Why Then Do We Nit Despair, Anna Akhmatova

Why Then Do We Nit Despair, Anna Akhmatova

Everything is plundered, betrayed, sold,

Death's great black wing scrapes the air,

Misery gnaws to the bone.

Why then do we not despair?

 

By day, from the surrounding woods,

cherries blow summer into town;

at night the deep transparent skies

glitter with new galaxies.

 

And the miraculous comes so close

to the ruined, dirty houses --

something not known to anyone at all,

but wild in our breast for centuries.

 

~ Anna Akhmatova ~

 

 

(Poems of Akhmatova, edited and translated by Stanley Kunitz with Max Hayward)

 

Letter of Retainer, Morton Janklow

Letter of Retainer

 

for Morton Janklow

 

2.

 

The heart was made to stammer.

How I wish it weren't so.

By moonlight, even the stars

have a grammar.  Before we are 

deleted from these paragraphs of snow,

I'd hold you

 

harmless from and against all losses

 

if I could,

but Earth is unforgiving.

 

In the samovars of night,

where all love's litanies repeat,

when grounds settle

and the time is right

we brew hope

like a small fluid contract.

So, if you wish,

we'll set forth upon an understanding,

 

that far rich wild trip

so dangerous to complete

which, in the suburbs of a glance,

on any avenue, beings in risk,

where all best journeys start,

with the half-lit hieroglyphics

of the heart.

 

~ Diane Ackerman ~

 

(Jaguar of Sweet Laughter: New and Selected Poems)

Who Knows What Is Going On, Juan Ramon Jimenez

Who Knows What is Going On
By Juan Ramon Jimenez
(1881 - 1958)
English version by Robert Bly

          Who knows what is going on on the other side of each hour?

          How many times the sunrise was
there, behind a mountain!

          How many times the brilliant cloud piling up far off
was already a golden body full of thunder!

          This rose was poison.

          That sword gave life.

          I was thinking of a flowery meadow
at the end of a road,
and found myself in the slough.

          I was thinking of the greatness of what was human,
and found myself in the divine.

Still Life With Invisible Canoe, Idra Novey

Still Life with Invisible Canoe   Idra Novey

Levinas asked if we have the right To be        the way I ask my sons If they’d like to be trees        The way the word tree Makes them a little animal Dancing up and down Like bears in movies                   Bears I have to say Pretend we are children      At a river one of them says So we sip it    pivot in the hallway    Call it a canoe It is noon in the living room We are rowing through a blue That is a feeling mostly  The way drifting greenly Under real trees  Is a feeling near holy

Us vs Them, David Tomas Martinez

Us vs Them

BY DAVID TOMAS MARTINEZ

My childhood was not an anxious place,

though I lay

              in my bed, awake, thumbing

my sheets like beads, wondering when the sun

              imploded

              would Russian astronauts be OK,

they in their Sputniks, with their space dogs,

              they that chased their own tail

around this water bowl

              we call Earth. When I was a child,

in elementary school

             we practiced a type of

             protection

called Duck and Cover,

where we huddled

                             under desks in case of a nuclear

attack

by the Russians. They were communists,

              had the bomb, and were evil

Reagan told us

from the small grave

                 of a TV screen.

In the sixties, Nixon said the same

              thing, and the Panthers

              countered with "the Viet Cong never

called me nigger" With their picks

like unclenched fists,

              with their afros like the plume of an atom bomb,

they scared white and black folks alike. It is 2014,

and America is still scared of

                            the Russians and black people;

              now the American Dream is to be debt free,

which I am not, nor may ever be, but at least

              I'm no longer afraid of the Russians.

The Hawk, Franz Wright

The Hawk

 

Maybe in a million years

a better form of human

being will come, happier

and more intelligent.  A few already

have infiltrated this world and lived

to very much regret it,

I suppose.

Me,

I'd prefer to have come

in the form of that hawk, floating over

the mirroring fire

of Clearlake's

hill, my gold

skull filled with nothing

but God's will

the whole day through, instead

of these glinting voices incessantly

unerringly guiding me

to pursue

what makes me sick, and not to

what makes me glad.  And yet

I am changing: this three-pound lump

of sentient meat electrified

by hope and terror has learned to hear

His silence like the sun,

and sought to change!

And friends

on earth at the same time

as me, listen: from the sound of those crickets

last night, Rene Char said

prenatal life

must have been sweet -

each voice perhaps also a star

in that night

from which

this time

we won't be

interrupted anymore - but

fellow monsters while we are still here, for one minute, think

about this: there is someone right now who is looking

to you, not Him, for whatever

love still exists.

 

~ Franz Wright ~

 

 

(God's Silence)

 

In Praise of the Great Bull Walrus, Alden Nowllan

In Praise of the Great Bull Walrus

 

I wouldn't like to be one

of the walrus people

for the rest of my life

but I wish I could spend

one sunny afternoon

lying on the rocks with them.

I suspect it would be similar

to drinking beer in a tavern

that caters to longshoremen

and won't admit women.

We'd exchange no

cosmic secrets.  I'd merely say,

"How yuh doin' you big old walrus?"

and the nearest of

the walrus people

would answer,

"Me? I'm doin' great.

How yuh doin' yourself,

you big old human being, you?"

How good it is to share

the earth with such creatures

and how unthinkable it would have been

to have missed all this

by not being born:

a happy thought, that,

for not being born is

the only tragedy

that we can imagine

but never fear.

 

~ Alden Nowlan ~

 

Sweetness
by Stephen Dunn
Just when it has seemed I couldn’t bear
one more friend
waking with a tumor, one more maniac
with a perfect reason, often a sweetness
has come
and changed nothing in the world
except the way I stumbled through it,
for a while lost
in the ignorance of loving
someone or something, the world shrunk
to mouth-size,
hand-size, and never seeming small.
I acknowledge there is no sweetness
that doesn’t leave a stain,
no sweetness that’s ever sufficiently sweet.
Tonight a friend called to say his lover
was killed in a car
he was driving. His voice was low
and guttural, he repeated what he needed
to repeat, and I repeated
the one or two words we have for such grief
until we were speaking only in tones.
Often a sweetness comes
as if on loan, stays just long enough
to make sense of what it means to be alive,
then returns to its dark
source. As for me, I don’t care
where it’s been, or what bitter road
it’s traveled
to come so far, to taste so good.

"Sweetness" by Stephen Dunn from New and Selected Poems

The Turtle, Mary Oliver

The Turtle

 

breaks from the blue-black

skin of the water, dragging her shell

with its mossy scutes

across the shallows and through the rushes

and over the mudflats, to the uprise,

to the yellow sand,

to dig with her ungainly feet

a nest, and hunker there spewing

her white eggs down

into the darkness, and you think

 

of her patience, her fortitude,

her determination to complete

what she was born to do----

and then you realize a greater thing----

she doesn’t consider

what she was born to do.

She’s only filled

with an old blind wish.

It isn’t even hers but came to her

in the rain or the soft wind

which is a gate through which her life keeps walking.

 

She can’t see

herself apart from the rest of the world

or the world from what she must do

every spring.

Crawling up the high hill,

luminous under the sand that has packed against her skin,

she doesn’t dream

she knows

she is a part of the pond she lives in,

the tall trees are her children,

the birds that swim above her

are tied to her by an unbreakable string.

 

~ Mary Oliver ~

 

(Dream Work)

Khaleesi, Leah Umansky

Khaleesi Says

BY LEAH UMANSKY

In this story, she is fire-born:

knee-deep in the shuddering world.

In this story, she knows no fear,

for what is fractured is a near-bitten star,

a false-bearing tree,

or a dishonest wind.

In this story, fear is a house gone dry.

Fear is not being a woman.

I'm no ordinary woman, she says.

My dreams come true.

And she says and she is

and I say, yes, give me that.

Source: Poetry (January 2014).