One Townslept Night

What the lover said

By Allur Nanmullaiyar

If one can tell morning
from noon from listless evening,
townslept night from dawn, then one's love
is a lie.

If I should lose her
I could proclaim my misery in the streets
riding mock-horses on palmyra-stems in my wildness:

but that seems such a shame.

But then,
living away from her,
living seems such a shame.  

--Translated A.K. Ramanujan ~ Book

One Translated Prayer

I prayed for relief from suffering; I received suffering.
Who can say my prayers were not heard? They were
Translated, edited--

…They were taken in, studied like ancient texts.
Perhaps they were ancient texts.

 --Louise Gluck

One Collapsed Wall

from Genesis 

By Romeo Oriogun 

Within the first light of my birth
I was named after a war.
My mother placed a pinch of sugar on my tongue
To sweeten every darkness I will walk through,
Then she rubbed hibiscus flower on my palms,
Which means son be tender even after the collapse of my walls.

....I have wished death on my shadow from behind the cover of bushes
& saw it die & still the earth keeps building

...

One Contrived Collision

Picasso....like the best poets, loved contriving collisions that forced new meanings to emerge. 

--Sebastian Smee

One Labyrinthine Dance

from The Crane Dance
By Yannis Ritsos

...at Delos they stopped,
Theseus and the young Athenians, and stepped
up to the altar of horns to dance a puzzle-
dance, its moves unreadable except to those who'd walked
the blank meanders of the labyrinth.
And this was midday: a fierce sun, the blaze
of their nakedness, the glitter of repetitions, a dazzle
rising off the sea, the scents of pine and hyacinth...

... Nowadays, we don't think much
about Theseus, the Minotaur, Ariadne on the beach
at Naxos, staring out at the coming years.
But people still dance that dance: just common folk,
those criss-cross steps that no one had to teach,
at weddings and wakes, in bars or parks,
as if hope and heart could meet, as if they might
even now, somehow, dance themselves out of the dark.

-- Translated by David Harsent ~ Book

One Blinding Ganglion

Looking for your light,
I went out:

it was like the sudden dawn
of a million million suns,

a ganglion of lightnings
for my wonder.

O Lord of Caves,
if you are light,
there can be no metaphor.

--Allama Prabhu, translated by A. K. Ramanujan

One Hard Hive

from Inside the Apple
By Yehuda Amichai

I trust your voice
because it has lumps of hard pain in it
the way real honey
has lumps of wax from the honeycomb.

--Translated by Chana Bloch ~ Book