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