New Directions
2021
Sunday, October 26, 2025
Saturday, October 25, 2025
GEORGE SEFERIS ~
Selva Oscura
When I close my eyes, I find myself in an expansive darkness
the color of dawn; I sense it on your fingertips.
Forget the lie that helped you live.
Bare your feet, bare your eyes —
very few things remain when we've bared ourselves
but in the end we can see them exactly as they are.
When I close my eyes I always find myself on a path,
the yards ruined to the right and left and in the corner
the house with windowpanes beaten by the sun, empty
I thought of your fingertips beating against the panes.
I thought of your heart beating behind the panes
and the very few things that set a man apart from others
are never overcome.
You don't know anything because you looked at the sun.
Your blood dripped into the black leaves of the laurel bush.
I see the nightingale and the marbled moon of evenings past,
when I dragged your blood into the river, dyeing it red.
I ponder — when I ponder — I ponder
my veins and the mystery of your hands,
guiding carefully, descending step by step.
When I close my eyes, I find myself in an expansive garden.
May 1937
____________________________
George Seferis
Book of Exercises II
World Poetry 2024
Translated from the Greek by Jennifer R. Kellogg
Friday, October 24, 2025
MARIO DELL' ARCO ~
Spiral Staircase
In search of a bawdy shade
of blue, without the slightest wisp of cloud,
stair by stair ascend.
I've stumbled, by spiral's end,
out of this world and into heaven.
The Apple
One last apple among the leaves
of the highest branch, the sweetest.
The pickers must've missed it.
No matter — only I
can reach that high.
Watermelon
A man carves watermelons
beneath the green shade
of the vendor's stand.
Dozens of half-moons
make moonlight red.
Star Hunter
Forget about thrushes, quails,
woodcocks! I'm out hunting
stars with a butterfly net.
Undecided between Orion,
Vega, and Scorpio, I bet
on the Herdsman, Bootes.
At dawn I return empty-handed,
net burnt to a crisp.
I Built A Wall
It's my fault. Stone by stone
by stone I built a wall,
walled myself off from the world.
No way out now.
Even if I wanted to
feel your hand, one
step and I'd crack
my head on that wall.
Sunflower
Bright yellow in a field of green,
face to face with the sky,
holding its breath, calls it a day.
Not even the sun, for all its art,
can purge night from the sunflower's heart.
___________________________
Mario dell' Arco
Day Lasts Forever
World Poetry, 2024
translated from Romanesco by Marc Di Martino
Thursday, October 23, 2025
NASSER RABAH ~
Rage
It wasn't you they saw on the television screen, it wasn't you
as they filmed you coming out crumbled from the rubble,
who then was applauding and clamoring for death?
This is what war makes you: it takes your skin off and gives
you a tent, and like a crumpled piece of paper, it throws
your home out with the trash—it plucks your pink heart
and plants gunpowder stones, no wheat fields gleam in
your eyes from now on, no hills of olive groves dream
to be picked, no bunch of kids play on your shoulders,
no grass of remembrance sits with you in the sunset
of the house, nothing here or there except limitless
rage, boiling over to the end of time and distance,
it was not you; it was not a stream of water, it was
a wolf snarling underneath the rubble, wanting
to rip the flesh of these tanks with its teeth.
March 13, 2024
________________________________
Nasser Rabah
Gaza: The Poem Said Its Piece
Translated from the Arabic by
Ammiel Alcalay, Emna Zghal, Khaled Al-Hilli
City Lights Books, 2025
Wednesday, October 22, 2025
Tuesday, October 21, 2025
Monday, October 20, 2025
Sunday, October 19, 2025
Saturday, October 18, 2025
NEW! CHARLES GOODRICH ~
Charles Goodrich
Building Knot House: A Scrapbook
Longhouse, 2025
$12 postpaid,
payable by Paypal or check
please use our email of longhousepoetry@gmail.com
LONGHOUSE
P.O. Box 2454
West Brattleboro
Vermont
05303
Friday, October 17, 2025
LILIANA PONCE ~
I will wait in the real sand,
the tangible form of rock,
in the conversion of fate by breath.
With words I feed the creation of time
— someone else can speak, someone else can write.
Liquid movements cycled by the marrow
of a false body.
The glass absorbs the sky.
I will wait in the sane, in the dust of the rock
—in the shadow of dryness I erase them.
Soothe me with passive thoughts.
Soothe me because I don't exist.
________________________
Liliana Ponce
Theory of the Voice and Dream
translated from the Spanish by Michael Martin Shea
World Poetry 2025
Thursday, October 16, 2025
Wednesday, October 15, 2025
FRANK O'HARA ~
Homosexuality
So we are taking off our masks, are we, and keeping
our mouths shut? as if we'd been pierced by a glance!
The song of an old cow is not more full of judgment
than the vapors which escape one's soul when one is sick;
so I pull the shadows around me like a puff
and crinkle my eyes as if at the most exquisite moment
of a very long opera, and then we are off!
without reproach and without hope that our delicate feet
will touch the earth again, let alone "very soon"
It is the law of my own voice I shall investigate.
I start like ice, my finger to my ear, my ear
to my heart, that proud cur at the garbage can
in the rain. It's wonderful to admire oneself
with complete candor, tallying up the merits of each
of the latrines. 14th Street is drunken and credulous,
53rd tries to tremble but is too at rest. The good
love a park and the inept a railway station,
and there are the divine ones who drag themselves up
and down the lengthening shadow of an Abyssinian head
in the dust, trailing their long elegant heels of hot air
crying to confuse the brave "It's a summer day,
and I want to be wanted more than anything else in the world."
1954, First published, Poetry, Chicago 1970
_____________________
Frank O' Hara
from Super Gay Poems
edited by Stephanie Burt
Belknap Press of Harvard University
2025
Tuesday, October 14, 2025
GURNEY NORMAN ~
July 22, 1937 – October 12, 2025
“When he writes, the page just falls away.”
WENDELL BERRY
ERIN MOURE ~
Evocation
As beautiful as the idea of a shoulder,
the skin of a cup that mirrors the spine,
the spartan stone confesses
stubbornly in the dead limb.
It was not milled oats, it breathed.
It rubbed and pleaded with the sea's tears
it was serrated and sandy
glad levity inviting the barbarian stranger.
It was beautiful as the shoulder of cattle,
between the grass and flies,
between the light of August as dreamed in April
and, and, it was only the palm of her hand.
__________________________
Erin Moure
from Super Gay Poems
edited by Stephanie Burt
Harvard University (Belknap Press)
2025
Monday, October 13, 2025
CINEMA 2 ~
Mehdi Hasan sits down with Palestinian filmmaker Annemarie Jacir and Palestinian actress Hiam Abbas to discuss their latest film ‘Palestine 36,’ which explores the ‘Great Revolt’ against British rule in Palestine from 1936-39, before the Nakba in 1948. The film is Palestine’s official submission to the Oscars for 2026 and received one of the longest ovations from an audience at the Toronto International Film Festival. They also discuss censorship in Hollywood and what it was like filming in the middle of an ongoing genocide.
Sunday, October 12, 2025
Saturday, October 11, 2025
PHILIP LARKIN ~
Days
What are days for?
Days are where we live.
They come, they wake us
Time and time over.
They are to be happy in:
Where can we live but days?
Ah, solving that question
Brings the priest and the doctor
In their long coats
Running over the fields.
_____________________
Philip Larkin
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