One Concernless No

A Clock stopped—
Not the Mantel’s—
Geneva’s farthest skill
Can’t put the puppet bowing
That just now dangled still—

An Awe came on the trinket!
The Figures hunched with pain—
Then quivered out of Decimals
Into Degreeless Noon—

It will not stir for doctors—
This Pendulum of snow—
The Shopman importunes it—
While cool—concernless No

Nods from the gilded pointers—
Nods from the seconds slim—
Decades of Arrogance between
The Dial life—
And Him—


By Emily Dickinson

One Full Mouth

from Thanks
By W.S. Merwin

Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water thanking it
smiling by the windows looking out
in our directions

back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging
after funerals we are saying thank you
after the news of the dead
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you
....

with the animals dying around us
our lost feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
we are saying thank you and waving
dark though it is


Book

One Gutted Sonnet

To Eros
By Alfonsina Storni

Here at the edge of the sea, I captured you
by the scruff of your neck while you were readying
the arrows in your quiver to strike me down.
I saw your floral crown, set on the sand.

I gutted out your belly like a doll's
and took a close look at your phony gears;
and picking through your mess of golden pulleys,
I found a secret trapdoor that said 'sex'.

I held you, sad and tattered on the beach,
and showed the sun, exposer of your exploits.
A ring of panic-stricken sirens watched.

The moon, your patroness of trickery,
began to climb her white way through the sky,
and I threw you to the wide mouth of the waves.


 ~Translated by Nicholas Friedman

One Tasteful Nemesis

Good taste is the enemy of creativity.

 --Pablo Picasso

One Kindred Spider

Design
By Robert Frost

I found a dimpled spider, fat and white,
On a white heal-all, holding up a moth
Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth--
Assorted characters of death and blight
Mixed ready to begin the morning right,
Like the ingredients of a witches’ broth--
A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth,
And dead wings carried like a paper kite.

What had that flower to do with being white,
The wayside blue and innocent heal-all?
What brought the kindred spider to that height,
Then steered the white moth thither in the night?
What but design of darkness to appall?--
If design govern in a thing so small.

One Quelled Child

from The Woman Who Cannot

The woman who cannot bring forth her child: go to a dead man’s grave and then step three times over the grave, and then say these words three times:

This is my cure for the loathsome late-birth
This is my cure for the bitter black-birth
This is my cure for the loathsome imperfect-birth

And when that woman is with child and she goes to her lord in his bed, then let her say:

Up I go, over you I step,
with a quick child, not a quelled one,
with a full-born one, not a doomed one.

And when the mother feels the child is quick, go then to a church, and when she comes before the altar say then:

Christ, I said it. This has been uttered.

The woman who cannot bring forth her child: grasp a handful of her own child’s grave, and after that, bind it in black wool and sell it to peddlers, and say then:

I sell it, you sell it.
This blackened wool, this sorrow seed.


--Anonymous, translated from the Old English by Miller Oberman

One Fiery Risk

We gave a helping hand to grass–
it turned into corn.
We gave a helping hand to fire–
it turned into a rocket.

Hesitatingly,
cautiously,
we give a helping hand
to people,
to some people...

--By Miroslav Holub

One Flat Land

from Special Problems in Vocabulary
By Tony Hoagland

There is no single particular noun
for the way a friendship,
stretched over time, grows thin,
then one day snaps with a popping sound.

No verb for accidentally
breaking a thing
while trying to get it open
 —a marriage, for example.

....There is no expression, in English, at least,
for avoiding the sight
of your own body in the mirror,
for disliking the touch

of the afternoon sun,
for walking into the flatlands and dust
that stretch out before you
after your adventures are done.

No adjective for gradually speaking less and less,
because you have stopped being able
to say the one thing that would
break your life loose from its grip.

....No word for waking up one morning
and looking around,
because the mysterious spirit

that drives all things
seems to have returned,
and is on your side again.

One Dead Sea

Episode
By Zbigniew Herbert

We walk by the sea-shore
holding firmly in our hands
the two ends of an antique dialogue
—do you love me?
—I love you

with furrowed eyebrows
I summarize all wisdom
of the two testaments
astrologers prophets
philosophers of the gardens
and cloistered philosophers

and it sounds about like this:
—don’t cry
—be brave
—look how everybody

you pout your lips and say
—you should be a clergyman
and fed up you walk off
nobody loves moralists

what should I say on the shore of
a small dead sea

slowly the water fills
the shapes of feet which have vanished

--Translated by Czeslaw Milosz and Peter Dale Scott | Book

One Unrhymed Slam

One Deep Bed

The Tides 
By Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

I saw the long line of the vacant shore,
The sea-weed and the shells upon the sand,
And the brown rocks left bare on every hand,
As if the ebbing tide would flow no more.
Then heard I, more distinctly than before,
The ocean breathe and its great breast expand,
And hurrying came on the defenseless land
Th'insurgent waters with tumultuous roar.
All thought and feeling and desire, I said,
Love, laughter, and the exultant joy of song
Have ebbed from me forever! Suddenly o’er me
They swept again from their deep ocean bed,
And in a tumult of delight, and strong
As youth, and beautiful as youth, upbore me.

One Freighted If

from In Memoriam A. H. H.
By Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Calm is the morn without a sound,
 Calm as to suit a calmer grief,
 And only thro' the faded leaf
The chestnut pattering to the ground: 

Calm and deep peace on this high wold,
 And on these dews that drench the furze.
 And all the silvery gossamers
That twinkle into green and gold:

Calm and still light on yon great plain
 That sweeps with all its autumn bowers,
 And crowded farms and lessening towers,
To mingle with the bounding main:

Calm and deep peace in this wide air,
 These leaves that redden to the fall;
 And in my heart, if calm at all,
If any calm, a calm despair:

Calm on the seas, and silver sleep,
 And waves that sway themselves in rest,
 And dead calm in that noble breast
Which heaves but with the heaving deep.

One Intolerant Profession

No artist tolerates reality.

--Friedrich Nietzsche

One Crumbling Face

Still When I Picture It the Face of God Is a White Man’s Face 
By Shane McCrae

Before it disappears

on the sand his long white beard    before it disappears

The face of the man

in the waves I ask her does she see it ask her does

The old man in the waves as the waves crest    she see it does

she see the old man his

White his face crumbling face it looks

as old as he’s as old as

The ocean looks


and for a moment almost looks

His face like it’s all the way him

As never such old skin

looks my / Daughter age four

She thinks it might he might be real she shouts Hello

And after there’s no answer answers No

One Gold Scar

The Joins
By Chana Bloch

Kintsugi is the Japanese art of mending precious pottery with gold.

What's between us
seems flexible as the webbing
between forefinger and thumb.

Seems flexible but isn’t;
what's between us
is made of clay

like any cup on the shelf.
It shatters easily. Repair
becomes the task.

We glue the wounded edges
with tentative fingers.
Scar tissue is visible history

and the cup is precious to us
because
we saved it.

In the art of kintsugi
a potter repairing a broken cup
would sprinkle the resin

with powdered gold.
Sometimes the joins
are so exquisite

they say the potter
may have broken the cup
just so he could mend it.

One Incomprehensible Flower

I see you do not want things to continue
This way
In this particular case
We speak of forget-me-nots
A flower about which we understand
Nothing

--Alberto de Lacerda, translated from the Portuguese by Calvin Olsen

One Gasping Wasp

from the boy detective loses love

By Sam Sax

there should be a word for how the world turns
to amber resin with a long dead wasp gasping
inside when somebody leaves you. the boy tries
to catalogue each betrayal, rage shouting
up through his skin. ...

...this is stasis. this is a fish split
open and thrashing on a dock beneath a sky
with no stars. this is how all the light gets
swallowed. how we store our sorrow in clear
glass jars that tint the winter's light and keep
us warm through the coldest months.

One Obfuscating Desk

Lashing the Body from the Bones 
By Lee Sharkey

Do you plead guilty to this—

No—

So why did you confess to—

I was not involved in—

Perhaps you pled guilty to acting in concert with—

You have seen to what extent I have been under the influence of—

Why did you give such testimony—

I shudder to think—I was searching myself for—

How is it you confirmed—and now are denying—

I became ashamed of—

So what you are saying is that—did things that were not—and became a nest of—

It became clear—it takes only one plague bacillus—

An appropriate person for criminal—

It is difficult for me to accuse—he is a person who is to some degree— there are elements in his—

Could it be—

By nature he is a convinced—

Was—an active—

Yes—an active—at one time he occupied a little desk—

From your answers—to conclude that—these—and together with—

Everyone was speaking out against—

So are we to understand—the entire—was against you, and you were against—

On the first evening—I already understood that things were going to—

Where is the truth—

I speak with complete openness and honesty

One Victorious Hand

from The Bacchae
By Euripides

When shall I dance once more
with bare feet the all-night dances,
tossing my head for joy
in the damp air, in the dew,
as a running fawn might frisk
for the green joy of the wide fields,
from from fear of the hunt,
free from the circling beaters
and the nets of woven mesh
and the hunters hallooing on
their yelping packs?

 ...What gift of the gods
is held in honor like this:
to hold your hand victorious over those you hate?
Honor is precious forever.

--translated by William Arrowsmith

One Revealing Flame

from Further In
By Tomas Transtromer

I am transparent
and writing becomes visible
inside me
words in invisible ink
that appear
when the paper is held to the fire

--Translated by Robin Fulton

One Heavy Flag

I remember my mother toward the end,
folding the tablecloth after dinner
so carefully,
as if it were the flag
of a country that no longer existed,
but once had ruled the world.

--Jim Moore

One Overturned Stalactite

The Sandcastles 
By Haim Gouri

You remember,
it’s like the afternoon wave that washed away
the sandcastle,
the tunnels and the fortress towers,
the patience, the seashells and the stalactites,
extra trimmings.

And didn’t know.

The barbarism will return.
Insensitive to nuances, it doesn’t hang back.
It thinks big.

--Translated by Vivian Eden

One Dark Polygon

There Is a Darkness
By Han Dong

I notice forest darkness
Darkness with a difference
Darkness like a square, in the forest
Darkness made by four people walking off in four directions
Darkness between the trees but not inside the trees
Darkness rising spreading through the sky
Darkness not of underground rocks that share everything
Darkness that weakens lights scattered evenly
Across a thousand miles to their lowest glow
Darkness gone through turns of endless trees unvanished
There is a darkness that forbids strangers to enter at any time
If you reach out a hand to stir it that is
Darkness in a giant glass
I notice forest darkness although I am not in the forest

~Translated by Maghiel van Crevel and Michael Day

One Modern Poet

after belching out
a verse on the moon
the toad's belly shrinks

~Buson, translated by Stephen Addiss

One Fit Cure

I made a posy, while the day ran by:
"Here will I smell my remnant out, and tie
My life within this band."
But Time did beckon to the flowers, and they
By noon most cunningly did steal away,
And withered in my hand.

My hand was next to them, and then my heart;
I took, without more thinking, in good part
Time’s gentle admonition;
Who did so sweetly death’s sad taste convey,
Making my mind to smell my fatal day,
Yet, sug’ring the suspicion.

Farewell dear flowers, sweetly your time ye spent,
Fit, while ye lived, for smell or ornament,
And after death for cures.
I follow straight without complaints or grief,
Since, if my scent be good, I care not if
It be as short as yours.

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.