Agha Shahid Ali

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.

Philippe Jaccottet

Weight of stones,

weight of thoughts
Dreams and mountains

do not even balance
We still inhabit another world

Perhaps the interval.

Robert Bly

Call and Answer

Tell me why it is we don’t lift our voices these days

And cry over what is happening. Have you noticed

The plans are made for Iraq and the ice cap is melting?
I say to myself: “Go on, cry. What’s the sense

Of being an adult and having no voice? Cry out!

See who will answer!

This is Call and Answer!”
We will have to call especially loud to reach

Our angels, who are hard of hearing; they are hiding

In the jugs of silence filled during our wars.
Have we agreed to so many wars that we can’t

Escape from silence? If we don’t lift our voices, we allow

Others (who are ourselves) to rob the house.
How come we’ve listened to the great criers—

Neruda,Akhmatova, Thoreau, Frederick Douglass—and now

We’re silent as sparrows in the little bushes?
Some masters say our life lasts only seven days.

Where are we in the week? Is it Thursday yet?

Hurry, cry now!

Soon Sunday night will come.

Hafez of Shiraz

The foods turned out by the factors of time and space are not all that great.

Bring some wine because good things of this world are not all that great.
The true kingdom comes to you without any breaking of bones.

If that weren't so, achieving the garden through your own neighbors wouldn't be all that great. In the five days remaining to you in this rest stop before you to go to the grave,

take it easy, give yourself time, because time is not all that great.

You Puritans on the stone floor, you are not safe from the tricks of God's zeal.

The distance between the cloister and the tavern we love is not all that great.

The name of Hafez has been well inscribed in the books, but in our clan of disreputables,

the difference between profit and loss is not all that great.

Tomas Tranströmer

Dawn comes.

The sparse tree trunks take on color now.

The frostbitten forest flowers form a silent search party

after something that has disappeared in the night.

I inherited a dark wood where I seldom go. But a day will come when the dead and the living trade places. The wood will be set in motion. We are not without hope. The most serious crimes will remain unsolved in spite of the efforts of many policemen. In the same way there is somewhere in our lives a great unsolved love. I inherited a dark wood, but today I’m walking in the other wood, the light one. All the living creatures that sing, wriggle, wag, and crawl! It’s spring and the air is very strong. I have graduated from the university of oblivion and am as empty-handed as the shirt on the clothesline.

They said this mystery never shall cease:

The priest promotes war, and the soldier peace.

~William Blake

Emmanuel Hocquard

The wind, when it flattens the grass under the wind, when it sparkles underneath in a dull light, the scarecrow is in the middle of the song. Both vertical and hollow on the earth, it pertains some of the air. It becomes that figure of the wind in the italicized fall of borrowed clothes collapsing into pieces. It bends right in the middle of what remains standing. Trees, a wall. He, a dug, a hollow idea, fright crossing through it.

Long ago, I was forbidden to have a slanting hand-writing. Hence why my body may have been tilting instead of my writing; hence why I remained bent amidst what stands erect, i.e. the letters of a Roman alphabet.

It is windy. The old grammar says that the wind is the real subject.

« He », the apparent subject. »