Absence
The moon
nicotine of a kiss…
A sideways glance
like the mast of a pirate ship
beyond a distant island.
by Luljeta Lleshanaku, Albania
International & Travel Poems
37. Aluminum Oxide
No one offered you a courtyard
where sometimes you’d see
pin-headed soldiers
standing beneath the trees
Apples fallen everywhere
A good many women
in seemingly good spirits
speak incomprehensibly
jabbering as they pass by
legs reflected in the water
Many flowers
two buds
by Gu Cheng, China
Paperboy
Disabled,
out of work,
out of workman’s compensation,
he works a paper route.
Seven days a week at six a.m.,
he places the papers gently.
Never lobs them,
never leaves them in the dewy lawn .
He abides every instruction:
If the Buick is gone, leave the paper on the porch.
Throw it over the dogs, if they’re out.
Come on in, help yourself to some coffee.
He delivers his papers to people:
Dusty. Double D. Agnes. Herbie.
He knows about their kids–
how many they have,
how often they visit.
They know how he takes his coffee, black.
Tony Mac.
Husband of Sue.
Father of three.
Retired machine operator,
with bad back, neck, knees.
Their paperboy,
a man measured in more than column inches, rides a Harley without a helmet, drives his mother to her appointments, and has two Shih Tzu, Zed and Dude.
Little do they know
about the Thursdays
before the dumpsters roll through,
when he works over the trash waiting to be collected.
He collects the remnants of lives discarded, and leaves newspapers in exchange for their VCRs, lawn chairs, trinkets.
He takes his coffee black and quick
and returns to his route. He’s home by 7 to help his wife off to work.
In with her sandwich, a note
scratched out on a purple Post-it:
Tonight, you will have a present waiting, my love.
by Autumn Konopka
The Question Mark
Poor thing. Poor crippled measure of
punctuation. Who would know,
who could imagine you used to be
an exclamation point?
What force bent you over?
Age, time and the vices
of this century?
Did you not once evoke,
call out and stress?
But you got weary of it all,
got wise and turned like this.
by Gevorg Emin, Armenia
Envoy to Palestine
I’ve come to this one grassy hill
in Ramallah, off Tokyo Street,
to a place a few red anemones
& a sheaf of wheat on Darwish’s grave.
A borrowed line transported me beneath
a Babylonian moon & I found myself
lucky to have the shadow of a coat
as warmth, listening to a poet’s song
of Jerusalem, the hum of a red string
Caesar stole off Gilgamesh’s lute.
I know a prison of sunlight on the skin.
The land I come from they also dreamt
before they arrived in towering ships
battered by the hard Atlantic winds.
Crows followed me from my home.
My coyote heart is an old runagate
redskin, a noble savage, still Lakota,
& I knew the bow before the arch.
I feel the wildflowers, all the grasses
& insects singing to me. My sacred dead
is the dust of restless plains I come from,
& I love when it gets into my eyes & mouth
telling me of the roads behind & ahead.
I go back to broken treaties & smallpox,
the irony of barbed wire. Your envoy
could be a reprobate whose inheritance
is no more than a swig of firewater.
The sun made a temple of the bones
of my tribe. I know a dried-up riverbed
& extinct animals live in your nightmares
sharp as shark teeth from my mountains
strung into this brave necklace around
my neck. I hear Chief Standing Bear
saying to Judge Dundy, “I am a man,”
& now I know why I’d rather die a poet
than a warrior, tattoo & tomahawk.
–Yusef Komunyakaa
House Of Spring
Hundreds of open flowers
all come from
the one branch
Look
all their colors
appear in my garden
I open the clattering gate
and in the wind
I see
the spring sunlight
already it has reached
worlds with out number
–Muso Soseki, Japan
To Ophelia
Doubt thou the stars are fire,
Doubt that the sun doth move,
Doubt truth to be a liar,
But never doubt I love.
O dear Ophelia, I am ill at these numbers. I have not art to reckon my groans, but that I love thee best, oh, most best, believe it. Adieu.
Thine evermore, most dear lady,
whilst this machine is to him,
Hamlet.
–William Shakespeare
Old Mountains Want To Turn To Sand
I have my roots inside me,
a skein of red threads.
The stones have their roots inside them,
like fine little ferns.
Wrapped around their softness
the stones sleep hard.
For centuries they have rested
under the sun.
Old mountains
want to turn to sand.
They let themselves go
and open up to water.
After centuries of thirst!
Like language–
that great mountain broken up
by our tongues.
We turn language to sand,
immersing the tongue
in a running stream
that moves mountains.
–Tommy Olofsson, Sweden
The Meaning Of Simplicity
I hide behind simple things so you’ll find me,
if you don’t find me, you’ll find the things,
you’ll touch what my hand has touched,
our hand prints will merge.
The August moon glitters in the kitchen
like a tin-plated pot (it gets that way
because of what I’m saying to you),
it lights up the empty house and
the house’s kneeling silence–
always the silence remains kneeling.
Every word is a doorway
to a meeting, one often cancelled,
and that’s when a word is true:
when it insists on the meeting.
–Yannis Ritsos, Greece
The Garden Of A Child
I entered the garden of my childhood days after
the storm had passed over. A gentle breeze was
blowing and the sky was blue. Seeing in the
undergrowth a bird that had come out of an egg
only a little while ago and had fallen down, I
put it back in its nest.
It all happened yesterday. Today I am a grown-up
man again, and I just can’t put anything back in
its proper place.
–Nirendranath Chakravarti, India
The Poetry Corner 