Month: December 2018

unworthy

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The First Madrigal
–Anna Swir
That night of love was pure
as an antique musical instrument
and the air around it.

Rich
as a ceremony of coronation.
It was fleshy as the belly of a woman in labor
and spiritual
as a number.

It was only a moment of life
and it wanted to be a conclusion drawn from life.
By dying
it wanted to comprehend the principle of the world.

That night of love
had ambitions.

The Second Madrigal
-Anna Swir
A night of love
exquisite as a
concert from old Venice
played on exquisite instruments.
Healthy as a
buttock of a little angel.
Wise as an
anthill.
Garish as air
blown into a trumpet.
Abundant as the reign
of a royal Negro couple
seated on two thrones
cast in gold.

A night of love with you,
a big baroque battle
and two victories.

Thank You, My Fate
-Anna Swir
Great humility fills me,
great purity fills me,
I make love with my dear
as if I made love dying
as if I made love praying,
tears pour
over my arms and his arms.
I don’t know whether this is joy
or sadness, I don’t understand
what I feel, I’m crying,
I’m crying, it’s humility
as if I were dead,
gratitude, I thank you, my fate,
I’m unworthy, how beautiful
my life.

Photo by Sebastian Spindler on Unsplash

without someone

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The World Is Not a Pleasant Place to Be
–Nikki Giovanni
The world is not a pleasant place
to be without
someone to hold and be held by.

A river would stop
its flow if only
a stream were there
to receive it.

An ocean would never laugh
if clouds weren’t there
to kiss her tears.

The world is
not a pleasant place to be without
someone.

Photo by Jack Anstey on Unsplash

“big as the myth of origin”

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Prayer to the Pacific
–Leslie Marmon Silko
I traveled to the ocean

distant

from my southwest land of sandrock
to the moving blue water

Big as the myth of origin.

Pale
pale water in the yellow-white light of

sun floating west

to China

where ocean herself was born.

Clouds that blow across the sand are wet.

Squat in the wet sand and speak to the Ocean:

I return to you turquoise the red coral you sent us,

sister spirit of Earth.

Four round stones in my pocket I carry back the ocean

to suck and to taste.

Thirty thousand years ago

Indians came riding across the ocean
carried by giant sea turtles.

Waves were high that day

great sea turtles waded slowly out

from the gray sundown sea.

Grandfather Turtle rolled in the sand four times

and disappeared

swimming into the sun.

And so from that time

immemorial,

as the old people say,

rain clouds drift from the west

gift from the ocean.

Green leaves in the wind
Wet earth on my feet

swallowing raindrops

clear from China.

Photo by elora manzo on Unsplash

you covered with feathers

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Like the twist of a knife, the shaft penetrates – first a naked man wandering freely through city streets, covered in feathers and erect. Then suddenly, the twist – a different man, a broken disaster of a man, “quarrelsome and desperate”. These who populate.

About the Knife
–Novica Tadić

Screen Shot 2018-08-19 at 10.23.53

Photo by psychoballerina photography on Unsplash

legalities

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Legal Fiction
–William Empson
Screen Shot 2018-10-27 at 19.19.32

Photo by Andres F. Uran on Unsplash

grave grass

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Street Corner College
–Kenneth Patchen
Next year the grave grass will cover us.
We stand now, and laugh;
Watching the girls go by;
Betting on slow horses; drinking cheap gin.
We have nothing to do; nowhere to go; nobody.

Last year was a year ago; nothing more.
We weren’t younger then; nor older now.

We manage to have the look that young men have;
We feel nothing behind our faces, one way or other.

We shall probably not be quite dead when we die.
We were never anything all the way; not even soldiers.

We are the insulted, brother, the desolate boys.
Sleepwalkers in a dark and terrible land,
Where solitude is a dirty knife at our throats.
Cold stars watch us chum
Cold stars and the whores.

Photo by eddie howell on Unsplash

from the earth’s inside

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Coal
–Audre Lorde
I
Is the total black, being spoken
From the earth’s inside.
There are many kinds of open.
How a diamond comes into a knot of flame
How a sound comes into a word, coloured
By who pays what for speaking.

Some words are open
Like a diamond on glass windows
Singing out within the crash of passing sun
Then there are words like stapled wagers
In a perforated book—buy and sign and tear apart—
And come whatever wills all chances
The stub remains
An ill-pulled tooth with a ragged edge.
Some words live in my throat
Breeding like adders. Others know sun
Seeking like gypsies over my tongue
To explode through my lips
Like young sparrows bursting from shell.
Some words
Bedevil me.

Love is a word another kind of open—
As a diamond comes into a knot of flame
I am black because I come from the earth’s inside
Take my word for jewel in your open light.

Photo by Lurm on Unsplash

unshaded avenue

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Untitled
–Claude de Burine
An unshaded avenue
will from now on be my life
where once I spoke love
the way a sheet is spread in the sun
with my absent voyagers
more living than the living
milestones along the way
towards an unknown world
minus passport or time
where words hoist black flags

Original

Une allée sans ombre
sera maintenant ma vie
où je disais amour
comme un étend un drap au soleil
avec mes absents voyageurs
plus vivants que les vivants
bornes sur le chemin
vers un monde inconnu
sans passeport ni temps
où les mots hissent le drapeau noir.

entirely entirety

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Entirely
–Louis MacNeice
If we could get the hang of it entirely
It would take too long;
All we know is the splash of words in passing
And falling twigs of song,
And when we try to eavesdrop on the great
Presences it is rarely
That by a stroke of luck we can appropriate
Even a phrase entirely.

If we could find our happiness entirely
In somebody else’s arms
We should not fear the spears of the spring nor the city’s
Yammering fire alarms
But, as it is, the spears each year go through
Our flesh and almost hourly
Bell or siren banishes the blue
Eyes of Love entirely.

And if the world were black or white entirely
And all the charts were plain
Instead of a mad weir of tigerish waters,
A prism of delight and pain,
We might be surer where we wished to go
Or again we might be merely
Bored but in brute reality there is no
Road that is right entirely.

Photo by John Cafazza on Unsplash

dreamlessness

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Waking This Morning Dreamless After Long Sleep
–Jane Hirshfield
But with this sentence:
‘Use your failures for paper.’
Meaning, I understood,
the backs of failed poems, but also my life.

Whose far side I begin now to enter —

A book imprinted without seeming reason,
each blank day bearing on its reverse, in random order,
the mad-set type of another.
December 12, 1960. April 4, 1981. 13th of August, 1974 —

Certain words bleed through to the unwritten pages.
To call this memory offers no solace.

‘Even in sleep, the heavy millstones turning.’

I do not know where the words come from,
what the millstones,
where the turning may lead.

I, a woman forty-five, beginning to gray at the temples,
putting pages of ruined paper
into a basket, pulling them out again.

Photo by Christa Dodoo on Unsplash