National Poetry Month

It looks so dark the end of the world may be near.
I believe it’s going to rain.
The birds in the park are silent.
Nothing is what it seems to be,
Nor are we.

There’s a tree on our street so big
We can all hide in its leaves.
We won’t need any clothes either.
I feel as old as a cockroach, you said.
In my head, I’m a passenger on a ghost ship.

Not even a sigh outdoors now.
If a child was left on our doorstep,
It must be asleep.
Everything is teetering on the edge of everything
With a polite smile.

It’s because there are things in this world
That just can’t be helped, you said.
Right then, I heard the blood orange
Roll off the table and with a thud
Lie cracked open on the floor.

Source: Selected Poems 1963-2003 (Faber, 2005).

Everything contains some
silence. Noise gets
its zest from the
small shark’s-tooth
shaped fragments
of rest angled
in it. An hour
of city holds maybe
a minute of these
remnants of a time
when silence reigned,
compact and dangerous
as a shark. Sometimes
a bit of a tail
or fin can still
be sensed in parks.

Source: The Niagara River (Grove/Atlantic Inc., 2005).

I own nothing. I own a watch.
I own three watches.
I own a motorcycle.
It’s all I do.

The undercarriage of the plane, whining to the down position for landing,
Locks in place, sick of sex.
My fancy life
Is plain and strange.

I always select Map
On the monitor at my seat.
It constantly displays where I am in my trip.
It refreshes the truth minute by minute.

You’re over the ocean with the other people in the cabin.
You’re far from your destination.
It will be hours at this altitude
Without sex.

I remember rushing out to an airport in Paris that morning on a whim,
Trying to get on any flight to divided Berlin
So I could watch the Wall coming down, which it did.
Which I did. I suppose it did some good.

I take my watch off at night but first thing in the morning slip
The platinum jail cell on my wrist like a noose and close the clasp.
Meanwhile, time is passing.
Sometimes I shave twice –

On waking as usual and then again
In the evening to be smooth,
Don’t ask for whom.
My new motorcycle goes a thousand miles per hour.

The plane has touched down in the rain
In a country I don’t know.
Talk about plain and strange.
I don’t speak their ugly singsong language. Having arrived,

I am ready to leave already.
I love it out on the runway.
It’s late at night. I love an empty airport.
They stamp my passport.

Source: Poems: 1959-2009 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010).

I watch your hands at the keyboard
Making music, one hand with a tiny jot,
A birthmark I think where finger bone
Joins palm, mark of the fish,
Living thing in search of a watering
Hole set in a walled garden,
Or in a field with all the fences torn:
Where I hear your father cry into the wind
That beats against stones in a small town
Where you were born; its cornfields
Skyward pointing, never sown, never
To be reaped, flagrant, immortal.

Source: Quickly Changing River (Northwestern University Press, 2008).

They amputated
Your thighs off my hips.
As far as I’m concerned
They are all surgeons. All of them.

They dismantle us
Each from the other.
As far as I’m concerned
They are all engineers. All of them.

A pity. We were such a good
And loving invention.
An aeroplane made from a man and wife.
Wings and everything.
We hovered a little above the earth.

We even flew a little.

Source: The Poetry of Yehuda Amichai (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015). Translated from the Hebrew by Assia Guttmann.

I had come to the house, in a cave of trees,
Facing a sheer sky.
Everything moved,—a bell hung ready to strike,
Sun and reflection wheeled by.

When the bare eyes were before me
And the hissing hair,
Held up at a window, seen through a door.
The stiff bald eyes, the serpents on the forehead
Formed in the air.

This is a dead scene forever now.
Nothing will ever stir.
The end will never brighten it more than this,
Nor the rain blur.

The water will always fall, and will not fall,
And the tipped bell make no sound.
The grass will always be growing for hay
Deep on the ground.

And I shall stand here like a shadow
Under the great balanced day,
My eyes on the yellow dust, that was lifting in the wind,
And does not drift away.

Source: Body of this Death: Poems (1923).

I too know it, the charm of funerals in the rain,
the ferocity of a veil in daylight
or the studied black suits and millinery:
disremembered rituals of the tribe.

The portals of the mausoleum lean
as if having suffered break-ins
by morbid archangels;
its columns evince a certain verticality,
each finding itself unable to fall
into that abstraction
known as giving up the ghost.

Wreathes sadden in a damp mode.
I smoke an ugly brown cigarillo;
its liverous grey wisps swell the nose.
We shall float up, a grey twist of smoke.
Are you with me, yourselves, at the rendezvous?

Source: Interior Night (Picador, 2010).

Flame of California
hardly a hand high,
and edging the beech-alleys
in a homecoming of gold:
counter-poppy clothed
in color of spilled honey.

Trifle of a marvel,
gift of a few weeks,
and soul-like in your poverty
enough, more than enough
to bear witness
and to offer thanks.

Picked, you last no time,
gathering up
like indrawn lips
your four quick words
once the taut erectness
of your praise is broken.

Ardor of California,
sharp as a trumpet call,
four fiery blasts,
blown at the fleeing road
that you can’t stop
or race to keep up with.

The Road runs frenzied
like an unleashed Fury,
and you who would save it
are left behind,
amber nourishing its sands,
feeding California.

Among tall orange groves,
in the breath of apple orchards,
patient of thirst and hunger,
alone, you offer praise
with four live tongues
and a burning throat.

Your praises greet the dawn,
and in the sleepy afternoon
and the slant light of evening,
their eyes closing already,
like the five senses,
your daughters speak and praise.

Source: Selected Poems of Gabriela Mistral (University of New Mexico Press, 2003). Translated from the Spanish by Ursula K. Le Guin.

The man with the red hat
And the polar bear, is he here too?
The window giving on shade,
Is that here too?
And all the little helps,
My initials in the sky,
The hay of an arctic summer night?

The bear
Drops dead in sight of the window.
Lovely tribes have just moved to the north.
In the flickering evening the martins grow denser.
Rivers of wings surround us and vast tribulation.

Source: Some Trees (1956).

Commonplace, divine, bald, at home,
licking day-long breath from the walls of his air-cell
he will eat the crayfish green-garnished in its blush of dying,
burned, like love, in and beyond the salt element.

He will taste the embarrassment of dying,
tear off the livid armour hiding the bloodless flesh,
destroy the cable laid along the sea-bed
communicating bloom of excrement.

From the time he is born he will need to eat this crayfish,
his left hand love, his right hand hate, he will take
larger and larger meals of nightmare till his life accumulates
eyes, eyes, that walk on twigs under the sea.

Source: The Goose Path: Poems (Random House New Zealand, 2006).

A sick fox recoils to the deepest corner of his hideout.
His coat’s moulting in tufts, rain’s drenching him, death’s on the way.
A pine stands sentry on the pile of stones, its bright green needles
adorned with dew for this last day. Somehow it’s a celebration.
A crow drops in, and sings a note. ‘Goodbye,’ the forest sighs, and
so does the whole world. A soul’s ecloding from its cellular pupa.
It yelps as it exits: ‘Why? Why are there still stars? Why must I fall so deep?’

Source: Anchorage (WSOY, 1994). Translated from the Finnish by Herbert Lomas.

After every war
someone has to clean up.
Things won’t
straighten themselves up, after all.

Someone has to push the rubble
to the side of the road,
so the corpse-filled wagons
can pass.

Someone has to get mired
in scum and ashes,
sofa springs,
splintered glass,
and bloody rags.

Someone has to drag in a girder
to prop up a wall.
Someone has to glaze a window,
rehang a door.

Photogenic it’s not,
and takes years.
All the cameras have left
for another war.

We’ll need the bridges back,
and new railway stations.
Sleeves will go ragged
from rolling them up.

Someone, broom in hand,
still recalls the way it was.
Someone else listens
and nods with unsevered head.
But already there are those nearby
starting to mill about
who will find it dull.

From out of the bushes
sometimes someone still unearths
rusted-out arguments
and carries them to the garbage pile.

Those who knew
what was going on here
must make way for
those who know little.
And less than little.
And finally as little as nothing.

In the grass that has overgrown
causes and effects,
someone must be stretched out
blade of grass in his mouth
gazing at the clouds.

Source: Miracle Fair (W.W. Norton and Company Inc., 2001). Translated from the Polish by Joanna Trzeciak.

If time started anew,
and waters submerged the face of life,
and the earth convulsed, and that god
rushed to me, beseeching, “Noah, save the living!”
I would not concern myself with his request.
I would travel upon my ark, removing
clay and pebbles from the eyes of the dead.
I would open the depths of their being to the flood,
and whisper in their veins
that we have returned from the wilderness,
that we have emerged from the cave,
that we have changed the sky of years,
that we sail without giving in to our fears—
that we do not heed the word of that god.
Our appointment is with death.
Our shores are a familiar and pleasing despair,
a gelid sea of iron water that we ford
to its very ends, undeterred,
heedless of that god and his word,
longing for a different, a new, lord.

Source: Poetry (April 2007). Translated from the Arabic by Shawkat M. Toorawa.

The poem can start with him walking backwards into a room.
He takes off his jacket and sits down for the rest of his life;
that’s how we bring Dad back.
I can make the blood run back up my nose, ants rushing into a hole.
We grow into smaller bodies, my breasts disappear,
your cheeks soften, teeth sink back into gums.
I can make us loved, just say the word.
Give them stumps for hands if even once they touched us without consent,
I can write the poem and make it disappear.
Step-Dad spits liquor back into glass,
Mum’s body rolls back up the stairs, the bone pops back into place,
maybe she keeps the baby.
Maybe we’re okay kid?
I’ll rewrite this whole life and this time there’ll be so much love,
you won’t be able to see beyond it.

You won’t be able to see beyond it,
I’ll rewrite this whole life and this time there’ll be so much love.
Maybe we’re okay kid,
maybe she keeps the baby.
Mum’s body rolls back up the stairs, the bone pops back into place,
Step-Dad spits liquor back into glass.
I can write the poem and make it disappear,
give them stumps for hands if even once they touched us without consent,
I can make us loved, just say the word.
Your cheeks soften, teeth sink back into gums
we grow into smaller bodies, my breasts disappear.
I can make the blood run back up my nose, ants rushing into a hole,
that’s how we bring Dad back.
He takes off his jacket and sits down for the rest of his life.
The poem can start with him walking backwards into a room.

Source: Poetry (October 2017).

Speed is violence
Power is violence
Weight is violence

The butterly seeks safety in lightness
In weightless, undulating flight

But at a crossroads where mottled light
From trees falls on a brash new highway
Our convergent territories meet

I come power-packed enough for two
And the gentle butterfly offers
Itself in bright yellow sacrifice
Upon my hard silicon shield.

Source: Chinua Achebe: Collected Poems (Penguin Books, 2004).

And these are my vices:
impatience, bad temper, wine,
the more than occasional cigarette,
an almost unquenchable thirst to be kissed,
a hunger that isn’t hunger
but something like fear, a staunching of dread
and a taste for bitter gossip
of those who’ve wronged me—for bitterness—
and flirting with strangers and saying sweetheart
to children whose names I don’t even know
and driving too fast and not being Buddhist
enough to let insects live in my house
or those cute little toylike mice
whose soft gray bodies in sticky traps
I carry, lifeless, out to the trash
and that I sometimes prefer the company of a book
to a human being, and humming
and living inside my head
and how as a girl I trailed a slow-hipped aunt
at twilight across the lawn
and learned to catch fireflies in my hands,
to smear their sticky, still-pulsing flickering
onto my fingers and earlobes like jewels.

Source: Carpathia (BOA Editions Ltd., 2009).

Night, the black summer, simplifies her smells
into a village; she assumes the impenetrable

musk of the negro, grows secret as sweat,
her alleys odorous with shucked oyster shells,

coals of gold oranges, braziers of melon.
Commerce and tambourines increase her heat.

Hellfire or the whorehouse: crossing Park Street,
a surf of sailor’s faces crest, is gone

with the sea’s phosphoresence; the boites-de-nuit
tinkle like fireflies in her thick hair.

Blinded by headlamps, deaf to taxi klaxons,
she lifts her face from the cheap, pitch oil flare

toward white stars, like cities, flashing neon,
burning to be the bitch she must become.

As daylight breaks the coolie turns his tumbril
of hacked, beheaded coconuts towards home.

Source: The Poetry of Derek Walcott, 1948-2013 (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2013).

Sunlight the tall women may never have seen.
Men, perhaps, going headfirst into the breakers,
But certainly the children at the sandbar.
Shallow glints in the wave suspended
We knew at the breaker line, running that shore
At low tide, when it was safe. The grasses whipped
And nothing was what they said: not safety, nor the sea.
And the sand was not what they said, but various,
Lion-grained, beard-grey. And blue. And green.
And each grain casting its shadow down before
Childhood in tide-pools where all things are food.
Behind us the shores emerged and fed on tide.
We fed on summer, the round flowers in our hands
From the snowball bush entered us, and prisoner wings,
And shells in spirals, all food.

All keys to unlock
Some world, glinting as strong as noon on the sandbar,
Where men and women give each other children.

Source: Poetry (April 1955).

The word burl, you say? It reminds me of
Certain boats wrecked amid seaweeds,
Dragged by kids on summer mornings
Among light yells out of dark whirlpools,

Because there are some, you see, with traces
left by a fire that once burned at the world’s fore
-And on their blackened wood, where time places
salt resembling a message, and then is no more,
You would also love this water when it shines.

Fires at the sea have short-lived flames
But when they are extinguished by the waves,
You can see irisations in the rising smoke
–The word burl is like this dark drowning wood.

And poetry, if we can still pronounce the word
Poetry, isn’t it to know full well where the stars
Are seemingly taking us, clearly towards death,

And to love their light nonetheless? To still love
the dark opening of absence’s almond into words?

Source: In the Shadow’s Light (University of Chicago Press, 1987). Translated from the French by John Naughton.

I’m a woman sitting here with all my words intact
like a basket of green fruit.

The fragments
of a thousand ancient and defeated gods
seek and bind each other in my blood, straining
to rebuild their statue.
From their shattered mouths
a song struggles to rise to mine,
an aroma of burnt resin, some gesture
of a mysterious carved stone.
But I am oblivion, betrayal,
the shell that did not hold an echo
from even the smallest wave in the sea.
I do not watch the submerged temples;
I watch only the trees moving their vast shadow
over the ruins, biting the passing wind
with acid teeth.
And the signs close beneath my eyes like
a flower under the awkward fingers of the blind.
Yet I know: behind
my body, another body crouches,
and around me many breaths
cross furtively
like nocturnal animals in the jungle.
I know that in some place,
like cactus in the desert,
a clustered heart of thorns, awaits a name
as the cactus does the rain.
But I know only a few words
in the language or the stone
beneath which they buried my ancestor alive.

Source: A Rosario Castellanos Reader (University of Texas Press, 1988). Translated from the Spanish by Maureen Ahern.

The stones we threw I hear
fall, glass-clear through the years. In the valley
the confused actions of the moment
fly screeching from
treetop to treetop, become silent
in thinner air than the present’s, glide
like swallows from hilltop
to hilltop until they’ve
reached the furthest plateaus
along the frontier of being. There all
our deeds fall
glass-clear
with nowhere to fall to
except ourselves.

Source: 17 Poems (Albert Bonniers, 1954). Translated from the Swedish by Robin Fulton.

A black cat among roses,
Phlox, lilac-misted under a first-quarter moon,
The sweet smells of heliotrope and night-scented stock.
The garden is very still,
It is dazed with moonlight,
Contented with perfume,
Dreaming the opium dreams of its folded poppies.
Firefly lights open and vanish
High as the tip buds of the golden glow
Low as the sweet alyssum flowers at my feet.
Moon-shimmer on leaves and trellises,
Moon-spikes shafting through the snow ball bush.
Only the little faces of the ladies’ delight are alert and staring,
Only the cat, padding between the roses,
Shakes a branch and breaks the chequered pattern
As water is broken by the falling of a leaf.
Then you come,
And you are quiet like the garden,
And white like the alyssum flowers,
And beautiful as the silent sparks of the fireflies.
Ah, Beloved, do you see those orange lilies?
They knew my mother,
But who belonging to me will they know
When I am gone.

Source: Pictures of the Floating World (1919).

If there must be a god in the house, must be,
Saying things in the rooms and on the stair,

Let him move as the sunlight moves on the floor,
Or moonlight, silently, as Plato’s ghost

Or Aristotle’s skeleton. Let him hang out
His stars on the wall. He must dwell quietly.

He must be incapable of speaking, closed,
As those are: as light, for all its motion, is;

As color, even the closest to us, is;
As shapes, though they portend us, are.

It is the human that is the alien,
The human that has no cousin in the moon.

It is the human that demands his speech
From beasts or from the incommunicable mass.

If there must be a god in the house, let him be one
That will not hear us when we speak: a coolness,

A vermilioned nothingness, any stick of the mass
Of which we are too distantly a part.

Source: The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (Vintage, 1990).

At low tide like this how sheer the water is.
White, crumbling ribs of marl protrude and glare
and the boats are dry, the pilings dry as matches.
Absorbing, rather than being absorbed,
the water in the bight doesn’t wet anything,
the color of the gas flame turned as low as possible.
One can smell it turning to gas; if one were Baudelaire
one could probably hear it turning to marimba music.
The little ocher dredge at work off the end of the dock
already plays the dry perfectly off-beat claves.
The birds are outsize. Pelicans crash
into this peculiar gas unnecessarily hard,
it seems to me, like pickaxes,
rarely coming up with anything to show for it,
and going off with humorous elbowings.
Black-and-white man-of-war birds soar
on impalpable drafts
and open their tails like scissors on the curves
or tense them like wishbones, till they tremble.
The frowsy sponge boats keep coming in
with the obliging air of retrievers,
bristling with jackstraw gaffs and hooks
and decorated with bobbles of sponges.
There is a fence of chicken wire along the dock
where, glinting like little plowshares,
the blue-gray shark tails are hung up to dry
for the Chinese-restaurant trade.
Some of the little white boats are still piled up
against each other, or lie on their sides, stove in,
and not yet salvaged, if they ever will be, from the last bad storm,
like torn-open, unanswered letters.
The bight is littered with old correspondences.
Click. Click. Goes the dredge,
and brings up a dripping jawful of marl.
All the untidy activity continues,
awful but cheerful.

Source: The Complete Poems (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1969).

Our shells clacked on the plates.
My tongue was a filling estuary,
My palate hung with starlight:
As I tasted the salty Pleiades
Orion dipped his foot into the water.
Alive and violated,
They lay on their bed of ice:
Bivalves: the split bulb
And philandering sigh of ocean
Millions of them ripped and shucked and scattered.
We had driven to that coast
Through flowers and limestone
And there we were, toasting friendship,
Laying down a perfect memory
In the cool of thatch and crockery.
Over the Alps, packed deep in hay and snow,
The Romans hauled their oysters south to Rome:
I saw damp panniers disgorge
The frond-lipped, brine-stung
Glut of privilege
And was angry that my trust could not repose
In the clear light, like poetry or freedom
Leaning in from sea. I ate the day
Deliberately, that its tang
Might quicken me all into verb, pure verb.

Source: Opened Ground: Selected Poems 1966-1996 (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999).

Sometimes, when the light strikes at odd angles
and pulls you back into childhood

and you are passing a crumbling mansion
completely hidden behind old willows

or an empty convent guarded by hemlocks
and giant firs standing hip to hip,

you know again that behind that wall,
under the uncut hair of the willows

something secret is going on,
so marvelous and dangerous

that if you crawled through and saw,
you would die, or be happy forever.

Source: Alive Together: New and Selected Poems (Louisiana State University Press, 1996).

Soft liquid feet
adhere it; your eye
draws me to it. On a dark green
leaf of the street
we walk in this solitude
we made to inhabit,
your delicate
hand gestures
as the slow head
emerges with a quality
of certainty, wavers
in the warm, sweet
air, and nibbles
shiny leaves. We found it
together, this fragile life
ventured outside the planet
it carries.

Source: The Yellow Room: Love Poems (Harper & Row, 1971).

Insects pierce green through the orchard
crawl the undersides of leaves
ceaselessly multiplying.
Mucous expelled from nostrils
may seem like blue mist falling.
At times, they
without a sound flutter and vanish into the sky.
The ladies, always with an irritated look in their eyes
gather the unripe fruit.
Countless scars are attached to the sky.
Hanging like elbows.
And then I see,
the orchard cleaving from the center.
A bare patch emerges there, burning like a cloud.

Source: Collected Work of Sagawa Chika (Canarium Books, 2015). Translated from the Japanese by Nakayasu Sawako

Amid pale green milkweed
wild clover
a rotted deer, curled,
shag-like
after a winter so cold
the trees split open.
I think she couldn’t keep up
with the others-
they had no place to go-
and her food,
the frozen grass and twigs,
wouldn’t carry her weight.
Now from boney sockets
she stares out on this
cruel luxuriance.

Source: Poetry (August 1965).

Black body burns itself
                    to bushfire-
spurned husk that I am. Skinned viscous,
daughtering fever. Grief knifes its slow lava

through my fluorescent, gnarled
as if a neon viper, as if singed animus.
Gaslamp-hot for necking, lit oceanliners
                    gulped in.

Such is our ambush.     Spore of my peculiar –
Even the sea derails full-throttle at every turn.

What scurvy thrush unmoors      this boiled
microbial     as spite besots my humid mouth.

Storm, hag-seed and holy.
Come dusk, a rumbottle sky
                    I am sipping.
My preening tongue, the guillotine.

Know nothing here will grow politely.
Such is our nature.
Such lurid rains sedate us villainous low:

This eel-eye screws to dazzling fright
          what slowly turns to vapor,
and another hot light spoils me
                    of grotesquerie.

Sibling, Sisyphean.     Howl of my unusual,
now we have reclassified the very
                    ape of us.

Half fish          and Half monstrous.
Drowned spine of toothache take us
and barnacled,     all crippled filaments
          all jawbone.

Already plucked      of cruder blooms,
brined hippocampus
          unzipped with germ.

My dropsied and unteachable.
Lo, this Indigene. Hissing into madness
this infrared. All night

our dark carousel haphazards,
          churning to house our many jargon,
masked congenital, and cloven in.

Diagram and mooncalfed.     Even I.
How sometime I am wound with solitude.

          Enough a Negress all myself.

Scorn, one golliwog-bone knots the black
mock of me, naked and denouncing
          us artless.

Vexed skinfolk. Unfossiled, hence.
What a brittle world is     man.
Self inflammable, I abjure you.

And wear your gabble like a diadem,
this flecked crown of dictions,
          this bioluminescence.

Predator coiled eager     at the edge
          of these maps.

Master, Dare I

          unjungle it?

Source: Cannibal (University of Nebraska Press, 2016).