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