A Poem A Day

[PuliMorgan]

Continuing with the rain theme (Sorry, it is in Malayalam language). I don't think I can translate it well, but here is my attempt:

 

It's raining...

I know.

Come on, let us play in the rain...

No!

Why?

I just wanna watch.

So, don't you want to get drenched?

I am getting drenched.

In what?

In my rain soaked memories.

 

- Ijaz

 

[txomsy]

Wonderful

[Detman101]

That's sweet.
It's funny...when I read others taciturn poetry it's so very beautiful and the opposite of what's in the poem.
Though I think that these sweet snippets of beauty come just the way they should.
Thank you all.
 

[brokenclay]

 

His Spine Curved Just Enough

by Thomas Lux

 

His spine curved just enough

to suggest a youth spent amidst a boring

landscape: brokedown corncrib, abandoned sty,

skeletal manure shed, a two-silo barn with one

sold off leaving a round pit

filled with rubble--where once the sweet silage

piled up and up now the brooding

ground of toads. And then the barn

began to buckle like an ancient mule falling

first to one knee, then both,

rear haunches still bravely, barely, aloft.

Whatever hay left huddling in corners

more fossil than vegetble.

This landscape exists--in many

places--and is almost lovely,

even in, even in spite of, its decay.

It endures in histories

and in fiction: the crabapple, the gray

pastures, the dried dung

how many years old? --And atop the barn

a weather vane knocked askew by a rifle shot,

pointing straight up, as if all the winds

were going to heaven.

[GlenV]

That’s a cool one, full of images for thought 

 

[Detman101]

[migo984]

‘That is a strange day’

 

That is a strange day

when you wake to discover

age has drifted down

imperceptibly, like dust,

and you’re totally covered.

 

 

Alan Hill

 

 

[inkstainedruth]

Yeah, that.

I was just thinking today that the album my favorite song is on was released roughly half a century ago....

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

[brokenclay]

 

Visitors
by Talvikki Ansel

Flames from the burn barrel
flicker orange against a stormy sky,
poppies' tenacious, red petals
tissue-thin
in the path of rubble and salt wind
a seaside garden someone's tended,
bricks scrounged for a border
a whistle away from the lighthouse keeper's
field of promising turnips.
Flats and pots carried from train
to boat, onto the dock
silvered and littered with broken shells.

Belly down on the dock we watch
that other world: eelgrass
lulls and sweeps in the water, speckled
with minute mussels, barnacles
small as the white spots flecking
an inflamed throat, an empty shell
rolls down a rock, unprovoked. On the radio
the shorter tennis player battles it out
and wins; we've gotten taller,
the announcer says. Iodine-tinctured,
the seas lettuce waves, undulates,
betrays currents
like wind though a harbor town,
flapping bed sheets on a line, in the square
women in headscarves gather under cover
of dusk to talk,
they have hteir routines--
but that wasn't to be my emphasis, at all
the garden above, and below water, 
only so much after leaving
one can claim, this panoramic of poppies
another summer's summer's day. You reach

your hand down into clear water, minnos
flee the slightest vibrations.

[brokenclay]

 

Map of terror and pleasure,

ardent junk, passionate congress

filled with the arguments of chemicals,

 

Echo chamber for the fanatical cries

of stubborn generations, all the quaint invisibles

death has grown a beard on,

 

labyrinth of desire, playing field of impulse,

factory where decay's silent armies clock in,

philosopher-clown blowing a horn at each epiphany.

 

Washed by the rough nurse of morning,

wheeled into the ward of the afternoon,

feeds, grateful, on the rich broth of dusk.

 

Reads the erratic cards of dreams,

turns on the rack of insomnia,

steals the two-bit grace of sleep.

 

Loses its name in foreign embraces,

forges a passport to the country of tenderness,

gestures like a child at the thing that it wants,

opaque from its own breath on the glass.

 

[jandrew]

[GlenV]

 

I apologize if this shortened version doesn’t appeal but for space, I like this though...

[Carrau]

On 6/5/2021 at 10:24 PM, brokenclay said:

And if you don't already know it, you'll need this: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49303/howl

I think this belonged on the website of the peyotefoundation.😉

https://erowid.org/plants/peyote/peyote_foundation.shtml

[brokenclay]

Having a pedantic day today. Here are three translations of Horace, Odes, Book I Ode 11.

 

Translated by C. Smart, 1783

Inquire not, Leuconoe (it is not fitting you should know), how long a term of life the gods have granted to you or to me: neither consult the Chaldean calculations. How much better is it to bear with patience whatever shall happen! Whether Jupiter have granted us more winters, or [this as] the last, which now breaks the Etrurian waves against the opposing rocks. Be wise; rack off your wines, and abridge your hopes [in proportion] to the shortness of your life. While we are conversing, envious age has been flying; seize the present day, not giving the least credit to the succeeding one.

 

Translated by John Conington, 1882

Ask not ('tis forbidden knowledge), what our destined term of years,
Mine and yours; nor scan the tables of your Babylonish seers.
Better far to bear the future, my Leuconoe, like the past,
Whether Jove has many winters yet to give, or this our last;
This, that makes the Tyrrhene billows spend their strength against the shore.
Strain your wine and prove your wisdom; life is short; should hope be more?
In the moment of our talking, envious time has ebb'd away.
Seize the present; trust tomorrow e'en as little as you may.

 

 

Translated by Thomas McEvilley, 2013

Leuconoe, why try to know
The future, which cannot be known?
Or what the Assyrian numbers say
Of your fate and my own?

Put it away, don’t waste your time,
Winter will come on
And break the lower sea on the rocks
While we drink summer’s wine.

See, in the white of the winter air
The day hangs like a rose.
It droops down to the reaching hand
Take it before it goes.

 

And for the classicists among you, the original:

 

Tu ne quaesieris (scire nefas) quem mihi, quem tibi
finem di dederint, Leuconoe, nec Babylonios
temptaris numeros. Ut melius quicquid erit pati!
Seu pluris hiemes seu tribuit Iuppiter ultimam,
quae nunc oppositis debilitat pumicibus mare
Tyrrhenum, sapias, vina liques et spatio brevi
spem longam reseces. Dum loquimur, fugerit invida
aetas: carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero.

[Doulton]

Thank you for writing all of  that out.  I am mightily impressed.   I think I like Smart's translation the best, but that's just sentiment.     I've heard that they are very difficult to translate and I am impressed with McEvilley's translation.  Thank you so much, Broken Clay

[Pale.Ink.Tom]

From the published works of an old gentleman I met and had a drink with many years ago.

 

 

Rain

I can hear you making small holes in the silence rain

If I were deaf the pores of my skin would open to you and shut

And I should know you by the lick of you if I were blind

The steady drum-roll sound you make when the wind drops

The something special smell of you when the sun cakes the ground

But if I could not hear, smell or feel or see you

You would still define me, disperse me, wash over me

Rain

 

Hone Tuwhare

[brokenclay]

 

I Did Not Die

by Mary E. Frye

 

Do not stand at my grave nad weep,

I am not there; I do not sleep.

I am a thousand winds that blow.

I am the diamond glint on snow.

I am the sunlight on ripened grain.

I am the gentle autumn rain.

And when you wake in the morning's hush

I am the swift uplifting rush

of quiet birds in circled flight.

I am the soft stars that shine at night.

Do not stand at my grave and cry.

I am not there.

I did not die.

[brokenclay]

 

Viento, agua, piedra
Octavio Paz
A Roger Caillois

El agua horada la piedra,
el viento dispersa el agua,
la piedra detiene al viento.
Agua, viento, piedra.
 
El viento esculpe la piedra,
la piedra es copa del agua,
el agua escapa y es viento.
Piedra, viento, agua.
 
El viento en sus giros canta,
el agua al andar murmura,
la piedra inmóvil se calla.
Viento, agua, piedra.
 
Uno es otro y es ninguno:
entre sus nombres vacíos
pasan y se desvanecen
agua, piedra, viento.

Wind, Water, Stone
By Octavio Paz
Translated By Eliot Weinberger
for Roger Caillois

Water hollows stone,
wind scatters water,
stone stops the wind.
Water, wind, stone.

Wind carves stone,
stone's a cup of water,
water escapes and is wind.
Stone, wind, water.

Wind sings in its whirling,
water murmurs going by,
unmoving stone keeps still.
Wind, water, stone.

Each is another and no other:
crossing and vanishing
through their empty names:
water, stone, wind.

[brokenclay]

 

Music

by Juhan Liiv

translated by H.L. Hix and Jüri Talvet

 

It must be somewhere, the original harmony, 

somewhere in great nature, hidden.

Is it in the furious infinite,

in distant stars' orbits, 

is it in the sun's scorn,

in a tiny flower, in treegossip,

in heartmusic's mothersong 

or in tears?

It must be somewhere, immortality,

somewhere the original harmony must be found:

how else could it infuse

the human soul,

that music?

[migo984]

12 hours ago, brokenclay said:

 

Music

by Juhan Liiv

translated by H.L. Hix and Jüri Talvet

 

It must be somewhere, the original harmony, 

somewhere in great nature, hidden.

Is it in the furious infinite,

in distant stars' orbits, 

is it in the sun's scorn,

in a tiny flower, in treegossip,

in heartmusic's mothersong 

or in tears?

It must be somewhere, immortality,

somewhere the original harmony must be found:

how else could it infuse

the human soul,

that music?

That is lovely!