A horse escaped from the circus
and lodged in my daughter’s eyes:
there he ran circles around the iris
raising silver dust-clouds in the pupil
and halting sometimes
to drink from the holy water of the retina.
Since then my daughter feels a longing
for meadows of grass and green hills…
waiting for the moon to come
and dry with its silk sleeves
the sad water that wets her cheeks.
—Alberto Blanco, Translated by Jennifer Clement
my baby’s got an off color way about things
he don’t like people
or festivals or parades
or house parties or prisons for that matter
he’s got a look that’d turn you to stone if you let it
but if oceans were dark brown ‘stead of blue
they’d be his eyes
he’d swallow whiskey before water
but that mouth can form the sweetest words ever said
and I love him from the crust between his toes
to the top of his head
we’so tight
that I can tell when he changes his mind about his favorite color
or uses different soap
when he loses hope
if he’s broke without needin’ healing
if he’s hurt but wantin’ fixing
when he bleeds
what he dreams
but most importantly, if i’m what he needs
and if I should let him go
Shugar,
ain’t that love?
he dreamed of a place
past the moons
and cuckolds of his heart
where he and his lady could bask
in the warped rhapsody of their love
a story told an untold times
mounted against him
So he waited
strangled by principle
he waited for the revolution
to scream aloud with his bloody fist
in the air, in the name of all he held dear
for the sins to be unearthed
to labor for his children
and die a warrior
He waited for danger
to kill and spite his country
a gladiator in another time with another her
If only she were aware of the way he’d
bare knuckled three armed guards outside
her bedroom window
or how he stayed up all night
tending the fires so that she’d never know cold
or loneliness
but it never came
It passed him over in every century
a philosopher a teacher an artist
a woman an apprentice a poet
a lawyer a father a nurse
a dancer a devil a leader and a criminal
all couldn’t break character
not even for an instant did he
dispel a silent oath for anarchy
He perished unfulfilled and unsung
for generations
wondering what he had done
why visions of valor never came to be
why he needed the fight
why he dreamed of this
lady’s beauty
every night
Bruce Onobrakpeya
When despair grows in me
and I wake in the middle of the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting for their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
— by Wendell Berry
Zineb Sedira pulls you into this eerie and moving art installation featuring a poetic short film.
The world changed.
Books disappeared, replaced
by glowing screens.
Poems that mattered once
were gently laid to rest.
Once, the summer was
the summer, the fall the fall.
Outside, cars sat quietly at the curb,
puffy like soft sculptures,
or finned like giant fish.
Mornings, afternoons,
a boy on a bicycle delivered
news of the world.
Then suddenly it all ended.
There was only the present
looping continuously on a screen,
but you couldn’t make sense of it.
Outside people still jogged,
walked their dogs, coffee
in one hand, a phone in the other.
Holding bright little gods,
they texted and twittered.
Vainly, you tried to recall
when everything had mattered,
when the summer was the summer,
the fall the fall. When people stood
on the sidewalk in the cool
of the evening quietly talking.
When a rolled newspaper hit
the door, mornings, afternoons,
delivered by a boy on a bicycle.
Whatever had happened,
had happened overnight.
You open your mouth.
You open your mouth.
Although there is nothing
to sing about, you sing.
–by Elizabeth Spires
To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and, by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, ’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub.
Who can open the door,
of the green river,
of the golden clouds,
of my heart?
— By Zuhur Dixon, Iraq
If you thought that was hard
you’re in for a treat
‘here endeth the lesson’
americangallery.files.wordpress.com
“Don’t look back and don’t cry.”
The Poetry Corner 