I Keep Forgetting

We present this work in honor of Holocaust Remembrance Day.

I keep forgetting
the facts and statistics
and each time
I need to know them

I look up books
these books line
twelve shelves
in my room

I know where to go
to confirm the fact
that in the Warsaw Ghetto
there were 7.2 people per room

and in Lodz
they allocated
5.8 people
to each room

I forget
over and over again
that one third of Warsaw
was Jewish

and in the ghetto
they crammed 500,000 Jews
into 2.4 per cent
of the area of the city

and how many
bodies were they burning
in Auschwitz
at the peak of their production

twelve thousand a day
I have to check
and re-check

and did I dream
that at 4pm on the 19th January
58,000 emaciated inmates
were marched out of Auschwitz

was I right
to remember that in Bergen Belsen
from the 4th-13th of April 1945
28,000 Jews arrived from other camps

I can remember
hundreds and hundreds
of phone numbers

phone numbers
I haven’t phoned
for twenty years
are readily accessible

and I can remember
people’s conversations
and what someone’s wife
said to someone else’s husband

what a good memory
you have,
people tell me.

Star Gazing

We present this work in honor of Australia Day.

John Philip Bourke
Australian
1860 – 1914

I camped last night in a desert grey
‘Neath the eyes of a million stars,
For they all had come in their vestments gay,
Like a laughing host in the wake of day,
To the shrine of the midnight bars.
And satyrs slid on the glinting spars
Of light, through the halls of space,
And Venus served from the vintage jars,
And a blossom shone on the nose of Mars
And a smile on the old Moon’s face.
My castle’s roof was the spangled sky
And its carpet of sea-green moss;
And its walls were curtained with tapestry,…
And the face of her I had kissed Good-bye
Was enshrined in the Southern Cross.
As I gazed, the stars kept clustering,
And closer and closer crept,
Until I and they, we were all a-swing,
When an owl flew down on a drowsy wing
And we blew out the light… and slept.

Kapatakkha River

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

Michael Madhususdan Dutt
Indian
1824 – 1873

Always, o river, you peep in my mind.
Always I think you in this loneliness.
Always I soothe my ears with the murmur
Of your waters in illusion, the way
Men hear songs of illusion in a dream.
Many a river I have seen on earth;
But which can quench my thirst the way you do?
You’re the flow of milk in my homeland’s breasts.
Will I meet you ever? As long as you
Go to kinglike ocean to pay the tax
Of water, I beg to you, sing my name
Into the ears of people of Bengal,
Sing his name, o dear, who in this far land
Sings your name in all his songs for Bengal.

The Prisoner

When off from work he’d sit at home all day
atop his tin-bound wooden trunk and pout.
This town was too familiar, he’d complain:
he knew each square, each house inside and out.

Yes, he’d go somewhere far away, and soon:
maybe he’d try the hide trade in Siberia.
Mother would listen with a knowing grin
and never lift her head from her embroidery.

While we’d cling to his knees, climb higher, higher…
So many little hands, so tight our grip!
He would fall silent, and the little fire
would die out slowly in his meerschaum pipe…

Of course we knew he’d stay. No foreign country
would ever rob us of our papa. Still,
his melancholy eyes were always watching
the stunted cactus on the windowsill.

Translation by Boris Dralyuk

I Committed No Offense

Mahmoud Samy El Baroudi
Egyptian
1839 – 1904

Which should condemn me to this,
my state. Why must I suffer
this distress and grief?
Was that, my defense of religion
and country, a crime for which
I should be unjustly condemned and exiled?

Let Us Live

Let us live, my Lesbia, and let us love,
and let us value all the rumors of
more severe old men at only a penny!
Suns are able to set and return:
when once the short light has set for us
one perpetual night must be slept by us.
Give me a thousand kisses, then a hundred,
then another thousand, then a second hundred,
then immediately a thousand then a hundred.
then, when we will have made many thousand kisses,
we will throw them into confusion, lest we know,
or lest anyone bad be able to envy
when he knows there to be so many kisses.

Tulips Bloom from Youths’ Blood

We present this work in honor of the 90th anniversary of the poet’s death

It’s the season of wine, meadows, and Rose
The court of spring is cleared of choughs and crows
Generous clouds now water Rey more freely than Khotan
The caged bird and I both long for our own land