parallel shafts of sun,
and now you want to restore
my youthful errors: fixed
notions of top and bottom,
the illusion of three-dimensional space,
wisteria separate
from the bridge it covers.
What can I say to convince you
the Houses of Parliament dissolves
night after night to become
the fluid dream of the Thames?
I will not return to a universe
of objects that don’t know each other,
as if islands were not the lost children
of one great continent. The world
is flux, and light becomes what it touches,
becomes water, lilies on water,
above and below water,
becomes lilac and mauve and yellow
and white and cerulean lamps,
small fists passing sunlight
so quickly to one another
that it would take long, streaming hair
inside my brush to catch it.
To paint the speed of light!
Our weighted shapes, these verticals,
burn to mix with air
and change our bones, skin, clothes
to gases. Doctor,
if only you could see
how heaven pulls earth into its arms
and how infinitely the heart expands
to claim this world, blue vapor without end.