One Thoughtless Flower

a morning glory

not knowing of our drinking

blooms

--Basho, translated by Stephen Addiss

One Heavy Cornsack

from Song of Speaks-Fluently 

To have to carry your own corn far—
who likes it?
To follow the black bear through the thicket—
who likes it?
To hunt without profit, to return without anything—
who likes it?

You have to carry your own corn far.
You have to follow the black bear.
You have to hunt without profit.

If not, what will you tell the little ones?

--Osage, version by Mary Ruefle

One Damaged Atlas

... i held an atlas in my lap
ran my fingers across the whole world
and whispered
where does it hurt?

it answered
everywhere
everywhere
everywhere.

--Warsan Shire

One Strong Spell

Song of a Marriageable Girl

Will a man come for me?
The good spirit of the forest knows.
He could tell little Medje;
But he will not tell.

There are things it is not right to know:
If there will be dew on the grass tomorrow,
If the fish will come to the trap and be caught,
If a spell put on the gazelle
Will let my father kill it.


~Translated from the Pygmy by Willard Trask, after O. De Labrouhe

One Scrubbed Surgeon

When exile took us by surprise,
a surgeon ready-scrubbed
treated us with scalpels
cleansed us of the dream tumors in our organs...

--Fawzi Karim

One Amphibious Centaur

Poetry is a centaur. The thinking, word-arranging, clarifying faculty must move and leap with the energizing, sentient, musical faculties. It is precisely the difficulty of this amphibious existence that keeps down the census record of good poets.

 --Ezra Pound

One Civilized Glance

And Dreams Paled 
By Eeva Kilpi

No sooner had I learned to
get along without
than I happened to think:
I will not give up this person,

And the sheets burst into bloom.
This is reality, he said,
and dreams paled.

So that was the kind of force
behind those civilized glances
that for years
we gave each other.

One Proven Death

from alternate names for black boys
By Danez Smith

1. smoke above the burning bush
2. archnemesis of summer night
3. first son of soil
4. coal awaiting spark & wind
5. guilty until proven dead
6. oil heavy starlight
7. monster until proven ghost
8. gone
9. phoenix who forgets to un-ash
10. going, going, gone
11. gods of shovels & black veils
12. what once passed for kindling

More

One Happy Quarry

from The So-called Singer of Nab 
By Sarah Lindsay

They have left behind the established cave
with its well-worn floor. Scholarship impels them
in hundreds, but generally one by one,
to find an unknown passage or scrape out their own.
Proto-Semitic linguistic theory,
Hittite stratigraphic anomalies,
microclimatic economics. "What do you see?"
invisible followers ask in their ears,
and they whisper "Wonderful things" as they quarry
a grain of rock at a time, or examine
a fleck of ore, or measure
the acidity of a trickle of water.
See! Behold! Look! Lo!
they cry in season, rapt, in love,
chipping away with their pocketknives,
pencils, rulers, fingernails,
but some have tunneled so narrowly and deep
that those behind see nothing but slivers of light
around an excavator's haunches.
.....

Look at them, crouched in a long tunnel dug
by means of argument over an antique syntax,
warming their hands at a chunk of brick
baked maybe in the time of the Trojan War,
broken some moment between then and now—
peering at it with penlights, squandering eyesight.
They know they may crawl out hungry, mumbling,
aged and gray, clutching a secret message of small import
or nothing, nothing. They seem lost. They seem happy.

~ Book

One Unfaded Yellow

You have yourself remarked that my studies in the studio improve rather than lose their color with time.... This is crucial in my opinion--how to paint so that it hardens well....

 --Vincent van Gogh

One Insecure Bird

On my volcano grows the Grass
A meditative spot --
An acre for a Bird to choose
Would be the General thought --

How red the Fire rocks below --
How insecure the sod
Did I disclose -- Would populate
With awe my solitude.

--Emily Dickinson

One Wakeful Nightingale

They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead,
They brought me bitter news to hear and bitter tears to shed.
I wept as I remember'd how often you and I
Had tired the sun with talking and sent him down the sky.

And now that thou art lying, my dear old Carian guest,
A handful of grey ashes, long, long ago at rest,
Still are thy pleasant voices, thy nightingales, awake;
For Death, he taketh all away, but them he cannot take.

--Callimachus, translated by William Johnson Cory

One Resilient Moon

Broken and broken
again on the sea, the moon
so easily mends

--Chosu, translated by Henry Behn

One Cherished Cliff

I am the lord of the edge
I control this edge this edge is sacred to me
nothing goes over it I guard its correctness its silence
irregularities I observe and report to the highest authority
I take care of this edge it is everything to me
I repair where it tumbles or crumbles I add to, sweep up
I work hard on this edge
I do nothing else this edge

 --Marije Langelaar, translated by Diane Butterman

One Invisible Bull's-Eye

Talent hits the target no one else can hit; genius hits a target no one else can see.

--Arthur Schopenhauer

One Satiating Moon

Watching the full moon,
a small hungry boy forgets
to eat his dinner.

--Basho, translated by Henry Behn

One Recharted Course

Wind
By Olav Hauge

I was a boat becalmed,
You were wind.

South southwest
North or east
The direction I wanted to go
Is forgotten

Who cares about steering
With a wind like that!


--Version by Laura Sheahen

One Serviceable Prosthesis

from Mr. Cogito Meditates on Suffering 
By Zbigniew Herbert

All attempts to remove
the so-called cup of bitterness—
by reflection
frenzied actions on behalf of homeless cats
deep breathing
religion—
failed

one must consent
gently bend the head
not wring the hands
make use of the suffering gently moderately
like an artificial limb
without false shame
but also without unnecessary pride
...

~Translated by John and Bogdana Carpenter | Book

One Ordinary Wedding

We both knew we could not do it
But she promised so I promised too

--Munir Niazi, translated by Anwar Dil

One Collapsed Hive

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,—
One clover, and a bee,
And revery.
The revery alone will do
If bees are few.

--Emily Dickinson

One Suffering Orchestra

from Definition of mutations
By Octavian Paler

When wood learns to suffer
And to dream as people do
It shall henceforth be called Violin...

~Translated by Ileana Stefanescu and S. D. Curtis | Book

One Artistic STD

from Philosophy of Autumn
By Miroslav Holub

...I ask myself if the prevailing
shortage of geniuses
may not be caused by the disappearance
of tertiary stages of syphilis.

--Translated by Ewald Osers | Book

One Keyless Door

from Secrecy 
By Margaret Atwood

 ...it's in you, secrecy.
Ancient and vicious, luscious
as dark velvet.
It blooms in you,
a poppy made of ink.

...Once you have it, you want more.
What power it gives you!
Power of knowing without being known,
power of the stone door,
power of the iron veil,
power of the crushed fingers,
power of the drowned bones
crying out from the bottom of the well.

One Unapocalyptic War

It Bids Pretty Fair 
By Robert Frost

The play seems out for an almost infinite run.
Don't mind a little thing like the actors fighting.
The only thing I worry about is the sun.
We'll be all right if nothing goes wrong with the lighting.

One Delightsome Tickling

Here are a list of facts on which I and 9,000,000 other poets have spieled endlessly:

1. Spring is a pleasant season. The flowers, etc. etc. sprout bloom etc. etc
2. Young man's fancy. Lightly, heavily, gaily etc. etc.
3. Love, a delightsome tickling. Indefinable etc. A) By day, etc. etc. etc B) By night, etc. etc. etc.
4. Trees, hills etc are by a provident nature arranged diversely, in diverse places.
5. Winds, clouds, rains, etc flop thru and over 'em.
6. Men love women. ...
7. Men fight battles, etc. etc.
8. Men go on voyages.

--Ezra Pound

One Restored Painting

from At Yale 
By Czeslaw Milosz

...There was once an artist
Faithful and hardworking. His workshop
Together with all he had painted, burned down,
He himself was executed. Nobody has heard of him.
Yet his paintings remain. On the other side of fire.

--Book

One Unfortunate Engagement

At the flea market
someone's selling genuine love for
no money,
no lie.

No one
stops.
My lover at the next stall
buys a golden ring.

--Translated from the German of Kerstin Hensel

One Survivalist Sonnet

There is no argument by which one can defend a poem. It defends itself by surviving, or it is indefensible.

--George Orwell

One Semidigested Meal

from Remembering My Father

By Zbigniew Herbert 

he was born for a second time slight very fragile
with transparent skin hardly perceptible cartilage
he diminished his body so I might receive it

in an unimportant place there is shadow under a stone

he himself grows in me we eat our defeats
we burst out laughing
when they say how little is needed

to be reconciled

--Translated by John and Bogdana Carpenter

One Unprepared Host

At my hut I fear
All I can really tempt you with...
Smallish mosquitoes

--Matsuo Basho, translated by Peter Beilenson

One Unbridgeable Distance

...that sort of poetry which seems as if sculpture or painting were just forced or forcing itself into words. The gulf between evocation and description, in this latter case, is the unbridgeable distance between genius and talent.

-- Ezra Pound on W.B. Yeats

One Unprophetic Child

When I Banged My Head on the Door 
By Yehuda Amichai

When I banged my head on the door, I screamed,
"My head, my head," and I screamed, "Door, door,"
and I didn't scream "Mama" and I didn't scream "God."
And I didn't prophesy a world at the End of Days
where there will be no more heads and doors.

When you stroked my head, I whispered,
"My head, my head," and I whispered, "Your hand, your hand,"
and I didn't whisper "Mama" or "God."
And I didn't have miraculous visions
of hands stroking heads in the heavens
as they split wide open.

Whatever I scream or say or whisper is only
to console myself: My head, my head.
Door, door. Your hand, your hand.

--Translated by Chana Bloch and Stephen Mitchell ~ Book

One Tardy Fact-Checker

And Day Brought Back My Night 
By Geoffrey Brock

It was so simple: you came back to me
And I was happy. Nothing seemed to matter
But that. That you had gone away from me
And lived for days with him—it didn’t matter.
That I had been left to care for our old dog
And house alone—couldn’t have mattered less!
On all this, you and I and our happy dog
Agreed. We slept. The world was worriless.

I woke in the morning, brimming with old joys
Till the fact-checker showed up, late, for work
And started in: Item: it’s years, not days. 
Item: you had no dog. Item: she isn’t back, 
In fact, she just remarried. And oh yes, item: you 
Left her, remember? I did? I did. (I do.)

One Blushing Slaughterhouse

from Mr. Cogito on Virtue
By Zbigniew Herbert

1

It is not at all strange
she isn't the bride
of real men

of generals
athletes of power
despots

for centuries she has stalked them
that whimpering old maid
in her hideous Salvation Army hat

...

but all around glorious life runs riot
blushing like a slaughterhouse at dawn
...

she becomes smaller and smaller
like a hair in the throat
like a buzzing in the ear

2

my God
if she were a little younger
a little prettier...

Two Long Days

I asked for a long life, I received four days
Two passed in desire, two in waiting.

--Bahadur Shah Zafar

One Ignored Insight

What it is 
By Eric Fried

It is madness
says reason
It is what it is
says love

It is unhappiness
says caution
It is nothing but pain
says fear
It has no future
says insight
It is what it is
says love

It is ridiculous
says pride
It is foolish
says caution
It is impossible
says experience
It is what it is
says love

~Translated by Stuart Hood

One Furious Goddess

Strong Goddess, Goddess Cybele, Goddess Lady ...
Spare my house, Queen, from total fury.
Hunt others. Seize others. Others appall.

--After Catullus, translated by Reynolds Price

One Restless Leaf

from Autumn Day
By Rainer Maria Rilke

...
Whoever has no home now will never have one.
Whoever is alone will stay alone,
will sit, read, write long letters through the evening,
and wander along the boulevards, up and down,
restlessly, while the dry leaves are blowing.

--Version based on a translation by Stephen Mitchell ~ Book

One Untrimmed Tree

Please let my hair grow, mother.
Don't cut it.

A trimmed tree
is no place for singing birds.

--Pashto landay. Version based on a translation by Saduddin Shpoon

One Genuine Hermit

from Hermitage
By Wislawa Szymborska

You expected a hermit to live in the wilderness,
but he has a little house and a garden,
surrounded by cheerful birch groves,
ten minutes off the highway.
Just follow the signs.

 ...

Meanwhile a tight-lipped old lady from Bidgoszcz
whom no one visits but the meter reader
is writing in the guestbook:
"God be praised
for letting me
see a genuine hermit before I die"...


--Translated by Clare Cavanaugh

One Marked Mind

From the Travels of Abigdor Karo
By Miroslav Holub

That land
is marked by
a multitude of crosses,
large and small,
at crossroads,
along highways,
on a stone or a tree,
in the far corners
of forests,
and minds,
and towns.

Jesus Christ
is on many of them.
Many are
still free.

--Translated by David Young and Dana Habova

One Uncharming Problem

If girls were as charming after the fact as before it,
What man would ever tire?
But the sad truth is,
Just then the dearest of wives is a joyless problem.

--Rufinus, translated by Dudley Fitts

One Unsatisfactory Inebriate

from Kinaxixi
By Agostinho Neto

...I would see the tired footsteps
of the servants whose fathers also were servants
looking for love here, glory there, wanting
something more than drunkenness in every
alcohol.

...

--Translated by W.S. Merwin

One Affirmative Negative

Of all writers under the sun the poet is the least liar... the poet affirms nothing, and therefore never lies.

--Sir Philip Sidney

One Scentless Fruit

from Contemplating Hell
By Bertolt Brecht

...Also in Hell,
I do not doubt it, there exist these opulent gardens
With flowers as large as trees, wilting, of course,
Very quickly, if they are not watered with very expensive water. And fruit markets
With great heaps of fruit, which nonetheless

Possess neither scent nor taste. And endless trains of autos,
Lighter than their own shadows, swifter than
Foolish thoughts, shimmering vehicles, in which
Rosy people, coming from nowhere, go nowhere.
And houses, designed for happiness, standing empty,
Even when inhabited. ...

--Translated by Robert Firmage

One Erased Kiss

A kiss on the forehead 
By Marina Tsvetaeva

A kiss on the forehead—erases misery.
I kiss your forehead.

A kiss on the eyes—lifts sleeplessness.
I kiss your eyes.

A kiss on the lips—is a drink of water.
I kiss your lips.

A kiss on the forehead—erases memory.


--Version by Jean Valentine and Ilya Kaminsky

One Bloodied Boomerang

from Threading
By Yehuda Amichai

...But the heart must kill one of us
on one of its forays,
if not you — me,
when it comes back empty-handed,
like Cain, a boomerang from the field.

--Translated by Chana Bloch and Stephen Mitchell

One Thin Needle

from Threading
By Yehuda Amichai

Loving each other began this way: threading
loneliness into loneliness
patiently, our hands trembling and precise.

--Translated by Chana Bloch and Stephen Mitchell

One Bare Finger

Another Lullaby for Insomniacs
By A.E. Stallings

Sleep, she will not linger:
She turns her moon-cold shoulder.
With no ring on her finger,
You cannot hope to hold her.

She turns her moon-cold shoulder
And tosses off the cover.
You cannot hope to hold her:
She has another lover.

She tosses off the cover
And lays the darkness bare.
She has another lover.
Her heart is otherwhere.

She lays the darkness bare.
You slowly realize
Her heart is otherwhere.
There's distance in her eyes.

You slowly realize
That she will never linger,
With distance in her eyes
And no ring on her finger.

One Bankrupting Kiss

I would love to kiss you.
 The price of kissing is your life. 
Now my loving is running toward my life shouting,
 What a bargain, let's buy it. 

 --Jelaluddin Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks

One Soaked Spirit

Poets, though,
differ in combustibility.
Those soaked in spirits
catch fire first.

--Miroslav Holub, translated by David Young and Dana Habova

One Misleading Spine

Had we known the Ton she bore
We had helped the terror—
But she straighter walked for Freight
So be hers the error—

--Emily Dickinson

One Fiery Flower

from To the Tune 'Soaring Clouds'
By Huang O

...All night the bee
Clung trembling to the flower
Stamens. Oh my sweet perfumed
Jewel! I will allow only
My lord to possess my sacred
Lotus pond, and every night
You can make blossom in me
Flowers of fire.

--Translated by Kenneth Rexroth and Ling Chung

One Staring Dial

from Elegy of Fortinbras
By Zbigniew Herbert

...you knew no human thing you did not know even how to breathe

Now you have peace Hamlet you accomplished what you had to
and you have peace The rest is not silence but belongs to me
you chose the easier part an elegant thrust
but what is heroic death compared with eternal watching
with a cold apple in one's hand on a narrow chair
with a view of the ant-hill and the clock's dial

Adieu prince I have tasks a sewer project
and a decree on prostitutes and beggars
I must also elaborate a better system of prisons
since as you justly said Denmark is a prison
I go to my affairs This night is born
a star named Hamlet We shall never meet
what I shall leave will not be worth a tragedy...

--Translated by Czeslaw Milosz and Peter Dale Scott

Two Opposing Moons

from The Neglected Wife
By Yi Talch'ung

...Soon came the whisper of a silken skirt.
Soon came the perfume of a jasmine flower.
Swiftly for you there rose another moon.

....I think you do not know how cruel you are,
But why was your parting gift to me
Another folding fan?

---Translated by Joan Grigsby

One Empty Lot

from Love is finished again
By Yehuda Amichai

...
Love is finished again. When a tall building
is torn down and the debris cleared away, you stand there
on the square empty lot, saying: What a small
space that building stood on
with all its many floors and people.
...

--Translated by Chana Bloch and Stephen Mitchell

One Sleepy Husband

A War-Torn Wife 
By Chenjerai Hove

This war!
I am tired of a husband
 who never sleeps
guarding the home or on call-up,
never sleeping!

Maybe inside himself he says
"I am tired of a wife
   who never dies
so I can stop guarding."

One Trembling Dog

The Promise
By Jane Hirshfield

Stay, I said
to the cut flowers.
They bowed
their heads lower.

Stay, I said to the spider,
who fled.

Stay, leaf.
It reddened,
embarrassed for me and itself.

Stay, I said to my body.
It sat as a dog does,
obedient for a moment,
soon starting to tremble.

Stay, to the earth
of riverine valley meadows,
of fossiled escarpments,
of limestone and sandstone.
It looked back
with a changing expression, in silence.

Stay, I said to my loves.
Each answered,
Always.

One Incinerated Woman

from Don't Go, Don't Go
By Mirabai

 ...I would like my own body to turn into a heap of incense and sandalwood and you set a torch to it.
When I've fallen down to gray ashes, smear me on your shoulders and chest. ...

 --Version by Robert Bly

One Forgiven Lot

from A Dialogue of Self and Soul
By W.B. Yeats

I am content to follow to its source
Every event in action or in thought;
Measure the lot; forgive myself the lot!
When such as I cast out remorse
So great a sweetness flows into the breast
We must laugh and we must sing,
We are blest by everything,
Everything we look upon is blest.

Two Tattered Stockings

from The Light-Gray Soil
By Gjertrud Schnackenberg

...O beggar, I have seen the mound of earth
When all the rivers call their fountains back.
I wore my shoes away, I wore away
The stockings from my feet, seeking the house
Where no beloved person ever died,
No father, mother, husband, wife, or child.
Earth's crust diminishing beneath my feet.
The mantle glimpsed. The churning, iron core.
My hand lies next to me, begging, unheld:
Another earth. Give me another earth.

More

One Poetic Year

The present year has been, in some respects, the most awful nightmare of anxiety that the mind of man could conceive, but at least it is not dull. --T.S. Eliot

One True Lie

...poets are almost always wrong about facts. That's because they are not really interested in facts: only in truth: which is why the truth they speak is so true...

 --William Faulkner

Zero Integrated Sentimentalists

Nor has any poet I have read of or heard of or met with been a sentimentalist. The other self, the anti-self or the antithetical self, as one may choose to name it, comes but to those who are no longer deceived, whose passion is reality.

--W.B. Yeats

One Enthusiasmless Dream

Once
By Nina Cassian

The old rock-climber cries out in his sleep,
    Dreaming without enthusiasm
Of a great cliff immeasurably steep,
    Or of the sort of yawning chasm,
    Now far too deep,
That once, made safe by rashness, he could leap.

--Translated by Richard Wilbur

One Forethoughtful Child

In childhood I never sowed a seed unless it was perennial—and that is why my garden lasts.

--Emily Dickinson

Two Overyellow Birds

Yellow Birds 
After Yuri of Goguryeo

In yellow sunlight on the golden road
I stand alone.
All, all are mine—rice fields and golden road,
All but the one thing I desire.

In a tree by the road two yellow birds are mating.
Why must they sing so gaily?

--Translated by Joan Grigsby

One Thin Stream

At the Water Fountain

Just as with eyes raised
The traveler at the well
Drinking water that she pours
Lets it run through his fingers
To make her go on pouring
So she pours the thin stream
Thinner.

--Sanskrit

One Particular Merit

To Generalize is to be an Idiot; To Particularize is the Alone Distinction of Merit.

--William Blake

One Ephemeral Hue

Nothing Gold Can Stay
By Robert Frost

Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

One Acid Obol

from Nike Who Hesitates
By Zbigniew Herbert

....
a solitary youth
he goes down the long tracks
of a war chariot
on a grey road in a grey landscape
of rocks and scattered juniper bushes

...
right now the scale containing his fate
abruptly falls
towards the earth

....Nike hesitates
and at last decides
to remain in that position
which sculptors taught her
...

she understands
that tomorrow at dawn
this boy must be found
with an open breast
closed eyes
and the acid obol of his country
under his numb tongue


--Translated by Czeslaw Milosz

One Bottled Message

Poetry is the great S.O.S. of loneliness.

--Anna Kamienska

One Incomprehensible Name

from When I Was a Boy
By Friedrich Holderlin

When I was a boy
A god often rescued me
From the shouts and the rods of men
And I played among trees and flowers
Secure in their kindness

....you delighted the heart in me

Father Helios, and like Endymion
I was your favourite,
Moon. O all

You friendly
And faithful gods
I wish you could know
How my soul has loved you.

Even though when I called to you then
It was not yet with names, and you
Never named me as people do
As though they knew one another

I knew you better
Than I have ever known them.
I understood the stillness above the sky
But never the words of men.

--Translated by David Constantine

Two Pragmatic Loves

Since I'll only live once
I love both of you.
Since I'll only live once
I offend neither the sunray,
Nor the moonbeam!

If I lived twice
I would have loved you in this life
And loved the other in that life.
Since I only live once,
I have no choice:
I love both of you.
I offend neither the sunray
Nor the moonbeam.

--Abdulla Pashew

Two Blear Eyes

from Blue Girls
By John Crowe Ransom

....Practice your beauty, blue girls, before it fail;
And I will cry with my loud lips and publish
Beauty which all our powers shall never establish,
It is so frail.

For I could tell you a story which is true;
I know a lady with a terrible tongue,
Blear eyes fallen from blue,
All her perfections tarnished—yet it is not long
Since she was lovelier than any of you.

One Lazy Poet

....Sometimes mountains conceal
That
which is beyond the mountains
so the mountains must be moved
but I lack the necessary
technical means
and the strength
and the faith
to move mountains
so you will not see it
ever
I know
and that is why
I write

--Tadeusz Rozewicz ~ Book

One False Apocalypse

The End of the World
By Miroslav Holub

The bird had come to the very end of its song
and the tree was dissolving under its claws.

And in the sky the clouds were twisting
and darkness flowed through all the cracks
into the sinking vessel of the landscape.

Only in the telegraph wires
a message still
crackled:

C-.-o---m--e. h...o---m--e.
y-.--o---u..- h...a.-v...-e.
a.-s...o---n-.


Book

One Simultaneous Mood

Her states of mind were not progressive but approximately simultaneous.

--George Whicher on Emily Dickinson

Three Black Robes

from Binding Song of the Eumenides
By Aeschylus

I have chosen overthrow
of houses, where the Battlegod
grown within strikes near and dear
down. So we swoop upon this man
here. He is strong, but we wear him down
for the blood that is still wet on him.

Men's illusions in their pride under the sky melt
down, and are diminished into the ground, gone
before the onset of our black robes, pulsing
of our vindictive feet against them.

For with a long leap from high
above and dead drop of weight
I bring foot's force crashing down
to cut the legs from under even
the runner, and spill him to ruin.

....All holds. For we are strong and skilled;
we have authority; we hold
memory of evil; we are stern
nor can men's pleading bend us. We
drive through our duties, spurned, outcast
from gods...

...Privilege
primeval yet is mine, nor am I without place
though it be underneath the ground
and in no sunlight and in gloom that I must stand.

--Translated by Richmond Lattimore

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