1207. Our Two Silences - Anna Swir

 

Translated from the Polish by Czeslaw Milosz and Leonard Nathan

Silence

flows into me and out of me

washing my past away.

I am pure already waiting for you. Bring me 

your silence.

They will doze off

nestled in each other’s arms,

our two silences. 

1206. A Call - Seamus Heaney

“Hold on,” she said, “I’ll just run out and get him.

The weather here’s so good, he took the chance

To do a bit of weeding.”

So I saw him

Down on his hands and knees beside the leek rig,

Touching, inspecting, separating one

Stalk from the other, gently pulling up

Everything not tapered, frail and leafless,

Pleased to feel each little weed-root break,

But rueful also…

Then found myself listening to

The amplified grave ticking of hall clocks

Where the phone lay unatended in a calm

Of mirror glass and sun struck pendulums…

And found myself then thinking: if it were nowadays,

This is how Death would summon Everyman.

Next thing he spoke and I nearly said I loved him.

1205. Thumbprint - Eve Merriam

 

On the pad of my thumb

are whorls, whirls, wheels

in a unique design:

mine alone.

What a treasure to own!

My own flesh, my own feelings.

No other, however grand or base,

can ever contain the same.

My signature,

thumbling the pages of my time

My universe key,

my singularity.

Impress, implant,

I am myself,

of all my atom parts I am the sum.

And out of my blood and my brain

I make my own interior weather,

my own sun and rain.

Imprint my mark upon the world

whatever I shall become.

1204. Symphony in Yellow - Oscar Wild

 

An omnibus across the bridge

   Crawls like a yellow butterfly,

   And, here and there, a passer-by

Shows like a little restless midge.

Big barges full of yellow hay

   Are moored against the shadowy wharf.

   And, like a yellow silken scarf,

The thick fog hangs along the quay.

The yellow leaves begin to fade

   And fluter from the Temple elms,

   And at my feet the pale green thames

Lies like a rod of rippled jade.

1203. Years Later - David Palmer Grenell

In the dusty triangular attic

a box of old school books.

Inside, a worn volume of poems,

a page turned down at the corner-

my father and I, meeting again,

depending on The Red Wheelbarrow. 

1202. Love in A Flat - Lauren K. Alleyne

 

after Dean Young

Dean in a story about Coltrane:

how one time in a recording, he hit

a wrong note—a real clam.

In the second take, he hit it again,

this time harder, longer.

The third time, it became the heart—

the sound all the other notes wrap themselves around,

a different understanding of the melody—

the song beneath the song: the stubborn beat

holding up the heaviness of flesh.

1201. For Guy Davenport - Wendell Berry

Within the circles of our lives

we dance the circles of the years,

the circles of the seasons

within the circles of the years,

and the cycles of the moon

within the circles of the seasons,

the circles of our reasons

within the cycles of the moon.

Again, again we come and go,

changed, changing. Hands

join, unjoin in love and fear,

grief and joy. The circles turn,

each giving into each, into all.

Only music keeps us here,

each by all the others held.

In the hold of hands and eyes

we turn in pairs, that joining

joining each to all again.

and then we turn aside, alone,

out of the sunlight gone

into the darker circles of return.