 You show me the poems of some woman
my age, or younger translated from your language Certain words occur: enemy, oven, sorrow enough to let me know she's a woman of my time obsessed with Love, our subject: we've trained it like ivy to our walls baked it like bread in our ovens worn it like lead on our ankles watched it through binoculars as if it were a helicopter bringing food to our famine or the satellite of a hostile power I begin to see that woman doing things: stirring rice ironing a skirt typing a manuscript till dawn trying to make a call from a phonebooth The phone rings endlessly in a man's bedroom she hears him telling someone else Never mind. She'll get tired. hears him telling her story to her sister who becomes her enemy and will in her own way light her own way to sorrow ignorant of the fact this way of grief is shared, unnecessary and political Adrienne Rich - December 25, 1972  Tremors of your network
cause kings to disappear. Your open mouth in anger makes nations bow in fear. Your bombs can change the seasons, obliterate the spring. What more do you long for ? Why are you suffering ? You control the human lives in Rome and Timbuktu. Lonely nomads wandering owe Telstar to you. Seas shift at your bidding, your mushrooms fill the sky. Why are you unhappy ? Why do your children cry ? They kneel alone in terror with dread in every glance. Their rights are threatened daily by a grim inheritance. You dwell in whitened castles with deep and poisoned moats and cannot hear the curses which fill your children's throats. - Maya Angelou  “so I wait for you like a lonely house
till you will see me again and live in me. Till then my windows ache.” ― Pablo Neruda  I’m thinking of you. What else can I say?
The palm trees on the reverse are a delusion; so is the pink sand. What we have are the usual fractured coke bottles and the smell of backed-up drains, too sweet, like a mango on the verge of rot, which we have also. The air clear sweat, mosquitos & their tracks; birds, blue & elusive. Time comes in waves here, a sickness, one day after the other rolling on; I move up, its called awake, then down into the uneasy nights but never forward. The roosters crow for hours before dawn, and a prodded child howls & howls on the pocked road to school. In the hold with the baggage there are two prisoners, their heads shaved by bayonets, & ten crates of queasy chicks. Each spring there’s a race of cripples, from the store to the church. This is the sort of junk I carry with me; and a clipping about democracy from the local paper. Outside the window they’re building the damn hotel, nail by nail, someone’s crumbling dream. A universe that includes you can’t be all bad, but does it? At this distance you’re a mirage, a glossy image fixed in the posture of the last time i saw you. Turn you over, there’s the place for the address. Wish you were here. Love comes in waves like the ocean, a sickness which goes on & on, a hollow cave in the head, filling and pounding, a kicked ear. - Margaret Atwood 
 “I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar  Had we nothing to prove
we might have leaned all night at that window, merely beside each other, watching Peel Street, wrought-iron gates and weather vanes, black lace of trees between cautious Victorian silhouettes; but there were obligations, the formalities of passion; so we sealed the shutters and were expedient in the brevity of night; reading with empty sockets moonlight in dull hair, softness to chafed thighs; both of us anxious and shaking the night, with all my arm, she with fingers and gentle; no hope for silver leaves in the morning. And always a glance for the brightening windows, a suspension of breath for the hearing of birds and incantations to the sun which stirs in dust behind stone horizons. - Leonard Cohen  When suddenly, at midnight, you hear
an invisible procession going by with exquisite music, voices, don’t mourn your luck that’s failing now, work gone wrong, your plans all proving deceptive—don’t mourn them uselessly. As one long prepared, and graced with courage, say goodbye to her, the Alexandria that is leaving. Above all, don’t fool yourself, don’t say it was a dream, your ears deceived you: don’t degrade yourself with empty hopes like these. As one long prepared, and graced with courage, as is right for you who proved worthy of this kind of city, go firmly to the window and listen with deep emotion, but not with the whining, the pleas of a coward; listen—your final delectation—to the voices, to the exquisite music of that strange procession, and say goodbye to her, to the Alexandria you are losing. - CP Cavafy  We don’t know how to say goodbye.
We wander all over, shoulder to shoulder. It is already starting to get dark, You’re thoughtful, and I remain quiet. Let’s go inside a church, and watch A baptism, a wedding, a funeral. Why can’t we live like that? Let’s leave, not looking at each other. Or, let us sit in the cemetery, Quiet in the trampled snow. And watch you trace with a stick, Places where we will always be together. - Anna Akhmatova 
 You’re wondering if I’m lonely:
OK then, yes, I’m lonely as a plane rides lonely and level on its radio beam, aiming across the Rockies for the blue-strung aisles of an airfield on the ocean. You want to ask, am I lonely? Well, of course, lonely as a woman driving across country day after day, leaving behind mile after mile little towns she might have stopped and lived and died in, lonely If I’m lonely it must be the loneliness of waking first, of breathing dawns’ first cold breath on the city of being the one awake in a house wrapped in sleep If I’m lonely it’s with the rowboat ice-fast on the shore in the last red light of the year that knows what it is, that knows it’s neither ice nor mud nor winter light but wood, with a gift for burning - Adrienne Rich  even if you are a small forest surviving off of
moon alone. your light is extraordinary. - reminder Nayyirah Waheed  I have a feeling that my boat
has struck, down there in the depths, against a great thing. And nothing happens! Nothing… Silence… Waves… —Nothing happens? Or has everything happened, and are we standing now, quietly, in the new life? Juan Ramón Jiménez Translated by Robert Bly  “Maybe I am not very human - all I ever wanted to do was to paint sunlight on the side of a house.” - Edward Hopper
9
I broke your heart. Now barefoot I tread on shards. 17 Why is the word yes so brief? It should be the longest, the hardest, so that you could not decide in an instant to say it, so that upon reflection you could stop in the middle of saying it. 18 —Sing me The Song of Songs. —Don’t know the words. —Then sing the notes. —Don’t know the notes. —Then simply hum. —Forgot the tune. —Then press my ear to your ear and sing what you hear. Vera Pavlova 
And with knees like that
You won't live long “Beauty is often spoken of as though it only stirs lust or admiration, but the most beautiful people are so in a way that makes them look like destiny or fate or meaning, the heroes of a remarkable story.”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost  Time and again
You, too, Must long for Your old nest Deep in the mountain. - Taigu Ryokan The moon did not become the sun.
It just fell on the desert in great sheets, reams of silver handmade by you. The night is your cottage industry now, the day is your brisk emporium. The world is full of paper. Write to me. - Agha Shahid Ali |
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