poet

all all and all

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All All and All the Dry Worlds Lever
–Dylan Thomas

I

All all and all the dry worlds lever,
Stage of the ice, the solid ocean,
All from the oil, the pound of lava.
City of spring, the governed flower,
Turns in the earth that turns the ashen
Towns around on a wheel of fire.

How now my flesh, my naked fellow,
Dug of the sea, the glanded morrow,
Worm in the scalp, the staked and fallow.
All all and all, the corpse’s lover,
Skinny as sin, the foaming marrow,
All of the flesh, the dry worlds lever.

II

Fear not the waking world, my mortal,
Fear not the flat, synthetic blood,
Nor the heart in the ribbing metal.
Fear not the tread, the seeded milling,
The trigger and scythe, the bridal blade,
Nor the flint in the lover’s mauling.

Man of my flesh, the jawbone riven,
Know now the flesh’s lock and vice,
And the cage for the scythe-eyed raver.
Know, O my bone, the jointed lever,
Fear not the screws that turn the voice,
And the face to the driven lover.

III

All all and all the dry worlds couple,
Ghost with her ghost, contagious man
With the womb of his shapeless people.
All that shapes from the caul and suckle,
Stroke of mechanical flesh on mine,
Square in these worlds the mortal circle.

Flower, flower the people’s fusion,
O light in zenith, the coupled bud,
And the flame in the flesh’s vision.
Out of the sea, the drive of oil,
Socket and grave, the brassy blood,
Flower, flower, all all and all.

Photo by Alexis Chloe on Unsplash

infernal

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The Infernal Powers
–Carlos Drummond de Andrade

 

Translation

Os poderes infernais

Photo by Philipp Pilz on Unsplash

ivan

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Ivan
–Laura Kasischke

Our rooster’s name is Ivan.
He rules the world.
He stands on a bucket to assist
the sun in its path
through the sky. He
will not be attending
the funeral, for God

has said to Ivan, You
will never be sick
or senile. I’ll
kill you with lightning
or let you drown. Or

I’ll simply send
an eagle down
to fetch you when you’re done.

So Ivan stands on a bucket
and looks around:

Human
stupidity.
The pitiful
cornflakes in their bowls.
The statues of their fascists.
The insane division of their cells.
The misinterpretations
of their bibles.Their
homely combs— and,

today, absurdly, their
crisp black clothes.

But Ivan keeps his thoughts
to himself, and crows.

Photo by David Brooke Martin on Unsplash

the lunatic

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The Lunatic
–Charles Simic

The same snowflake
Kept falling out of the gray sky
All afternoon
Falling and falling
And picking itself up
Off the ground,
To fall again,
But now more surreptitiously,
More carefully
As night strolled over
To see what’s up

Photo by Raisa Milova on Unsplash

botticellian

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The Botticellian Trees
–William Carlos Williams

The alphabet of
the trees

is fading in the
song of the leaves

the crossing
bars of thin

letters that spelled
winter

and the cold
have been illumined

with
pointed green

by the rain and sun—
The strict simple

principles of
straight branches

are being modified
by pinched-out

ifs of color, devout
conditions

the smiles of love—

..............
until the stript
sentences

move as a woman’s
limbs under cloth

and praise from secrecy
quick with desire

love’s ascendancy
in summer—

In summer the song
sings itself

above the muffled words—

Photo by Zach Reiner on Unsplash

Zwijgen

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Zwijgen

–Saskia Hamilton

I slept before a wall of books and they
calmed everything in the room, even
their contents, even me, woken
by the cold and thrill, and still
they said, like the Dutch verb for falling
silent that English has no accommodation for
in the attics and rafters of its intimacies.

departure

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Departure
–Carolyn Forché

We take it with us, the cry
of a train slicing a field
leaving its stiff suture, a distant
tenderness as when rails slip
behind us and our windows
touch the field, where it seems
the dead are awake and so reach
for each other. Your hand
cups the light of a match
to your mouth, to mine, and I want
to ask if the dead hold
their mouths in their hands like this
to know what is left of them.
Between us, a tissue of smoke,
a bundle of belongings, luggage
that will seem to float beside us,
the currency we will change
and change again. Here is the name
of a friend who will take you in,
the papers of a man who vanished,
the one you will become when
the man you have been disappears.
I am the woman whose photograph
you will not recognize, whose face
emptied your eyes, whose eyes
were brief, like the smallest
of cities we slipped through.

Photo by Yaoqi LAI on Unsplash