One Suspicious Postcard

Interpretations
By Mourid Barghouti

A poet sits in a coffee shop, writing.
The old lady
thinks he is writing a letter to his mother,
the young woman
thinks he is writing a letter to his girlfriend,
the child
thinks he is drawing,
the businessman
thinks he is considering a deal,
the tourist
thinks he is writing a postcard,
the employee
thinks he is calculating his debts.
The secret policeman
walks, slowly, towards him.


--Translated by Radwa Ashour | Book

One Guileless Missile

from A Child is Something Else Again
By Yehuda Amichai

....A child is Job. They've already placed their bets on him
but he doesn't know it. He scratches his body
for pleasure. Nothing hurts yet.
They're training him to be a polite Job,
to say "Thank you" when the Lord has given,
to say "You're welcome" when the Lord has taken away.

A child is vengeance.
A child is a missile into the coming generations.
I launched him: I'm still trembling.
....

--Translated by Chana Bloch

One Long Chain

On a Bird Singing in Its Sleep 
By Robert Frost

A bird half wakened in the lunar moon
Sang halfway through its little inborn tune.
Partly because it sang but once all night
And that from no especial bush's height,
Partly because it sang ventriloquist
And had the inspiration to desist
Almost before the prick of hostile ears,
It ventured less in peril than appears.
It could not have come down to us so far,
Through the interstices of things ajar,
On the long bead chain of repeated birth,
To be a bird while we are men on earth,
If singing out of sleep and dream that way
Had made it much more easily a prey.

One Inert Tongue

Echo
By A.E. Stallings

What tales we tell what talesWhat ails?
About the girls gone quietYet
The story-telling ones once
Who entertained the heartart
Till suddenly they ceased.eased
What makes the tongue inert?hurt.
What turns the voice to swordsWords,
Cutting the throat? What takesaches,
The name from the alibiI
Of the body? We were stern:turn
Stories, we said, are lies,ice,
We told her, don’t repeat them. eat them.

One Cleaved Burden

from In Memorium
By Alfred Tennyson

I know that this was Life,—the track
Whereon with equal feet we fared;
And then, as now, the day prepared
The daily burden for the back.

But this it was that made me move
As light as carrier-birds in air;
I loved the weight I had to bear,
Because it needed help of Love:

Nor could I weary, heart or limb,
When mighty Love would cleave in twain
The lading of a single pain,
And part it, giving half to him.

One Knowledgeable Child

Drank lonesome water:
Weren't but a tad then
Up in a laurel thick
Digging for sang;

Came on a place where
The stones was holler;
Something below them
Tinkled and rang.

Dug where I heard it
Drippling below me:
Should a knowed better,
Should a been wise;

Leant down and drank it,
Clutching and gripping
The overhung cliv
With the ferns in my eyes.

...

I'd drunk lonesome water,
I knowed in a minute
Never larnt nothing
From then till today;

Nothing worth larning,
Nothing worth knowing.
I'm bound to the hills
And I can't get away.

...

I know where the grey foxes
Uses up yander,
Know what'll cure ye
Of ptisic or chills,

But I never been way from here,
Never got going:
I've drunk lonesome water,
I'm bound to the hills.

from Global Event
By Lucas Pingel

 ...just like the veins that stay
hidden until we age enough for our skin

to fall slack. Just like how a march races
to the coda the moment the conductor

moves his baton. No. Just like

the moment he sees his baton
and decides that it must be moved.

One Garbled Word

from The Tree of Knowledge
By Shane McCrae

The hastily assembled angel saw...

..... And what he saw was everything would come
Together at the same time everything
Would fall apart and that was humans thinking

The world was meant for them and other things
Were accidental or were decora-
tions meant for them and therefore purposeful
That humans thought that God had told them so

And what the hastily assembled angel
Thought was that probably God had said the same thing
To every living thing on Earth and on-
ly stopped when one said Really back but then

Again the hastily assembled angel
Couldn’t tell human things apart and maybe
That Really mattered     what would he have heard
Holy or maybe Folly or maybe Kill me

One Satisfied Cell

from Origin
By Sarah Lindsay

The first cell felt no call to divide.
Fed on abundant salts and sun,
still thin, it simply spread,
rocking on water, clinging to stone,
a film of obliging strength.

..... With no incidence
of loneliness, inner conflict, or deceit,
no predator nor prey,
it had little to do but thrive,
draw back from any sharp heat
or bitterness, and change its pastel
colors in a kind of song.
We are descendants of the second cell.

One Saline Pool

After Love
By Sara Teasdale

There is no magic any more,
We meet as other people do,
You work no miracle for me
Nor I for you.

You were the wind and I the sea—
There is no splendor any more,
I have grown listless as the pool
Beside the shore.

But though the pool is safe from storm
And from the tide has found surcease,
It grows more bitter than the sea,
For all its peace.

One Buried Look

from Selling Gold
By Nguyen Duy

Our soul -- a slab of pure gold.
We'll have to sell it piece by piece.
One piece for a son, one for a wife,
others for parents and friends.

The inner wealth hard to keep,
we're rich men, but our children eat dirt,
still, we walk, noses in the air, wife in hock,
parents drowned in storms and floods.

We dream and dance on without shame
don't give a damn for the leaky roof,
don't give a damn for a son's rags,
don't give a damn for a wife's withered hand.

We'd get drunk with the ocean and sky
just to get away from what's closest to us,
the rice pot empty, we turn our backs,
worry safely buried in a wife's hidden look.


~Translated by Kevin Bowen and Nguyen Ba Chung | Book

One Sharp Needle

Sonnet XXIV
By Louise Labe

Do not reproach me, ladies, if I’ve loved
And felt a thousand torches burn my veins,
A thousand griefs, a thousand biting pains.
If all my days to bitter tears dissolved,

Then, ladies, do not denigrate my name.
If I did wrong, the pain and punishment
Are now. Don’t file their needles to a point.
Consider: Love is master of the game:

No need of Vulcan to explain your fire,
Nor of Adonis to excuse desire,
But with less cause than mine, far less occasion,

As the whim takes him, idly he can curse
You with a stranger and a stronger passion.
But O take care your suffering's not worse.

One Strange Plagiarizer

The Aviator
By Shota Iatashvili

He flew off and turned out to be right:
They praised him, blessed him, bent his neck down.
He flew off again, and again turned out to be right:
They gave him a reception and didn’t grudge him bread, water and
A comb for his wing and plumage.
He flew off a third time and this time, too, he turned out to be right:
They put up with him, tolerated him.
He flew off a fourth time and turned out to be in the wrong:
They called him a silly plagiarizer of an angel.
But he still flew off a fifth time –
They fired at him,
They killed him.


--Translated by Donald Rayfield

One Unearthed Wallet

from The Summer A Tribe Called Quest Broke Up
By Hanif Abdurraqib

all them black
boys in the 'hood
had they wallets
unearthed in cities
they ain’t never
seen before & they
was all empty
'cept for maybe the bones
of the last woman
to hold them in her arms &
call them by the
name they blessed the
earth with
....

More

One Stolen Dance

from The United States Welcomes You
By Tracy K. Smith

Why and by whose power were you sent?
What do you see that you may wish to steal?
Why all this dancing? Why do your dark bodies
Drink up the light? What are you demanding
That we feel? Have you stolen something? Then
What is that leaping in your chest?

One Worthwhile War

When the war is over 
By W.S. Merwin

When the war is over
We will be proud of course the air will be
Good for breathing at last
The water will have been improved the salmon
And the silence of heaven will migrate more perfectly
The dead will think the living are worth it we will know
Who we are
And we will all enlist again

One Troubling Treasure

Crying, my little one, footsore and weary?
Fall asleep, pretty one, warm on my shoulder:
I must tramp on through the winter night dreary,
While the snow falls on me colder and colder.

You are my one, and I have not another;
Sleep soft, my darling, my trouble and treasure;
Sleep warm and soft in the arms of your mother,
Dreaming of pretty things, dreaming of pleasure.

--By Christina Rossetti

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