One Fake Passport

And Then Who Shows Up (Hymn to Aphrodite)
By Jean Gallagher

How did I not know you but you fool me
every time. The alias, the fake passport, the clever
excuse for why you talk like me. Then you fell
like something fancy and on fire in my lap
and there's no going home for me. For you,
there's the long track of shine in which no one,
you included, can ever say your name.

More

One Nice Chair

Oh No
By Robert Creeley

If you wander far enough
you will come to it
and when you get there
they will give you a place to sit

for yourself only, in a nice chair,
and all your friends will be there
with smiles on their faces
and they will likewise all have places.

Book

One Insulting Citizenry

from Complaint
By Andrzej Bursa

Mr. Minister of Justice...
you Sir offend me.
I don't know you personally, but I saw your photo in the paper
and I feel deeply offended,
unfortunately not just by you Sir,
the majority of State-run and social institutions
are insults to me,
almost every one of the citizens of our state
is an insult aimed directly at me.
Really, not just once do I ask myself for whom was it so vital to construct so enormous a machine
with architecture, a military, law and crime,
so that it would
personally plague ME.
Even the blind man installed on the street corner is there to drive me insane. ...more

--Translated by Kevin Christianson and Halina Ablamowicz

One Icy Shell

from The Children of the Poor
By Gwendolyn Brooks

People who have no children can be hard:
Attain a mail of ice and insolence:
Need not pause in the fire, and in no sense
Hesitate in the hurricane to guard.

...we others hear
The little lifting helplessness, the queer
Whimper-whine; whose unridiculous
Lost softness softly makes a trap for us... more

One Strange Flower

The falling flower
I saw drift back to the branch
Was a butterfly.

--Moritake, translated by Babette Deutsch