suddenly everything has forgotten its rythm
the sky was shouting at the mountains
the wind was shouting at the trees
the sea at a naughty kite
some words were looking for their delta
and their hearts of stone
my sleep was taken away by migrant birds.
it must have been then
when I started to love you
like madness loves its forgetting

sleepless forests
in my dreams
embracing the shape of you
sung by the pine trees

the impossible depth of solitude
with its amber tone
vitality  and some ambiguous  words
like the scent of a blooming field
in forgotten summers
and my wish to be his toy
in the machinery of dreams
he had canons of magic in his fingers
and a slippery mind
that went from one orbit to another
till the light was decoloured
devoured
into the music of
an agonizing time
or prayer

she is so brave so daring
so quiet so earnest
holding the void of pain
for so long
in sleepless nights
she used to wildly dance
her unmuted dreams
such gentle spirit nests
in her heart
that the days count themselves
till darkness subsides
and laughter reinvents itself

her fierce heart is such a gift
the shape of miracle
in my tears
each day

An honorable human relationship — that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word “love” — is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.

It is important to do this because it breaks down human self-delusion and isolation.

It is important to do this because in doing so we do justice to our own complexity.

It is important to do this because we can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.

from  On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966-1978

rainy days like these
I fill them up with
tenderness,
visions of the unknown
like lymphatic vessels
roaming the world
just to keep myself
from not knowing
that even the gods are weeping
or hidding their cries
in unwritten stories
when the pain is so
so so so so so
alive

what a blessing
what a chance
what an accident
a wonder:
the horizon itself is in
transition
to something other
than the blue speed
of the earth

life needs to destroy
itself
a little
to become
Real
like the center
of our atoms
mixing
crushing
falling
into each other
to the depth
of mystery

When I am with you
I wanna lose my center
he would say to you gently
without words

he would translate you into his own language
of groove, longing, shouting, fluid desires
for the sake of  finding his own tracks
his eager mutable depths

he is looking for harbours
for his solitude turned into offerings
for devotion
for the secret wisdom that fills the cracks of night
he doesn't deny the intensity
of the sweet conversations between the hearing
and the touch
he hides his violence in sealed wells,
in clear visions, in the decimals of knowledge

he was a lonely boy
full of wonder

that moment of terrifiying beauty
for which there is no language
only a foam of primordial letters
and the possibility of cosmos

the hours cascading in his veins
it was so natural and shocking:
he was my hidden black whole
(the black whole one thought crosses to another)
and with my bare feet on the blade of the horizon
I was bleeding curses
promises to the unknown
confessions of sublime intensity

the terror of beauty so real
as we danced that mysterious dance
of light turning effortlessly into darkness
of darkness turning effortlessly into
light

it all starts in pieces
maybe I was his morphine
and he was rebelling against
every fragment of unhealed time
in his shoulders.
with him I discovered a new sea of time and
fused with my roots
I rest suspended in the chaos of possibility
to the end of my undreamed dreams
as he was hallucinating my younger selves
anew

we opened the other dimensions of time
descended into flesh
without really knowing
how coherent pain can be
and I could go on and on and on, like the beat
we were only a poem
without destination
but the possibility
of cosmos

silence was improvising in my eyes
in this tender fog between one moment
and this moment
and I could see the old love approaching
to invade me
to intoxicate me
with its hypnotic violence
this love like a fossilized wood in their gaze
came to visit me
again
with so many faces
so many whispers
it was as if angels had descended
on the barren land and
with their unthought hands
were tenderly carressing
the old bones unsung
what else could have I done
than
open my eyes and dream
the palimpsest of forgotten dreams
forged in the greatest intensity
of all the fleeting moments
in which
they blinked

(I need to shelter my heart from
the silence of decaying leaves
from the violence of life destroying
itself)

Steeped in history, building a shadowy bouquet,
Unable to reassemble ourselves as grapes,
We are wound into a richness we cannot undo.
Beautiful still, and with a destiny that is vaguely related to vines—
We still know water and wind.
We know the stories of the keepers of the casks,
We know versions of civilizations that sing.
There is goodness.
A look to a future of solutions is a potion table of bubbling mysteries,
Soaked in folded learnings, lost threads, unseen outcomes.
We are not
And yet
We are grapes always

by Nora Bateson

In my house, the sunlight inhabits all the rooms,
which makes me think that I am someone important.
At the window, I fall into the slumber
of the nonbeing of everything I see.

I have only the sunlight on my face and arms. I am sad,
like a man who never leaves his house,
yet knows we live in a world of stones and trees
and has no use for the hastened moves
we call friendship.

by Constantin Abaluta, from It Might Take Me Years, An Anthology of Poetry

Poetry is the weeping eye
it is the weeping shoulder
the weeping eye of the shoulder
it is the weeping hand
the weeping eye of the hand
it is the weeping soul
the weeping eye of the heel.
Oh, you friends,
poetry is not a tear
it is the weeping itself
the weeping of an uninvented eye
the tear of the eye
of the one who must be beautiful
of the one who must be happy.

by Nichita Stanescu, translated by Thomas Carlson and Vasile Poenaru

Distance is the cog wheel
on the haunted axle of my hearing,
grinding fine the deadened mind
of that unborn god
waiting to be caught
by the earth's blue speed,
and carrying in a handled urn
the plucked heart - ours,
it's beating, it's heard, it's beating, it's heard,
a sphere in wild growth -
the roads are wet with tears,
memory frail and elastic,
a sling for stones, a gondola
drowned in childlike Venice's,
a tooth yanked from the cells with a string -
down the empty socket of Vesuvius. And you exist.

by Nichita Stanescu, translated by Thomas Carlson and Vasile Poenaru

I was so very aware
that the afternoon was dying in the domes,
and all around me sounds froze,
turned to winding pillars.

I was so very aware
that the undulant drift of scents
was collapsing into darkness,
and it seemed I had never tasted
the cold.

Suddenly
I awoke so far away
and strange,
wandering behind my face
as though I had hidden my feelings
in the senseless relief of the moon.

I was so very aware
that
I did not recognize you, and perhaps
you come, always,
every hour, every second,
moving through my vigil - then -
as through the spectre of a triumphal arch.

by Nichita Stanescu, translated by Thomas Carlson and Vasile Poenaru

Little by little she became a word,
bundles of soul on the wind,
a dolphin in the clutches of my eyebrows,
a stone provoking rings in water,
a star inside my knee,
a sky inside my shoulder,
and I inside I.

by Nichita Stanescu, translated by Thomas Carlson and Vasile Poenaru

neon birds above
plastic souls beneath
I have no choice
but to feed my soul
with the secret of trees

I still dream
in the skin of the rain
I write with my eyes
poems of touch

This summer I chased
perseids
again
I tried to forget all about
this age of anxiety,
or about the eyes with no echo

For a moment I let reality crash
like cloud castles
and
neon birds spring above
my tired city

to kindness, to knowledge,
we make promises only; pain we obey.
Marcel Proust

I was born into this world
of people without
guardian angels but
loveless pockets
no body to see how
pain was incessantly
turned into tombstones
a carousel of masks and
defeated laughter
blinded by deceitful colours.
triumphant sidewalks not afraid
to be crushed by the weight of
humiliated bodies.
-he was secretly dreaming
how vanilla ice-cream would taste
on her lips-
people got used to bringing their thoughts
to the drug stores
as if walking their pets
weeping was incomprehensible
forbidden by law.
-she was secretly dreaming
of him smelling like tobacco,
white musk and cedarwood -


this world survived because of
all the hidden dimensions,
perhaps.
I was handed over a disembodied world
to dream of but
the metaphors were of
no use
to moonless people
their hands paralyzed.
oh, can anybody see?
the unspoken terror
that time stood still.
-I was secretly dreaming of destroying
this world with fresh words, with
the craziness of feeling alive-

I inherited the secret passion
of some unknown promises and
never-whispered desires
the only teacher I could find -
my manic heart
unbearable the pains of
growing a mind.

they wanted to keep it simple:
to cry, to speak, to fall in love.
muted seagulls
loveless alphabets
into this world
waiting for the sun to shed
its hidden self
of blindness

Blue nothing. She considered miles
out the high window in the stairwell.
First, simple paper distances her finger

could trace, point A to point B.
Then the more difficult measurement,
that of closeness, like bonded atoms.

And then, hypothetical expanses
like those of the heart's vessels -
their length could circle the globe twice.

A plane seemed to crawl across the glass,
leaving a necklace vapor trail. She believed
in possibilities, that every atom that could exist,

already did, but still, she could not wear the red,
strapless dress she no longer owned,
couldn't lift her hair for his fingertips to clasp

pearls at the nape of her neck, his breath
fastening a shiver between her shoulder blades
down the small dip of her back.

She wanted to look into a large aperture
telescope, to view the farthest reaches
of visible space, where no energy had ever been

destroyed, to see into the incalculable vastness
of him in their living room downstairs, him
on the brown sofa reading. She wanted

him to put down his book, to think of her
on the landing, waiting. For him to move
exponentially faster, up the stairs two at a time.

by Jo Brachman

I wait each night for a self.
I say the mist, I say the strange
tumble of leaves, I say a motor
in the distance, but I mean
a self and a self and a self.
A small cold wind
coils and uncoils in the corner
of every room. A vagrant.
In the dream
I gather my life in bundles
and stand at the edge of a field
of snow. It is a field I know
but have never seen. It is
nowhere and always new:
What about the lives
I might have lived?
And who? And who
will be accountable
for this regret I see
no way to avoid? A core,
or a husk, I need to learn
not how to speak, but from where.
Do you understand? I say
name, but I mean a counduit
from me to me, I mean a net,
I mean an awning of stars.

by Charif Shanahan

A drop of water fell on my hand,
drawn from the Ganges and the Nile,

from hoarfrost ascended to heaven off a seal's whiskers,
from jugs broken in the cities of Ys and Tyre.

On my index finger
the Caspian Sea isn't landlocked,

and the Pacific is the Rudawa's meek tributary,
the same stream that floated in a little cloud over Paris

in the year seven hundred and sixty-four
on the seventh of May at three a. m.

There are not enough mouths to utter
all your fleeting names, O water.

I would have to name you in every tongue,
pronouncing all the vowels at once

while also keeping silent — for the sake of the lake
that still goes unnamed

and doesn't exist on this earth, just as the star
reflected in it is not in the sky.

Someone was drowning, someone dying was
calling out for you. Long ago, yesterday.

You have saved houses from fire, you have carried off
houses and trees, forests and towns alike.

You've been in christening fonts and courtesans' baths.
In coffins and kisses.

Gnawing at stone, feeding rainbows.
In the sweat and the dew of pyramids and lilacs.

How light the raindrop's contents are.
How gently the world touches me.

Whenever wherever whatever has happened
is written on waters of Babel

By Wisława Szymborska

Faith is in you whenever you look
At a dewdrop or a floating leaf
And know that they are because they have to be.
Even if you close your eyes and dream up things
The world will remain as it has always been
And the leaf will be carried by the waters of the river.

You have faith also when you hurt your foot
Against a sharp rock and you know
That rocks are here to hurt our feet.
See the long shadow that is cast by the tree?
We and the flowers throw shadows on the earth.
What has no shadow has no strength to live.

By Czeslaw Milosz

that moment
as fragile as a snowflake
when I slip into another's poem
and something inside twinkles
like a firefly full of wonder

"Be the bliss of my trembling
like a tree’s leaves:
give a name, give a beautiful name
a pillow to this disintegration."
— János Pilinszky

I am black with love
neither boy nor nightingale
intact as a flower
I yearn without desire.

I arose amid violets
at the day’s first light,
sang a song forgotten
in the unchanging night.
I said to myself: “Narcissus!”
and a spirit with my face
darkened the grass
with the glow of his curls.

by Pier Paolo Pasolini

tanks are marching over my soul
bombs are dynamite for sight
it is unbearable
(if you can't ease)
the pain
the anger
the grief
helplessness and terror
they sculpture our souls
raising citadelles to dwell

I weep words for time not to freeze
it is cruelty that shuts down the mind

countless lives are played at the roulette
the geometry of power is mutilating everything
especially the birth of reality
my fragility like velvet
is soft to touch.
the trajectory of erratic steps,
the fragility and the strength of the world
are visible through bones of glass

hatred is a force that keeps the center spinning,
not turning into a black hole

we are close
the tyrant pushes himself on the brink
the naive world has fortgotten -
tanks are marching over
bodies carrying
the brightest of light -
the event-horizon
of death

in the depth of human tragedy
there is also this dillema
of tyranny
that either the truth or the lie
is going to crash the tyrant

they play reality games
and
the delusion will end in catastrophe
but
how much of the world is going to take with it?

spring is in a rush this year,
to affirm the rationality
of life

yes, the tyrant is ready
to destroy with thousands of arms
with thousands of eyes
with thousands of hearts
a denied collective crime after all
and the old circle of darkness about to complete
again
the worm of history is tattooing our dreams

unbearable the recipe of pain

no real tipping point
especially
no turning point
for any tyrant

wooden tongues speak non truths
to be fed by a tyrant freezes the rivers of the mind

being a tyrant is so simple, so natural in a world we've ceased to imagine

this tyrant like any other free
to toy with history as with plasticine
cause we/you/they are as ready as ever
to support him dynamite
the horizon
of time

we are here because of the trees
what about the climate of our mind?
too many versions of alternative realities
and we've killed the spirit of oceans
in our souls
our bones don't grow roots anymore

we exist because of the flowers
and we are dying in the most stylish way
wearing Dior mascara, high heels, oh,
the latest Zara shirt

we are here because of the bees
it's not to late to ask ourselves
what is the climate of our hearts?

death can be so
just so asymptotic with our obsessions
so asymbolic on golden shoulders
and climate just another
hollow word
sent to Mars

What is Poetry? Who knows?
Not the rose, but the scent of a rose;
Not  a sky, but the light in the sky;
Not the fly, but the gleam of the fly;
Not the sea, but the sound of the sea;
Not myself, but what makes me
See, hear, and feel something that prose
Cannot: and what it is, who knows?

by Eleanor Farjeon

I want to write a poem about you
and use patches of my skin
instead of nouns
the passion of druids instead of
verbs
All I need is
Radiohead and
space to breath
in
your
breathing

(the body imagines what the mind can't)

Autumn eats its leaf out of my hand: we are friends.
From the nuts we shell time and we teach it to walk:
then time returns to the shell.

In the mirror it's Sunday,
in dream there is room for sleeping,
our mouths speak the truth.

My eye moves down to the *** of my loved one:
we look at each other,
we exchange dark words,
we love each other like poppy and recollection,
we sleep like wine in the conches,
like the sea in the moon's blood ray.

We stand by the window embracing, and people look up from the street:
it is time they knew!
It is time the stone made an effort to flower,
time unrest had a beating heart.
It is time it were time

It is time

by Paul Celan

There was earth inside them, and
they dug.

They dug and they dug, so their day
went by for them, their night. And they did not praise
          God
who, so they heard, wanted all this,
who, so they heard, knew all this.

They dug and heard nothing more;
they did not grow wise, invented no song,
thought up for themselves no language,
They dug.

There came a stillness, and there came a storm,
and all the oceans came.
I dig, you dig, and the worm digs too,
and that singing out there says: They dig.

O one, o none, o no one, o you:
Where did the way lead when it led nowhere?
O you dig and I dig, and I dig towards you,
and on our finger the ring awakes.

by Paul Celan, translated by Michael Hamburger

Speak, you also,
speak as the last,
have your say.

Speak -
But keep yes and no unsplit,
And give your say this meaning:
give it the shade.

Give it shade enough,
give it as much
as you know has been dealt out between
midday and midday and midnight,

Look around:
look how it all leaps alive -
where death is! Alive!
He speaks truly who speaks the shade.

But now shrinks the place where you stand:
Where now, stripped by shade, will you go?
Upward. ***** your way up.
Thinner you grow, less knowable, finer.
Finer: a thread by which
it wants to be lowered, the star:
to float further down, down below
where it sees itself glitter:
on sand dunes of wandering words.

by Paul Celan, translated by Michael Hamburger

he would have discovered him
trying to change the water formula in his tears
he tried to exist/insist/resist
where no body was thinking
the man without moon
suspended in a terrorizing labyrinth of faces
His own
he was a method man
growing salt in his eyes like minefields
teaching it the taste of the earth
anxiety like mountains of fog eradicating crossroads
he wants to exist inside the body of the world
with the decency of negotiated desires
and the hands get lost in translation
truth is a black truffle
sweating and swearing
sensuous craters perhaps
he killed many singing birds
searching for imagination, his body
muted, renegotiated soon after birth
staying alive, denying the soul of zebras
He lacks verbs, some nouns
learning from the theory of absence
how the effortless U(n-conscious)
is a Poet that
rhymes the body with the mind
of the world

He summoned the shaman, the artists, the tango teacher
to the wake of his body
while learning how summer waves contribute to a theory of mind
his self white
white while forgetting Magritte,
a taxi for Chopin
or the whiteness of the cotton pickers
perhaps

When we are
Overwhelmed by fear
And the God at our core
Has left

We become
The shoes waiting
In the chest
Of a
Paralyzed woman.


by Riri Sylvia Manor,
English by Ioana Ieronim
from Poetry and Science
An Anthology of Comtemporary Authors from Romania

The mourning is
about it never being
the way I needed
it to be.

My life itself a
disturbance of mourning

Stands in my life. Before me. The
dead girl under the bed
her skin transparent as mine

disappears. I come out
and there is no mother. Sometimes
she appears and there is no telling what
attracts her warmth. Approaches and departs.
Becomes desire,
the loot of her mourning.

Empty womb pillow. I am not
enrapt. Its’ tufts flap my fringe.
Behind me, at my sides
stands mourning.

I have only to be busy with your burial.
Sharpening flint to a pillar
pile to a mound
and turn from it.

It is gone
forever.
And I am.

By Noa Vardi, M. D.

Every year
the lilies
are so perfect
I can hardly believe

their lapped light crowding
the black,
mid-summer ponds.
Nobody could count all of them -

the muskrats swimming
among the pads and the grasses
can reach out
their muscular arms and touch

only so many, they are that
rife and wild.
But what in this world
is perfect?

I bend closer and see
how this one is clearly lopsided -
and that one wears an orange blight -
and this one is a glossy cheek

half nibbled away -
and that one is a slumped purse
full of its own
unstoppable decay.

Still, what I want in my life
is to be willing
to be dazzled -
to cast aside the weight of facts
and maybe even
to float a little
above this difficult world.
I want to believe I am looking

into the white fire of a great mystery.
I want to believe that the imperfections are nothing -
that the light is everything - that it is more than the sum
of each flawed blossom rising and fading.  And I do.

There is no space wider than that of grief
there is no universe like that which bleeds.

from Extravagaria

The way the trees empty themselves of leaves,
let drop their ponderous fruit,
the way the turtle abandons the sun-warmed log,
the way even the late-blooming aster
succumbs to the power of frost -

this is not a new story.
Still, on this morning, the hollowness
of the season startles, filling
the rooms of your house, filling the world
with impossible light, improbable hope.

And so, what else can you do
but let yourself be broken
and emptied? What else is there
but waiting in the autumn sun?

Carolyn Locke, from Poetry of Presence An Anthology of Mindfulness Poems

The moment when, after many years
of hard work and a long voyage
you stand in the centre of your room,
house, half-acre, square mile, island, country,
knowing at last how you got there,
and say, I own this,

is the same moment when the trees unloose
their soft arms from around you,
the birds take back their language,
the cliffs fissure and collapse,
the air moves back from you like a wave
and you can't breathe.

No, they whisper. You own nothing.
You were a visitor, time after time
climbing the hill, planting the flag, proclaiming.
We never belonged to you.
You never found us.
It was always the other way round.

from Poetry of Presence An Anthology of Mindfulness Poems

Of patience, I know only
what sea turtles have taught me:
how they are born on lightless
beaches so the moon can serve
as a beacon to lure them
into the water; how they spend
their whole lives trying to swim
towards it, enamored, obsessed;
how they flap their forelimbs,
a vague recollection of flying -
the right movement in the wrong
medium, as if they knew how
to reach the moon in a former life
but now only remember the useless
persistent motions; how if you cut
one's heart out it would keep
beating in the pit of your palm,
recognizing the cold night air.

by Ariel Francisco from Best New Poets 2016 50 Poems from Emerging Writers

You are there.
You have always been
there.
Even when you thought
you were climbing
you had already arrived.
Even when you were
breathing hard,
you were at rest.
Even then it was clear
you were there.

Not in our nature
to know what
is journey and what
arrival.
Even if we knew
we would not admit.
Even if we lived
we would think
we were just
germinating.

To live is to be
uncertain.
Certainty comes
at the end.

by Erica Jong

How swiftly the strained honey
of afternoon light
flows into darkness

and the closed bud shrugs off
its special mystery
in order to brake into blossom

as if what exists, exists
so that it can be lost
and become precious.

by Lisel Mueller

tonight I’m calling fearful souls
the peers of my tribe
there is chaos in the heart of stones we are casting
there is a lot of pain in unborn desires
we are trembling, we are holding our breath –
what does it mean to feel safe
we are dreaming and waiting
old mothers are screaming unheard
the tyrant is playing backgammon with God

I am searching for each of you in the safety of dawn
the beast with bottomless eyes is here
Inside
so difficult to grasp our soul
to endure this: a world of faceless people
we cover our eyes, mouth, hearts
bottomless eyes are smearing

the body as a battlefield
oh, we remember what we want to have forgotten
we collapse under the burden of our own fragility
the history repeats itself shutting down stories
so many stories of cancelled love

the slaughterhouse soul is too heavy
and I can’t remember the ancient joy and innocence
the simplicity of being
words have just exploded
and my heart is cracked open

and now I am afraid even of my words
of that which should not be named
the murderer of soul, dignity and poetry

I am afraid of staring into bottomless eyes
without my peers
without my tribe

Go into the woods
and tell your story
to the trees.
They are wise
standing in their folds of silence
among white crystals of rock
and dying limbs.
And they have time.
Time for the swaying of leaves,
the floating down,
the dust.
They have time for gathering
and holding the earth about their feet.
Do this.
It is something I have learned.
How they will bend down to you
softly.
They will bend down to you
and listen.

Laura Foley, from Poetry of Presence An Anthology of Mindfulness Poems

mama told me:
minodora, stop thinking about sam
when you go to the market
think of bacon, think of cabbage
be a proper woman
what would have been, i asked her
if beethoven hadn’t always had a bird
singing in his head?
yeah but beethoven, mama said
picking up the dust rag
and starting to clean the genius’s ears
and that’s only because i must
write about you
the same way i must sneeze
or yawn
i dreamt of you last night
you had a baby with a cat’s head
he was cute as a button
you were screaming your head off
‘come see what a tumbling rock
has to go through to reach a beautiful stillness’
it’s a big deal
when you forget to cross yourself
before going to sleep

Nora Iuga translated by Diana Manole and Adam Sorkin

Dear E. S.
poetry
is the world the human race
my own life
all flowered from the word
the transparent wonder
of a delirious ferment

When I find
one single word
in this my silence
it is hewn into my life
like an abyss

Giuseppe Ungaretti

Like this stone
of Monte San Michele
as cold as this
as hard as this
as dried as this
as stubborn as this
as utterly
dispirited as this

Like this stone
is my unseen
weeping

Death
we discount
by living

Giuseppe Ungaretti, 1916

your words like high speed winds
making noise on my skin
I put on a psychedelic lipstick
I take off the blue dress
(made in India)
- he tries new scores with
oxidized fingers
galvanizes the silence, the thirst, the dreams of the air-
I want to confess iloveyous louder
than the coffee machines. Louder
than the morning radio. Louder
than tram number 5.
life is what happens while
you stay, leave, come back and
redefine our melting point

I open the door,
you are there
with your carnival smile
and nothing prepares me
for this obscure truth:
imponderable I feel
when you say
my name my name my name