daydreaming w/ Bob Arnold
pure delight —
every Aira title is better
than the last, better
than the first!
There is no way to
go wrong with this New Directions
Storybook Series — simply
walk into your bookstore or
library and look for the tall narrow silver
strip that runs down the spine.
You've found a treasure.
[BA]
Our Parents
How embarrassing they are!
Some of their views
can be extraordinary.
Increasingly, we were torn
between protecting and
disowning them
for at least fifteen minutes.
In the end, when they left,
it had little to do with us.
They don't stick to a plan.
On one level, so focussed
on organising our lives,
on another, as it turns out,
unreliable in their departure.
The Writers
On constantly mishearing "rioting"
as "writing" on the BBC
There has been writing for ten days now
unabated. People are anxious, fed up.
There is writing in Paris, in disaffected suburbs,
but also in small towns, and old ones like Lyon.
The writers have been burning cars; they've thrown
homemade Molotov cocktails at policemen.
Contrary to initial reports, the writers
belong to several communities: Algerian
and Caribbean, certainly, but also Romanian,
Polish, and even French. Some are incredibly
young: the youngest is thirteen.
They stand edigly on street-corners, hardly
looking at each other. Long-standing neglect
and an absence of both authority and employment
have led to what are now ten nights of writing.
2005
______________________________________
Amit Chaudhuri
Sweet Shop
New and Selected Poems, 1985-2023
NYRB, 2023
Like You
Like you I
love love, life, the sweet smell
of things, the sky-blue
landscape of January days.
And my blood boils up
and I laugh through eyes
that have become the buds of tears.
I believe the world is beautiful
and that poetry, like bread, is for everyone.
And that my veins don't end in me
but in the unanimous blood
of those who struggle for life,
love,
little things,
landscape and read,
the poetry of everyone.
El Salvador Will Be
El Salvador will be a pretty
and (without exaggeration) serious country
when working class and peasantry
fertilize and comb and talc it
cure the historical hangover
clean it up reconstruct it
and get it going.
The problem is that today El Salvador
has a thousand rough edges and hundred thousand pitfalls
about five hundred thousand calluses and some blisters
cancers rashes dandruff filthiness
ulcers fractures fevers bad odors.
You have to round it off with a little machete
sandpaper lathe turpentine penicillin
sitz-baths kisses and gunpowder.
translated by Jack Hirschman
_________________
Roque Dalton
Clandestine Poems
introduction by Margaret Randall
Solidarity Publications, 1984
Trees
Is this Orlando's oak or are these oaks from Austin?
Is this Hudson's ombu or the one beside the car
that dragged Julio-my-almost brother from life?
Paz's banyan tree, that was also Shakuntala's?
The willows of Garcilaso? The one that I myself planted?
Poplars of love, or that one in winter
from which half-dead birds fell at my feet?
Trusty figs, among the dust and gardens?
That axis in the tropism of infinite moons,
a pale eucalyptus of perfumed down?
Those with lacquer-red flowers under fiery suns?
The birch/abedul I imagined black, for the ebony/abenuz,
until I touched its white, ringed bark?
The essential tree of Goethe's imagination?
Or the one in whose shade I lost the world
that was itself a murmur of friendly voices
and I see a river flow that is the same always,
whereas I watch it and am no longer the same?
________________
Ida Vitale
Time Without Keys
Translated by Sarah Pollack
New Directions, 2023
Happy Birthday!
"The Pole Star is dying,
The planets bend over it,
They lower it into
A bottomless grave."
The Pole Star is dead,
But shining, shining.
The Pole Star is shining
In a bottomless grave.
The Babes in the Wood
Are sleeping, sleeping.
The Babes in the Wood
And the wolf at the breast.
The moon of late morning
Fadeth for sorrow
For sorrow she fadeth
Far down in the west.
Not a sound in the world
While the Pole Star was dying.
Not the cry of a child,
Nor the crash of a wave.
No sound over Earth
But sighing, sighing,
For the Pole Star alive
In a bottomless grave.
