One Silent Sheet

from Compromise
By Akhtar-ul-Iman

...

...People dream and ride the high winds,
then reach a stage when they weep bitterly
and break like branches.
They find loved ones,
the focus of their desires and lives,
then come to hate them
even while loving them still.

I hate her, she despises me.
But when we meet
in the loneliness, the darkness,
we become one whole, like a lump of kneaded clay,
hatred leaves, silence stays,
the silence that covered the earth
after it was created,
and we go on breaking
like branches.

We don't talk about the dreams we once dreamt,
we don't talk about the joys,
we simply go on breaking.

I'm fond of drinking,
she's addicted to smoking,
wrapped in a sheet of silence we cling to each other,
we go on breaking
like tender branches.


--Translated by C.M. Naim and Vinay Dharwadker

One Jammed Highway

from Snow Is Falling
By Tomas Tranströmer

The funerals keep coming
more and more of them
like the traffic signs
as we approach a city.

--Translated by Robin Fulton

Ten Good Fingers

from Lullaby

This little girl
only born to
gather wild roses.

Only born to
shake the wild rice loose
with her little fingers.

Only to collect the sap
of young hemlocks
in spring….

This
little girl was
only born to
gather wild roses.


--Tsimshian/Pacific Northwest Indians

One Cornered Room

from Purdah
By Imtiaz Dharker

…

…Purdah is a kind of safety.
The body finds a place to hide.
The cloth fans out against the skin
much like the earth that falls
on coffins after they put dead men in.

People she has known
stand up, sit down as they have always done.
But they make different angles
in the light, their eyes aslant,
a little sly.

She half-remembers things
from someone else’s life,
perhaps from yours, or mine –
carefully carrying what we do not own:
between the thighs, a sense of sin.

We sit still, letting the cloth grow
a little closer to our skin.
A light filters inward
through our bodies’ walls.
Voices speak inside us,
echoing in the places we have just left.

She stands outside herself,
sometimes in all four corners of a room.
Wherever she goes, she is always
inching past herself…

...

Passing constantly out of her own hands,
into the corner of someone else’s eyes
while the doors keep opening
inward and again
inward.


More

One Tailored Suit

In the middle of life, death comes
to take your measurements. The visit
is forgotten and life goes on. But the suit
is being sewn on the sly.

--Tomas Tranströmer

One Dispirited Muse

Why does my Muse only speak when she is unhappy?
She does not, I only listen when I am unhappy
When I am happy I live and despise writing
For my Muse this cannot but be dispiriting.

--Stevie Smith

One Touchy Creature

The poet...a creature consisting of nothing but antennae and nerves.

--Durs Grunbein

One Long River

Not to know. Not to remember.
With this one hope:
That beyond the River Lethe, there is memory, healed.

--Czeslaw Milosz

One Wobbly Ladder

from Song for the Dying

Before you get to the king-tree

Come back

Before you get to the peach-tree

Come back

Before you get to the line of fence

Come back

Before you get to the bushes

Come back

....Before you get to the fire

Come back

Before you get to the middle of the ladder

Come back

--Seminole Indian

One Recidivist Night

Sleeplessly

I watch over

the spring night—

but no amount of guarding

is enough to make it stay.

--Izumi Shikibu, translated by Jane Hirshfield

One Justified Tirade

Video: Homer Simpson on Walt Whitman

One Polite Fib

...nothing is more difficult than to talk indifferently or insincerely on the subject of one's craft. The writer, without much effort, can reel off polite humbug about pictures, the painter about books; but to fib about the art one practices is incredibly painful.

--Edith Wharton

One Naked Throat

John Keats
John Keats
John
Please put your scarf on.

--Seymour Glass

One Instantaneous Toxin

The right reader of a good poem can tell the moment it strikes him that he has taken on an immortal wound--that he will never get over it. ...The proof of a poem is not that we have never forgotten it, but that we knew at sight that we never could forget it. There was a barb to it and a toxin that we owned to at once.

--Robert Frost

One Undespairing Beak

five-story house in laleli
By Gisela Kraft

one lies in rags on the street
and his stomach is empty
and he wishes for death

one sits with friends at tea and backgammon
and his mind is empty
and he wishes for death

one sits in a straight-backed chair at a desk
and his bank account is empty
and he wishes for death

one lies in bed staring out to sea
and the place next to him in bed is empty
and he wishes for death

one flies back with food in its beak
and its nest is empty
and only this one says
we should give it another try

Translated by Laura Leichum

One Empty Bed

The true poet is all the time a visionary and whether with friends or not, as much alone as a man on his death bed.

--W.B. Yeats

One Thunderous Alas

A long time back when we were first in love
Our bodies were always as one
Later you became my dearest
And I became your dearest alas
And now my beloved lord
And now you are my husband
I am your wife
Our hearts must be hard as the middle of thunder
Now what have I to live for?

--Indian, translated by J. Moussaieff Masson and W.S. Merwin

One False Word

"Therefore" is a word the poet must not know.

--André Gide

One Heavy Medal

All human beings should have a medal,
A god cannot carry it, he is not able.

--Stevie Smith

One Wasted Treasure

I have lived and I have loved;
I have waked and I have slept;
I have sung and I have danced;
I have smiled and I have wept;
I have won and wasted treasure;
I have had my fill of pleasure;
And all these things were weariness,
And some of them were dreariness.
And all these things, but two things,
Were emptiness and pain:
And Love--it was the best of them;
And Sleep--worth all the rest of them.

--Anonymous

One Enthusiastic Crowd

A poet is an unhappy being whose heart is torn by secret sufferings, but whose lips are so strangely formed that when the sighs and the cries escape them, they sound like beautiful music... and then people crowd about the poet and say to him: "Sing for us soon again;" that is as much as to say, "May new sufferings torment your soul."

--Soren Kierkegaard

One Fading Power

The poet...must use his special abilities to disappear.

--Stephen Burt

One Free Flower

from The Book of Hours
By Rainer Maria Rilke

And so they say: my life, my wife, my child,
my dog, well knowing all that they have styled
their own: life, wife, child, dog, remain
shapes foreign and unknown,
that blindly groping they must stumble on...

...in the beggary of their wandering
they cannot claim a bond with any thing,
but, driven from possessions they have prized,
not by their own belongings recognized,
they can own wives no more than they own flowers
whose life is alien and apart from ours.

--Translated by Babette Deutsch

One Abstract Eyeball

The Vision of Willie Yeats
By Louise Bogan

Suddenly into my chamber, I certainly would be at a loss to say from where,
A large roomy animal with mad abstract eyes, and considerable concrete hair
Advanced towards me with astronomical slowness, as I sat glued to my Byzantine chair.
While the sizzle of either Mrs. Yeats frying sausages, or sausages frying Mrs. Yeats, slouched up the winding stair.

One Good Letter

I have conquered, and shall go on conquering.

--William Blake

One Reliable Debtor

To nothing fitter can I thee compare
Than to the son of some rich penny-father,
Who, having now brought on his end with care,
Leaves to his son all he had heap'd together;
This new-rich novice, lavish of his chest,
To one man gives, doth on another spend,
Then here he riots, yet among the rest
Haps to lend some to one true honest friend.
Thy gifts thou in obscurity dost waste,
False friends thy kindness, born but to deceive thee,
Thy love that is on the unworthy plac'd,
Time hath thy beauty, which with age will leave thee;
Only that little which to me was lent
I give thee back, when all the rest is spent.

--Michael Drayton

One Slight Doom

The worst thing that being an artist could do to you would be that it would make you slightly unhappy constantly.

--J. D. Salinger

One Fell Impaler

Fate slew Him, but He did not drop --
She felled -- He did not fall --
Impaled Him on Her fiercest stakes --
He neutralized them all --

She stung Him -- sapped His firm Advance --
But when Her Worst was done
And He -- unmoved -- regarded Her --
Acknowledged Him a Man.

--Emily Dickinson

One Stymied Lobe

They make you sit up and not think, which is perhaps the real point of poetry.

--Colm Toibin

One Handy Book

We are happy, we are merry:
We got a rhyming dictionary.

--Bart Simpson

One Broken Blue

from Love Under House Arrest
By Nizar Qabbani

I ask your leave to go
for the blood I used to think would never turn to water
has turned to water
and the sky whose blue crystal I used to think
could not break...has broken


....and the words
I used to cover you with when you slept
have fled like frightened birds
and left you naked.

Translated by Lena Jayyusi and W.S. Merwin ~ Book

One Clear View

The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something and tell what it saw in a plain way. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion, all in one.

--John Ruskin

One Floating Shadow

from Carillon
By Tomas Transtromer

I lie on the bed with my arms outstretched
I am an anchor that has dug itself down
and holds steady the huge shadow
floating up there

the great unknown
that I am a part of
and which is certainly
more important than me.

-Translated by Robin Fulton

One Long Chime

Gather wood, build the bonfire high
I will give myself
only in bright light

Midnight. You are not here--
these blankets burn me like fire

All night
like a bell and with jewels
I chimed in your arms

Never fall asleep beside my body
I belong to those
who keep vigil over me

If I strangle that rooster
will you lie longer
in my arms


--Pashto landays, versions by Laura Sheahen

One Defeatable Wall

The wall is high
but my beloved is tall

--Qahar Asi

One Familiar Smell

Myth
By Muriel Rukeyser

Long afterward, Oedipus, old and blinded, walked the
roads. He smelled a familiar smell. It was
the Sphinx. Oedipus said, "I want to ask one question.
Why didn't I recognize my mother?" "You gave the
wrong answer," said the Sphinx. "But that was what
made everything possible," said Oedipus. "No," she said.
"When I asked, What walks on four legs in the morning,
two at noon, and three in the evening, you answered,
Man. You didn't say anything about woman."
"When you say Man," said Oedipus, "you include women
too. Everyone knows that." She said, "That's what
you think."

One Damned Gender

from Sestina: Altaforte
By Ezra Pound

...And I love to see the sun rise blood-crimson.
And I watch his spears through the dark clash
And it fills my heart with rejoicing
And pries wide my mouth with fast music
When I see him so scorn and defy peace
His lone might 'gainst all darkness opposing....


There's no sound like to swords swords opposing,
No cry like the battle's rejoicing,
When our elbows and swords drip the crimson
And our charges 'gainst The Leopard's rush clash.
May God damn for ever all who cry 'Peace!'

And let the music of the swords make them crimson!
Hell grant soon we hear the swords clash!
Hell blot black for alway the thought 'Peace'!

One Veiled Arm

from Ghazal XV
By Ghalib

Almost none
of the beautiful faces
come back to be glimpsed for an instant in some flower

once the dust owns them

All day three stars
the Daughters of the Bier
hid in back of the light

then they step forth naked
but their minds are the black night

Sleep comes to him
peace belongs to him
the night is his

over whose arm your hair is spread

--Translated by W.S. Merwin

One Well-Hidden Child

Revelation
By Robert Frost

We make ourselves a place apart
Behind light words that tease and flout,
But oh, the agitated heart
Till someone really find us out.

'Tis pity if the case require
(Or so we say) that in the end
We speak the literal to inspire
The understanding of a friend.

But so with all--from babes that play
At hide-and-seek to God afar--
So all who hide too well away
Must speak and tell us where they are.

One Calm Sea

When I was a child I truly loved:
Unthinking love as calm and deep
As the North Sea. But I have lived,
And now I do not sleep.

--John Gardner

One Swift Lily

from Photograph
By Zbigniew Herbert

...my little boy my Isaac bend your head
just a moment of pain and then you will be
anything you like--a swallow a lily of the valley

More

One Thoughtful Haystack

The horse's mind
Blends
So swiftly
Into the hay's mind.

---Fazil Husnu Daglarca

One Steely Tap

from poet in the house
By Nic Sebastian

...you say I choose

what is difficult with a thin steel
dentist’s probe that I tap

and live for echoes
of fissures of

cavities and it’s not like I want
to fix them I just want

to find them

One Absurd World

Rondelet

I never meant
For you to go. The thing you heard
I never meant
for you to hear. The night you went
away I knew our whole absurd
sweet world had fallen with a word
I never meant.

--Anonymous

One Irritated Creator

All the great art we know of carries within its compass a guarantee that its creator is not content.

--Clive James

One Surreptitious Pie

from A Message from the Wanderer
By William Stafford

Today outside your prison I stand
and rattle my walking stick: Prisoners, listen;
you have relatives outside. And there are
thousands of ways to escape.

Years ago, I bent my skill to keep
my cell locked. I had chains smuggled to me
in pies, and shouted my plans to the jailers;
but always, new plans would occur to me,
or the new heavy locks bent the hinges off,
or some stupid jailer would forget
and leave the keys. ...

Nine Fierce Herbs

from Charm of the Nine Healing Herbs

...On stone in crags
You grow Stime
Fierce you are
You beat back pain
You fight all venoms
So fierce you're called
The grass that defeats the snake

...
Wergulu
Wergulu
A seal bore you up
Over the sea's high ridge
You heal all evil brought
By the nine wicked spirits
You stand strong against pain
You beat down poison
Fierce against the three and the thirty
You broke the demon's claw
You hold off the wicked glance
You break the harmful spells
Of every wicked thing

...
These nine healing herbs
Fight the nine laming demons
And the nine evil poisons
And the nine flying ills
They fight the red poison
The white poison and the purple
They fight the yellow poison
And the green poison
The black poison and the blue
And the brown poison
And the crimson

They fight the worm-boil
And the water-blister
The thorn-blister and thistle-swell
They fight the ice-blister
And swollen bite

...
Only I know the power
Of the stream that clears
And the nine slithering ones know it

Now all the fields bloom
Full of healing herbs
When I blow these ills away
The very salt of the sea disappears
And the waters clear forever


~Anonymous, translated by David Cloutier

One Young Rain

Sunflower
By Rolf Jacobsen

What sower walked over earth,
which hands sowed
our inward seeds of fire?
They went out from his fists like rainbow curves
to frozen earth, young loam, hot sand,
they will sleep there
greedily, and drink up our lives
and explode it into pieces
for the sake of a sunflower that you haven't seen
or a thistle head or a chrysanthemum.

Let the young rain of tears come.
Let the calm hands of grief come.
It's not all as evil as you think.


~Translated by Robert Bly

One Deaf Language

Often enough I tried language, often enough I tried song, but they didn't hear you.

--Friedrich Hölderlin

One Venomous Font

from Parting, Without a Sequel
By John Crowe Ransom

She has finished and sealed the letter
At last, which he so richly has deserved,
With characters venomous and hatefully curved,
And nothing could be better.

But even as she gave it,
Saying to the blue-capped functioner of doom
"Into his hands," she hoped the leering groom
Might somewhere lose and leave it...

More

One Serviceable Body

Only too often, sadly, a good poet turns into a damned poor keeper of his body, but I believe he is usually issued a highly serviceable one to start out with.

--J.D. Salinger

One Tortured No

T. S. Eliot, in fact, put it best. When asked if his tortured life as a poet had been worth it, he said, simply, "No."

--Alex Williams (apocryphal)

One Unhorsed Pasture

Grazing Horses
By Kay Ryan

Sometimes the
green pasture of the mind
tilts abruptly.
The grazing horses
struggle crazily
for purchase
on the frictionless
nearly vertical
surface. Their
furniture-fine
legs buckle
on the incline,
unhorsed by slant
they weren't
designed to climb
and can't.

One Midnight Battlement

...my Poet—every poet—is an insomniac. My own reads or wanders about our apartment for the best part of most nights. She told me she often feels she would give up every poem she's ever written for one good night's sleep. A friend of mine....tells me he finds it profoundly reassuring that while we ordinary mortals are asleep, there exist lit rooms containing anxious, vigilant souls. A terrible responsibility, he says, devolves upon the poet, that requires her never to be fully awake or asleep: at night, wakeful poets buoy humanity to the surface, to consciousness, preventing our slumbering bulk from sinking too far; during the day, these same poets anchor the madding masses to the depths. The world will end, he once told me, when the final poet awake closes her eyes. Last night I woke up sweating, having dreamed of sinking with the rest of humanity into cold oblivion. Sure enough my Poet was fast asleep beside me—the first deep sleep she'd entered in more than a week. So I knocked a pile of books to the floor, and returned to my blissful slumbers, much comforted by the thought that at least one poet would wander the midnight battlements, keep watch, and preserve us all for one more day.

–Naeem Murr

One Discouraging Fowl

I don't know which is more discouraging, literature or chickens.

--E. B. White

One Unrealized Woman

As a woman she would of course have had to be loved, for in being loved the feminine achieves its realization...but on the other hand she was also an artist and had to be able to help herself.

--Rainer Maria Rilke on Clara Westhoff

One Stained-Glass Body

In this world
love has no color--
but how deeply my body
is stained by yours.

--Izumi Shikibu, translated by Jane Hirshfield

One Hand Clapping

from An Ode to Himself
By Ben Jonson

Where dost thou careless lie
Buried in ease and sloth?
Knowledge that sleeps doth die;
And this Securitie,
It is the common Moth,
That eats on wits, and Arts, and oft destroys them both.

Are all th'Aonian springs
Dried up? lies Thespia waste?
Doth Clarius' Harp want strings,
That not a Nymph now sings?
Or droop they as disgraced,
To see their Seats and Bowers by chatt'ring Pies defaced?

If hence thou silent be,
As 'tis too just a cause,
Let this thought quicken thee:
Minds that are great and free
Should not on fortune pause,
'Tis crown enough to virtue still: her own applause.

What though the greedie Frie
Be taken with false Bayte
Of worded Balladrie,
And thinke it Poesie?
They die with their conceits,
And only pitious scorn, upon their folly waits.

Then take in hand thy Lyre,
Strike in thy proper strain,
With Japhet's line, aspire
Sol's Chariot for new fire,
To give the world again:
Who aided him, will thee, the issue of Jove's brain...

One Lusty Tyrant

The artistic half of Baxter's nature exerted a lusty dominion over the human half—fed upon its disappointments and grew fat upon its joys and tribulations. This, indeed, is simply saying that the young man was a true artist.

—Henry James

One Familiar Singer

The Oven Bird
By Robert Frost

There is a singer everyone has heard,
Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird,
Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again.
He says that leaves are old and that for flowers
Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten.
He says the early petal-fall is past
When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers
On sunny days a moment overcast;
And comes that other fall we name the fall.
He says the highway dust is over all.
The bird would cease and be as other birds
But that he knows in singing not to sing.
The question that he frames in all but words
Is what to make of a diminished thing.

One Metallic Dessert

The Divorce
By Hans Magnus Enzenberger

At first it was an imperceptible tremor of the skin--
"Whatever you say"--where the flesh is darkest.
"What's wrong?"--Nothing. Opaque dreams
of embraces, but on the morning after
the other looks different, strangely bony.
Razor-sharp misunderstandings. "That time in Rome--"
I never said that. --Pause. Rapidly beating heart,
a kind of hate, strange. --"That's not the point."
Repetitions. Brilliantly clear the certainty:
everything is wrong from now on. Odorless, in focus
like a passport photo, this unknown person
with the tea glass at the table, eyes staring.
It is no use no use no use:
litany in the brain, a touch of nausea.
End of reproaches. Slowly the room
fills up to the ceiling with guilt.
The plaintive voice is a stranger's, but the shoes
that drop with a crash to the floor, the shoes are not.
The next time, in an empty restaurant,
slow motion, breadcrumbs, they talk about money,
laughing. The dessert tastes of metal.
Two untouchables. Strident rationality.
"Things could be much worse. But at night
the vindictiveness, the noiseless struggle, anonymous
like two bony barristers, two big crabs
in the water. Then the exhaustion. Slowly
the scabs peel off. Another tobacconist,
a new address. Pariahs, awfully relieved.
Shadows getting paler. Here are the papers.
Here are the keys. Here is the scar.

--Translated by Herbert Graf

One Overpoeticized Cow

"Terence, this is stupid stuff:
You eat your victuals fast enough;
There can't be much amiss, 'tis clear,
To see the rate you drink your beer.
But oh, good Lord, the verse you make,
It gives a chap the belly-ache.
The cow, the old cow, she is dead;
It sleeps well, the horned head:
We poor lads, 'tis our turn now
To hear such tunes as killed the cow."

--A.E. Housman

One Diamond Shackle

Whoso list to hunt
By Francesco Petrarch

Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind,
But as for me, hélas, I may no more.
The vain travail hath wearied me so sore,
I am of them that farthest cometh behind.
Yet may I by no means my wearied mind
Draw from the deer, but as she fleeth afore
Fainting I follow. I leave off therefore,
Since in a net I seek to hold the wind.
Who list her hunt, I put him out of doubt,
As well as I may spend his time in vain.
And graven with diamonds in letters plain
There is written, her fair neck round about:
Noli me tangere, for Caesar's I am,
And wild for to hold, though I seem tame.

~Translated by Thomas Wyatt

Two Unpolitical Arms

Politics
By W.B. Yeats

How can I, that girl standing there,
My attention fix
On Roman or on Russian
Or on Spanish politics?
Yet here's a travelled man that knows
What he talks about,
And there's a politician
That has read and thought,
And maybe what they say is true
Of war and war's alarms,
But O that I were young again
And held her in my arms!

One Convincing Lie

We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies.

~Pablo Picasso

One Bitten Eyeball

Spirit Song

spirit in the sky
come down here
right away
bite the world to death

I rise
up to the spirits
magician friends help me
reach the spirits

child child child
spirit
that can bite evil
come to us

and spirit at the bottom of the
earth I'm calling you I
live near you on top
bite our enemies

join your brother from the sky
each bite an eye out
of evil's face
so it can't see us

--Inuit, translated by Stephen Berg

One Dark Silk

Slowly quietly gold is collected under your command
            slowly quietly
Slowly quietly wheat is distributed under your command
          slowly quietly
Slowly quietly people's bread is served out under your command
slowly quietly.

With you rapidly silk darkens spoils with you rapidly
Water is tied in knots becomes turbid rapidly with you
With you rapidly is atrophied the history of labor
And with you slowly slowly the name of pain written extensively
comes out on the copper quartz bronze.

-Ilhan Berk, translated by Suat Karantay

One Deep Burrow

Vietnam
By Wislawa Szymborska

"Woman, what's your name?" "I don't know."
"How old are you? Where are you from?" "I don't know."
"Why did you dig that burrow?" "I don't know."
"How long have you been hiding?" "I don`t know."
"Why did you bite my finger?" "I don't know."
"Don't you know that we won't hurt you?" "I don't know."
"Whose side are you on?" "I don't know."
"This is war, you've got to choose." "I don't know."
"Does your village still exist?" "I don't know."
"Are those your children?" "Yes."

~Translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh

One Venomed Dart

from Endymion
By John Keats

There lies a den,
Beyond the seeming confines of the space
Made for the soul to wander in and trace
Its own existence, of remotest glooms.
Dark regions are around it, where the tombs
Of buried griefs the spirit sees, but scarce
One hour doth linger weeping, for the pierce
Of new-born woe it feels more inly smart:
And in these regions many a venom'd dart
At random flies: they are the proper home
Of every ill: the man is yet to come
Who hath not journeyed in this native hell.
But few have ever felt how calm and well
Sleep may be had in that deep den of all.
There anguish does not sting; nor pleasure pall:
Woe-hurricanes beat ever at the gate,
Yet all is still within and desolate.

One Pleasant Experiment

from Thoughts About the Person from Porlock
By Stevie Smith

...These thoughts are depressing I know. They are depressing.
I wish I was more cheerful, it is more pleasant,
Also it is a duty, we should smile as well as submitting
To the purpose of One Above who is experimenting

With various mixtures of human character which goes best,
All is interesting for him it is exciting, but not for us.
There I go again. Smile, smile, and get some work to do
Then you will be practically unconscious without positively having to go.

One Trembling Dewlap

Each Moment a White Bull Steps Shining into the World
By Jane Hirshfield

If the gods bring to you
a strange and frightening creature,
accept the gift
as if it were one you had chosen.

Say the accustomed prayers,
oil the hooves well,
caress the small ears with praise.

Have the new halter of woven silver
embedded with jewels.
Spare no expense, pay what is asked,
when a gift arrives from the sea.

Treat it as you yourself
would be treated, brought speechless and naked
into the court of a king.

And when the request finally comes,
do not hesitate even an instant--

stroke the white throat,
the heavy, trembling dewlaps
you'd come to believe were yours,
and plunge in the knife.

Not once
did you enter the pasture
without pause,
without yourself trembling.

That you came to love it,
that was the gift.

Let the envious gods take back what they can.

One Malevolent Squint

from The Poor Poet
By Czeslaw Milosz

...now that the years have transformed my blood
And thousands of planetary systems have been born and died in my flesh,
I sit, a sly and angry poet
With malevolently squinted eyes,
And, weighing a pen in my hand,
I plot revenge.

One Efficacious Slaughter

The Measures Taken
By Erich Fried

The lazy are slaughtered
the world grows industrious

The ugly are slaughtered
the world grows beautiful

The foolish are slaughtered
the world grows wise

The sick are slaughtered
the world grows healthy

The sad are slaughtered
the world grows merry

The old are slaughtered
the world grows young

The enemies are slaughtered
the world grows friendly

The wicked are slaughtered
the world grows good


Translated by Michael Hamburger

One Unpoetical Bodysnatcher

A Poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence; because he has no Identity - he is continually in for - and filling some other Body - The Sun, the Moon, the Sea and Men and Women who are creatures of impulse are poetical and have about them an unchangeable attribute - the poet has none; no identity...

...not one word I ever utter can be taken for granted as an opinion growing out of my identical nature - how can it, when I have no nature?

...All I hope is that I may not lose all interest in human affairs - that the solitary indifference I feel for applause even from the finest Spirits, will not blunt any acuteness of vision I may have. I do not think it will - I feel assured I should write from the mere yearning and fondness I have for the Beautiful even if my night's labours should be burnt every morning, and no eye ever shine upon them. But even now I am perhaps not speaking from myself: but from some character in whose soul I now live.

--John Keats ~ More

One Enslaved Father

Song
By Vinicius de Moraes

Never take her away,
The daughter whom you gave me,
The gentle, moist, untroubled
Small daughter whom you gave me;
O let her heavenly babbling
Beset me and enslave me.
Don't take her; let her stay,
Beset my heart, and win me,
That I may put away
The firstborn child within me,
That cold, petrific, dry
Daughter whom death once gave,
Whose life is a long cry
For milk she may not have,
And who, in the nighttime, calls me
In the saddest voice that can be
Father, Father, and tells me
Of the love she feels for me.
Don't let her go away,
Her whom you gave—my daughter—
Lest I should come to favor
That wilder one, that other
Who does not leave me ever.


Translated by Richard Wilbur

One Sincere Crocodile

Crocodile Tears
By Kay Ryan

The one sincere
crocodile has
gone dry eyed
for years. Why
bother crying
crocodile tears.

One Worthy Patron

from What Mr. Cogito Thinks About Hell
By Zbigniew Herbert

The lowest circle of hell. Contrary to prevailing opinion it is inhabited neither by despots nor matricides, nor even by those who go after the bodies of others. It is the refuge of artists, full of mirrors, musical instruments, and pictures. At first glance this is the most luxurious infernal department, without tar, fire, or physical tortures.

...Beelzebub supports the arts. He provides his artists with calm, good board, and absolute isolation from hellish life.


Translated by Bogdana and John Carpenter

One Inattentive River

Agon
By Branko Miljkovic

While the river banks are quarreling,
The waters flow quietly.


Translated by Charles Simic

One Burning City

The Bell Zygmunt
By Jane Hirshfield

For fertility, a new bride is lifted to touch it with her left hand,
or possibly kiss it.
The sound close in, my friend told me later, is almost silent.

At ten kilometers, even those who have never heard it know what it is.

If you stand near during thunder, she said,
you will hear a reply.

Six weeks and six days from the phone's small ringing,
replying was over.

She who cooked lamb and loved wine and wild mushroom pastas.
She who when I saw her last was silent as the great Zygmunt mostly is,
a ventilator's clapper between her dry lips.

Because I could, I spoke. She laid her palm on my cheek to answer.
And soon again, to say it was time to leave.

I put my lips near the place a tube went into
the back of one hand.
The kiss - as if it knew what I did not yet - both full and formal.

As one would kiss the ring of a cardinal, or the rim
of that cold iron bell, whose speech can mean "Great joy,"
or - equally - "The city is burning. Come.”

Book

One Thirsty Deity

from psalm
By Alicia Ostriker

I am not lyric any more
I will not play the harp
for your pleasure

I will not make a joyful
noise to you, neither
will I lament

for I know you drink
lamentation, too,
like wine...


Book

One Nonexistent Mentor

from Letters to a Young Poet
By Rainer Maria Rilke

Nobody can advise you and help you, nobody.

One Rich Etcetera

from Song in the Manner of Housman
By Ezra Pound

O woe, woe,
People are born and die,
We also shall be dead pretty soon
Therefore let us act as if we were dead already.

The bird sits on the hawthorn tree
But he dies also, presently.
Some lads get hung, and some get shot.
Woeful is this human lot.
Woe! woe, etcetera...

One Stable Marsh

It is the roots from all the trees that have died
out here, that's how you can walk
safely over the soft places.

--Olav Hauge, translated by Robert Bly

One Unsaleable Shroud

My Stars
By Abraham ibn Ezra

On the day I was born,
The unalterable stars altered.
If I decided to sell lamps,
It wouldn't get dark till the day I died.

Some stars. Whatever I do,
I'm a failure before I begin.
If I decided to sell shrouds,
People would suddenly stop dying.

~Translated by Robert Mezey

One Unmarriageable Nose

From Luristan to Thule
By Sarah Lindsay

Delirium was the last country she saw clearly.
Mounting its exotic, riven flanks
on the back of a patient fever,
she left with regret the land of her hosts--
divisions of snow, upended stone threaded with tracks
between the goatskin houses with goatskin beds--
then left too the regret.

For decades she'd taken pleasure in imposing
the first white profile (with its great spinster nose)
upon such places, barely named,
as lay a few days' journey beyond fable,
uplands that bore no showy gold or ziggurat,
only the shallow marks of laboring generations,
the central campfires repeated deep in their eyes.

Past rocks tipped early out of the cradle of myth,
she finally became separated from her pack
with its twenty pencils, the notorious hat,
coins and aspirin, equally useless,
and yielded to discovery of one state
that lacks the primary luxuries: return,
and the safely delivered story.

Book

One Monochrome Winter

the sound of the wind
withered by
winter-one-color world

--Basho, translated by Stephen Addiss

One Blameless Artist

...the writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master - something that, at times, strangely wills and works for itself. ...Be the work grim or glorious, dread or divine, you have little choice left but quiescent adoption. As for you - the nominal artist - your share in it has been to work passively under dictates you neither delivered nor could question - that would not be uttered at your prayer, nor suppressed nor changed at your caprice. If the result be attractive, the World will praise you, who little deserve praise; if it be repulsive, the same World will blame you, who almost as little deserve blame.

--Charlotte Bronte

One Unsheathed Cortex

from Via Insomnia
By Adrienne Rich

...Is this how it is to be newly dead? unbelieving
the personal soul, electricity unsheathing
from the cortex, light-waves fleeing
into the black universe
to lie awake half-sleeping, wondering
Where, when will I sleep

One Pestered Angel

from my old Guardian Angel
By Tadeusz Rozewicz

the avalanche of angels
brought about
by inspired poets
artists priests
and American
movie directors
is infinitely more foolish
than the one brought about
by Romantic poets

the products
of the dream factory
--the "holy wood"--
are sugary white
like the cotton candy
young children
adore

my Guardian Angel who
is 83 years old
and remembers all
my misdeeds
flew to me in consternation
and told me he was
being pestered
by salesmen
pedophiles sodomites
from commercial public
and religious TV
to endorse "angel's milk" custard
dance hip-hop with seniors
and sell
sanitary napkins
with wings
and without...

Translated by Bill Johnston ~ Book

One Spilled Bucket

from Moon Eclipse Exorcism

come out come out come out
the moon has been killed

who kills the moon? crow
who often kills the moon? eagle
who usually kills the moon? chicken hawk
who also kills the moon? owl
in their numbers they assemble
for moonkilling

come out, throw sticks at your houses
come out, turn your buckets over
spill out all the water don't let it turn
bloody yellow
from the wounding and death
of the moon

o what will become of the world, the moon
never dies without cause
only when a rich man is about to be killed
is the moon murdered...

--Alsea, translated by Armand Schwerner and Leo J. Trachtenberg

One Late Laurel

Several Voices Out of a Cloud
By Louise Bogan

Come, drunks and drug-takers; come perverts unnerved!
Receive the laurel, given, though late, on merit;
to whom
and wherever deserved.

Parochial punks, trimmers, nice people, joiners true-blue,
Get the hell out of the way of the laurel.
It is deathless
And it isn't for you.

One Vertical Glare

Grief
By Elizabeth Barrett Browning

I tell you, hopeless grief is passionless;
That only men incredulous of despair,
Half-taught in anguish, through the midnight air
Beat upward to God's throne in loud access
Of shrieking and reproach. Full desertness,
In souls as countries, lieth silent-bare
Under the blanching, vertical eye-glare
Of the absolute Heavens. Deep-hearted man, express
Grief for thy Dead in silence like to death--
Most like a monumental statue set
In everlasting watch and moveless woe
Till itself crumble to the dust beneath.
Touch it; the marble eyelids are not wet:
If it could weep, it could arise and go.

One Cold Algebraist

[The poet] is no longer the disheveled, delirious man, someone who writes an entire poem in a night of fever; now he's a cool savant, almost an algebraist, in the service of a subtle dreamer.

--Paul Valery

One Appropriated Harvest

A Black Man Talks of Reaping
By Arna Bontemps

I have sown beside all waters in my day.
I planted deep within my heart the fear
that wind or fowl would take the grain away.
I planted safe against this stark, lean year.

I scattered seed enough to plant the land
in rows from Canada to Mexico,
but for my reaping only what the hand
can hold at once is all that I can show.

Yet what I sowed and what the orchard yields
my brother's sons are gathering stalk and root.
Small wonder then my children glean in fields
they have not sown, and feed on bitter fruit.

One Insulting Sun

All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event--in the living act, the undoubted deed--there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the moldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there's naught beyond. But 'tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I'd strike the sun if it insulted me.

--Herman Melville

One Blue-Smoking Torch

Bavarian Gentians
By D. H. Lawrence

Not every man has gentians in his house
in soft September, at slow, sad Michaelmas.

Bavarian gentians, big and dark, only dark
darkening the daytime, torch-like, with the smoking blueness of Pluto's gloom,
ribbed and torch-like, with their blaze of darkness spread blue
down flattening into points, flattened under the sweep of white day
torch-flower of the blue-smoking darkness, Pluto's dark-blue daze,
black lamps from the halls of Dis, burning dark blue,
giving off darkness, blue darkness, as Demeter's pale lamps give off light,
lead me then, lead the way.

Reach me a gentian, give me a torch!
let me guide myself with the blue, forked torch of this flower
down the darker and darker stairs, where blue is darkened on blueness
even where Persephone goes, just now, from the frosted September
to the sightless realm where darkness is awake upon the dark
and Persephone herself is but a voice
or a darkness invisible enfolded in the deeper dark
of the arms Plutonic, and pierced with the passion of dense gloom,
among the splendor of torches of darkness, shedding darkness on
the lost bride and her groom.

One Dusty Cell

from Women
By Louise Bogan

Women have no wilderness in them,
They are provident instead,
Content in the tight hot cell of their hearts
To eat dusty bread.

They do not see cattle cropping red winter grass,
They do not hear
Snow water going down under culverts
Shallow and clear.

They wait, when they should turn to journeys,
They stiffen, when they should bend.
They use against themselves that benevolence
To which no man is friend.

One Sealed Note

written in pencil in the sealed railway car
By Dan Pagis

here in this carload
I am eve
with abel my son
if you see my other son
cain son of man
tell him i


Translated by Stephen Mitchell

One Skeptical Tic

Inshallah
By Ben Downing

-- which is to say "God willing," more or less:
a phrase that rose routinely to her lips
whenever plans were hatched or hopes expressed,
the way we knock on wood, yet fervently,
as if to wax too confident might be
to kill the very thing she wanted most.

It used to pique and trouble me somehow,
this precautionary tic of hers, but now
I understand why she was skeptical
of what Allah in His caprice allots,
because that she should live He did not will
or, more terribly, He did that she should not.

in memoriam Mirel Sayinsoy 1967-1999

One Aching Instep

from After Apple-Picking
By Robert Frost

...I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight
I got from looking through a pane of glass
I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough
And held against the world of hoary grass.
It melted, and I let it fall and break.
But I was well
Upon my way to sleep before it fell,
And I could tell
What form my dreaming was about to take.
Magnified apples appear and disappear,
Stem end and blossom end,
And every fleck of russet showing clear.
My instep arch not only keeps the ache,
It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round.
I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend.

And I keep hearing from the cellar bin
The rumbling sound
Of load on load of apples coming in.
For I have had too much
Of apple-picking: I am overtired
Of the great harvest I myself desired.
There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch,
Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall...