MY MOTHER BAKED THE WHOLE WORLD FOR ME
by Yehuda Amichai 

My mother baked the whole world for me
In little sweet cakes.
My love filled my window
With raisins of stars.
I enclose longings within me like air
Pockets in a loaf of bread.
Outside I am smooth and quiet and brown.
The world loves me.
But my hair is sad like the reeds in a drying marsh –
All birds of rare and beautiful plumage
Fly from me.

Song at half past three
by Wojciech Bonowicz

Poets are cows that in full moon would graze on complex
flyovers with hardly any traffic. Poets are great architects
of the city endlessly perfected their projects
no longer attract investors. Poets are a nuisance
really that can’t be fixed by war progress nationalisms
stock exchange or other catchy metaphors.
When poets are given prizes they can’t be trusted they may
shout say nothing or merely shrug. Poets have pale bellies
heavy abdomens at times tree-bark on their backs. Poets are strangers
that’s why they welcome others as theirs and do not recognize friends.
Poets are five fingers of the right hand and five of the left. Poets pick up
abandoned instruments and start to juggle them. Once again
poets were seen prowling about the city in shoes with thick leather soles
and lighting cigarettes in front of every house. So what is it with poets?
Raise your hands and try to walk like this for a while until you see
how awkward it is. Climb the stairs like this or better still:
get onto a tram and when it departs with a jolt
imagine poets who must act like this every day.

Men
by Valzhyna Mort

Men arrive like a date on a calendar
they keep visiting once a month
men who’ve seen the bottom
of the deepest bottles
kings of both earth and heaven
and like the pearls from a torn necklace
trembling I scatter at their touch
their heartbeats open doors
vessels respond to their voice commands
and wind licks their faces like a crazy dog
and gallops after their train and roams
they undress me as if undressing themselves
and hold me in their arms like a saxophone
and oh this music these endless blues
like milk from breasts
those notes too high for human ears
those notes too low for gods
men who teach children to laugh
men who teach time how to run
men who love other men in club toilets
men who’ve kissed the hand of death herself
men who’ve never listened to my threats nightmares
which bound me to a chair
mama their lips fall on me
like burning planes
they are powerful patient
and when the world crashes
everyone runs for the shelters
they pause to pluck one of my lashes
mama not even mine
just anyone’s mama
come back
rescue me find me
in this plane wreck

good morning bandung (an exercise in deepchandi)
by Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh 

the natives
are winning but

 

the war has
ruined all the

 

factories they
cannot rebuild

 

them the work
ers in cities

 

are starving
half-starving in

 

order to
rebuild all the

 

factories the
peasants must first

 

start growing
more food they can

 

do this by
mechanizing

 

all their farms
only, they cannot

 

mechanize
the farms the war

 

has ruined
all the factories

Atmosphere
by Subhro Bandopadhyay 

Repeatedly October descends
On villages     deep rivers     jungles
Waiting and silence
Asphyxia and union
Repeatedly the sky’s autumn turns its head
Towards the meat of greed

Village roots     bodies     songs
Roads     festivals     waterlessness
Have unfurled before them existence
And into their mouths descends
The shadowfree meat of October

This is our Bangla, woken up again
By the unaccustomed sound of other languages
Though even now the meat of a few old phrases still clings

The uprooting of a multitude of villages can clearly be heard
Day of incredible sun, phrases worn out by disuse
Goodbye messages in an unaccustomed language
Pages of grammar spiked on nails
Rising in grotesque metallic sound

The uprooting of years and days can be heard
Catatonia comes and touches wholeness
Meat-eating birds can be seen
Tearing hunks from the flesh of massive villages
The bodies of massive rivers

Village and town      practise and partition     could clearly be heard
Prepared reading lists and repudiation
Boycotted words and my own-ness
Uprooting of that fixed gazing towards the stars

Thousands of meat-eating birds were heard
Who in truth are carrying away crematoria and carrion-dumps
from chockful skies
Carrying away the mounds of our neglect

Have they taken me too? The entire sky is the belly
Of a snake swollen with villages swallowed whole
Leaving behind
The sloughed-off skin of my language    unlettered

From 'After Nature'
by WG Sebald

When morning sets in,
the coolness of the night
moves out into the plumage
of fishes, when once more
the air’s circumference
grows visible, then at times
I trust the quiet, resolve
to make a new start, an excursion
perhaps to a region of
camouflaged ornithologists.
Come, my daughter, come on, give
me your hand, we’re leaving
the town, I’ll show you the mill
twice each day set in motion by current,
a groaning miraculous construct
of wheels and belts
that carries water’s power
right into stone,
right into trickling dust
and into the bodies of spiders.
The miller is friendly,
has clean white paws,
tells us all kinds of lore
to do with the story of flour.
A century ago here Edward Fitzgerald,
the translator of Omar Khayyam,
vanished. At an advanced age
one day he boarded his boat,
sailed off with his top hat
tied on, into the North Sea
and was never seen again.
A great enigma, my child, look,
here are eleven barrows
for the dead and in the sixth
the impress of a ship long gone
with forty oars, the grave of
Raedwald of Sutton Hoo.
Merovingian coins, Swedish
weaponry, Byzantine silver
the king took on his voyage
and his warriors even now
on this sandy strip keep their weapons
hidden in grassy bunkers
behind earthworks, barbed wire
and pine plantations, one great
arsenal as far as your eye can see,
and nothing else but this sky,
the gorse scrub now and then,
a capacious old people’s home,
a prison or mental hospital,
an institution for juvenile delinquents.
In orange jackets you see
the inmates labour
lined up across the moor.
Behind that the end of the world,
the five cold houses of the place called Shingle Street.
Inconsolable a woman
stands at the window, a children’s swing
rusts in the wind, a lonely
spy sits in his dormobile
in the dunes, his radio’s earphones
clipped on. No, here we can
write no postcards, can’t even get out
of the car. Tell me, child,
is your heart heavy as
mine is, year after year
a pebble bank raised
by the waves of the sea
all the way to the North,
every stone a dead soul
and this sky so grey.
So unremittingly grey
and low
as no sky I have seen
anywhere else.
Along the horizon
freighters cross over
into another age
measured by the ticking
of geigers in the power station
at Sizewell, where slowly
they destroy the nucleus
of the metal. Whispering
madness on the heathland
of Suffolk. Is this
the promis’d end? Oh,
you are men of stones.
What’s dead remains
dead. From loving
comes life. I don’t know
who’s telling me what, how,
where or when? Is love
nothing, then, now, or all?
Water? Fire? Good?
Evil? Life? Death?

The difference between narcissus

and sunflower

is a point of view: the first

stares at his image in water

and says, there is no I but I

and the second looks

at the sun and says I am

what I worship.

And at night, difference shrinks

and interpretation widens.

I am a man: little do I last
and the night is enormous.
But I look up:
the stars write.
Unknowing I understand:
I too am written,
and at this very moment
someone spells me out.

Before you came,
things were as they should be:
the sky was the dead-end of sight,
the road was just a road, wine merely wine.

Now everything is like my heart,
a color at the edge of blood:
the grey of your absence, the color of poison, of thorns,
the gold when we meet, the season ablaze,
the yellow of autumn, the red of flowers, of flames,
and the black when you cover the earth
with the coal of dead fires.

And the sky, the road, the glass of wine?
The sky is a shirt wet with tears,
the road a vein about to break,
and the glass of wine a mirror in which
the sky, the road, the world keep changing.

Don’t leave now that you’re here—
Stay. So the world may become like itself again:
so the sky may be the sky,
the road a road,
and the glass of wine not a mirror, just a glass of wine.

EDITH SÖDERGRAN (TRANSLATED FROM THE SWEDISH BY AVERILL CURDY)
A Life

That the stars are adamant
everyone understands—
but I won’t give up seeking joy on each blue wave
or peace below every gray stone.
If happiness never comes, what is a life?
A lily withers in the sand
and if its nature has failed? The tide
                                         washes the beach at night.
What is the fly looking for on the spider’s web?
What does a dayfly make of its hours?
(Two wings creased over a hollow body.)

Black will never turn to white—
yet the perfume of our struggle lingers
as each morning fresh flowers
spring up from hell.

The day will come
when the earth is emptied, the skies collapse
and all goes still—
when nothing remains but the dayfly
                                         folded in a leaf.
But no one knows it.

God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.
These are the words we dimly hear:
You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.
Flare up like flame
and make big shadows I can move in.
Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don't let yourself lose me.
Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.
Give me your hand. 

                       To all the victims of the collapse  
                        of the Jet Set, in memoriam

A smell of recently scattered benzene,
of the defeat of the landscape in the middle of a clear night,
of the condemnation of life, its silhouettes, its sorrows.
Words fail to find support in words,
and silence becomes a treacherous sonata in a dance of laments.
A pain silently cuts, like lightning, I sense it,
the arc in which the vowels placed their accents.
And prayer is drowned, and breath forbids itself that sigh,
that of the quiet goodbye, that of the cry unburied amid the rubble.
It was the reaper, fierce plane in hand, arriving dizzily, without a trace of remorse,
to level the party, to slash smiles, desires.
Stupor, diffuse rage, resentful humiliation of the most devious fate.
There is no needle, no knife, rusty dagger, stingray’s edge that could deepen the wounds where it hurts most.
The 7th passes as always, wrapped in mystery.
The 8th arrives, bloodied, made of fear, drunk with terror,
in the cruel month of April, that of the weak lilacs on the wounded earth.
Flowing with rage. Overflowing with stupor.
In familiar sadness, the hours grew slower,
the early morning dew more humid,
the sea’s crooning more solemn and bitter,
to find in their faces the reckless siege,
incomprehensible and sullen,
the indecipherable call of requiem and death.

Freely beside me the vineyards are running and unbridled
Remains the sky. Wildfires trade pinecones and one
Donkey bolts uphill
               for a little cloud
St. Heracleitos’s day and something’s up
That even noses can’t diagnose:
Tricks of a shoeless wind snagging the hem
Of Fate’s nightgown and leaving
Us in the open air of capricorns
               exposed
Secretly I go with all the loot in my mind
For a life unbowed from the beginning. No candles no
               chandeliers
Only a gold anemone’s engagement for a diamond
Feeling its way to where? Asking what? Our moon’s half-
               shadow needs
You to console even the graves
Homoethnic or not. The crux is that the scent of earth
Lost even to bloodhounds
With its weeds onions and creeks
Must be restored to its idiom

So what! A word contains you peasant of night’s green
Efessos! Forefather sulphur phosphorus your fourteenth
               generation
Inside the orange groves gold words
Sharing the scalpel’s chisel
Tents as yet unpitched
                           others midair
Lost poles suddenly grinding. Sermons
Rise from the seafloor of the facing coves
Twin scythes for theater or temple
Fresh valley springs and other curly streams
Of thus and so. If ever wisdom
Planned circles of clover and dog grass
Another world might live just as before
               your fingerprint

Letters will exist. People will read and grab
History’s tail once more. Just let the vineyards gallop and the sky
               remain
Unbridled as children want it
With roosters and pinecones and blue kites
               flags
On Saint Heracleitos’s day
                                       child’s is the kingdom.

I’m almost like that dark hallway
with a few framed photos
and lamps on the walls.
So many visitors
have walked through me,
dark and light,
depending on the illumination.

The bright
stones pass through the air, the bright-
white, the light-
bringers

They don’t
want to come down, nor fall,
nor hit. They open
up
like humble
dog roses, that’s how they open,
they float
toward you, my quiet one,
you, my true one—:

I see you, you gather them with my
new, my
everyman’s hands, you put them
into the Bright-Again no one
has to weep for or name.

In the beginning
The spirit moving
Upon the face of the waters
And in the breaking waves
Tasted salt

And I see fields of it
Drying on the shore.
We let in shallow lakes of sea
To evaporate,
And the salt

Accumulates along their edge
Thanks to the sunlight:
Crystal white,
Enough for everyone,
Harvested and sold

In every shop and on the roads:
Salt!—
In proper measure
Bringing out the taste,
The flavor and spirit

Of our food, hot or cold.
Why should pepper get
So much admiration
When salt does all the work?

So that I can speak of myself and to this time, and even further—so that I can converse with days gone by, I find nothing more fitting than the parable of migration. Maybe because migration is another name for exile made gentler by the alphabet. Maybe because migration is another name for passage. Maybe because it is another articulation to inaugurate a place and adopt it. Maybe because it is another embodiment of loss.

As if migration is another matter. Isn’t the word hejira the past tense of the name given to Ishmael’s mother in whom the descent of Abraham meets the seed of the Arabs? And you in flight are a leap, the seal whose name is the time of ignorance.

Greased by fumes called fatigue.

fatigue—a rose opening,
fatigue—a river flowing,
fatigue—a wing tempted by the horizon’s infinities,

the fatigue of a woman giving her firstborn into the hands of the world. And what surrounds you permeates your limbs, a liquid bitter and delightful. You feel as if you yourself are flowing within this substance and you ask yourself: How can I trickle down, what will be left of me?

In migration you see the world as an endless agglomeration, its teeth sharply honed. But you penetrate without your body being affected, even though it is soft and tender, your skin almost like silk, as the woman that loves you claims. This is how you can see history’s head chopped off, displayed before you in a cauldron or dangling from two hands you do not see. And you can see it floating over the water of a river whose mouth you do not know, whose sources you are unaware of. And it seems to you that you are following the banks of the river with footsteps that distinguish nothing but the distance separating them from the clamor.

In migration it pleases you to say: I want to take the form of a feather and make my second ink of water. You whisper to yourself: With this articulation I hand down another face, with this ink I erase what gives me pleasure to resume in another form.

In migration it becomes easy for you to write the dictionary of things—vegetation, rock, gravel, clouds, windows and the cracks thriving in the walls of being. And you trick yourself out, once in serpent skin, once in onion peel, once in pollen dust.

In migration you forget as if you are remembering and you remember as if you are forgetting. Drowned by that yearning, the comings and goings up and down the ladder of days left in your life on this planet earth—earth that only love can turn into an apple whose scent is imbibed bit by bit.

In migration you become the brother of things and their equal. You sense the spears sinking into your gut are nothing but a different air purifying you as you inhale and exhale. And it is then that you recognize yourself as remnants.

This migration of mine is long in place, enduring even longer within me, as if I do not know myself.

Once in flight I was intent to build a humble abode for the days of my past, not in the village my skin first touched soil—as a friend, the ancient poet put it—but in another place, I prefer not to say where. I sat myself down among them, I mean my days, that are scattered, gathered by force. And instead of staring at them and inquiring and scrutinizing them, they began looking at me and probing and searching and asking. As if they were waiting for something else, another person. Beginning then I started to understand my flight, and those roads no one takes lest they be tempted to track some shadow, some harvest. Roads that always retain ashes as if they were a fire just now dying out, as if the road were a body shattered in the scent of jasmine left over from childhood. There is a tangled binding between me and my flight. I cannot presume that “return” itself would ever fully appreciate the damages. I shall declare my life a home for my flight, and migration a home for my life. I shall tell migration: You are my expanse—you are vast.

The snow comes late this year. Violet shadows
doze like shepherds round
a white fire.
The swaying shadow of a fence looks like a woman’s clavicle—
a woman who dreams of her lover’s snowy journey home,
his late return.

Thin trails lead to the doorway.
A car parked for hours
compresses black earth.
Radio signals float just out of earshot.
A boat with its eel fishers
in luminous raincoats skims by.
A child—his little hand trembling—
casts slanting trees across the table.

The choir kneels.
The moment has come to speak
in a voice I have never known before.

I raise my head and see a single star in the night sky,
shapeless and fearful like the shard of a broken bottleneck,
a star I have for years foolishly followed.
Perhaps the shadow of our infinite persistence
looks to someone else like a large hump
on the Moon
a camel bent over a puddle
preparing for a new stretch of thirst.

I live at the foot of Taipei
never had a Taipei air conditioner
I hear Taipei’s lips have bloomed
with the stink of cars

Taipei’s nectar turns into cold cutlery
turns into rows of steak houses
I went to eat the fumes of bath milk
the sounds of the upstairs neighbor’s toilet flushing

I rode my bicycle to pilfer Taipei’s sunshine
netted some Taipei fish
I found the lions and tigers of Taipei
living in my empty stomach

my face living in Taipei grew hungry
thirty zebra crossings
thirty buses worth of hunger

Taipei inserted into the ears
inserted into the airway inserted into the heart’s ruckus
inserted into swimsuit chlorine
slipped into your eyes nose mouth

Taipei under construction
ten thousand real estate flyers
sweep the sidewalks in the rain

Stay stupid so the world pities you & leaves you alone. Listen to the music bubbling in the boiling broth. Preserve that papaya peel on which the cat left its claw marks before it died. Observe how a laughing man opens his body to the world like a hibiscus. Apologize to the ice cube as it loses its shape in your palm. Notice the delicate basket of light on the mango leaf. Smell the fragrant, floral notes of lemon zest when you feel exhausted to your bones. Pulp words like guarantee, planning, stability, turn them into a ring & hula hoop it on your waist. Trap a breath within your chest when you feel sad. Know a person beyond the shape of their limbs. Follow behind your dog. See the starkness of stamens against lily petals to learn patriarchal hierarchies. Feel hunger when you see a woman planting rice submerged in ankle-deep water. Think of incomplete kisses when a widow wipes the trickle of sweat before it reaches her lips. Learn that a kiss is the fourth basic necessity. Seek that kiss like a deer seeks a flash of light. Linger on its sparkling eyes, its leaping body, its restless feet. Does it ever matter if a bullet is shot, and its body becomes a vessel of blood? Look, instead, into its eyes as astonishment outweighs death. Watch, scan, stare, gaze in a way that it changes the world. When this doesn’t seem enough and you think of yourself as a fool, understand that this is the nature of capitalism. Hide and take refuge within yourself. The sole purpose of your life is to become a possibility.