Friday, March 30, 2018

1022. Harvey Ellis - Harvey Ellis

Harvey Ellis - Harvey Ellis

my ancestors surround me
like walls of a canyon
quiet
stone hard
their ideas drift over me
like breezes at sunset

we gather sticks
and make settlements
what we do is only partly
our own
and partly continuation
down through the chromosomes

my son
my baby sleeps behind me
stirring in the night
for the touch
that lets him continue

he is arranging 
in his small form the furniture
and windows of his home

it will be a lot like mine

it will be a lot like theirs

Friday, March 16, 2018

1021. To The Son - Jorge Luis Borges

Translated from the Spanish by Alastair Reid

It was not I who begot you. It was the dead—
my father, and his father, and their forebears,
all those who through a labyrinth of loves
descend from Adam and the desert wastes
of Cain and Abel, in a dawn so ancient
it has become mythology by now,
to arrive, blood and marrow, at this day
in the future, in which I now beget you.
I feed their multitudes. They are who we are,
and you among us, you and the the sons to come
that you will beget. The latest in the line
and in red Adam’s line. I too am those others.
Eternity is present in the things
of time and its impatient happenings