Czeslaw Milosz (1911-2004)

Veni Seer

Come, Holy Spirit,
bending or not bending the grasses,
appearing or not above our heads in a tongue of flame,
at hay harvest or when they plough in the orchards,
or when snow covers crippled firs in the Sierra Nevada.

I am only a human being: I need visible signs.
I tire easily, building the stairway of abstraction.
Many a time I asked, you know it well,
that the statue in church lift its hand, only once, just once, for me.
But I understand that signs must be human,
therefore, call one person, anywhere on earth,
not me-after all I have some decency-
and allow me, when I look at that person,
to marvel at you.

 

Czeslaw Milosz :

Paul Celan (1920-1970)

With Every Thought

With every Thought I went
out of the World: there you were,
you my Gentle One, you my Open One, and –
you received us.

Who
says that for us everything died,
that for us there the Eye broke?
Everything woke, all things began.

Vast, a Sun came swimming by, bright
a Soul and a Soul engaged, clear,
masterfully made a silence for it
a path ahead.

Lightly
you opened your Lap, quiet
rose a Breath in the Aether,
and what became cloud, was it not,
was it not Form, and for us then,
was it not
as good as a Name?

 

Paul Celan :

Wole Soyinka (b.1934)

Night

Your hand is heavy, Night, upon my brow.
I bear no heart mercuric like the clouds,
to dare.
Exacerbation from your subtle plough.
Woman as a clam, on the sea's cresent.
I saw your jealous eye quench the sea's
Flouorescence, dance on the pulse incessant
Of the waves. And I stood, drained
Submitting like the sands, blood and brine
Coursing to the roots. Night, you rained
Serrated shadows through dank leaves
Till, bathed in warm suffusion of your dappled cells
Sensations pained me, faceless, silent as night thieves.
Hide me now, when night children haunt the earth
I must hear none! These misted cells will yet
Undo me; naked, unbidden, at Night's muted birth.

Wole Soyinka :

Herta Muller

2.

 These days I don’t think of youBut after the soot covers me.
begin to wonder where those Evenings have gone, those wanderings
In the spacious lawns of enchantment That smacked of no design,
though We were bent on making a sense The early birds get their worms
lie in the tireless ticking of my old watch Counting the bits of frozen blood,
Listening to the worms That are in all of us Then I begin to crawl towards
the womb That threw me off a long way back And look for the dark,
 the black hole To suck me up.

Salvador Dali (1904-1989)

The Art of Picasso

          the biological
          and dynastic phenomenon
          which constitutes the cubism
          of
          Picasso
          has been
the first great imaginative cannibalism
surpassing the experimental ambitions
of modern mathematical physics.

Sergei Alexandrovitch Yesenin (1895-1925)

What I have retained of my own -
Just a whistle. That's all I can.
What I've got - just an ill renown
Of a ribald and filthy man.

What a funny and comic disfavor!
Life is full of this comic woe.
It's a shame I despised my Savior.
It's a pity I can't stand Him now.

Golden vistas, so far, so distant -
All's got burned in life's fiery gyre,
And my ribaldry was so indecent
Just to make it a brighter fire.

Poets always caressed and scrawled.
They are destined to act like that.
Snow-white roses and muddy toads
Were the ones whom I wanted to wed.

Though I failed, both in parts and in whole,
To achieve that ambitious dream,
But if Satan obsessed the soul
So the angels abode therein.

Now it's time to depart from here.
Fore the moment I turn cold and still
I would like the ones who'll be near
To accomplish my dying will.

So that they, for all of my bygones,
For my sins which were hard and dark,
Let me die on a bed under icons
Simply clad in the Russian sark.

 

Sergey Alexandrovich Yesenin :

Bei Xiao Huang (c.1970)

Ferry

• by Bei Xiaohuang


• Chancing to query, I give Baidu.com* a try.
• Just like when lost in the hills, I ask for direction
• from a wrinkled old granny.


• One day, I keyed in “Bei Xiao Huang”^,
• and found a few traces of a man:
• he has the habit of using a green mugwort twig,
• dipping it in the moon-lit brook
• and writing down seductive, inconsequential words.


• Baidu? When will my inquiry
• lead me to my moon maiden, peaceful and tranquil,
• among the rustling reeds at the water’s edge.


• Ferry? There will come a day
• when I arrive at the flowery other shore.
• Will anyone there be gently tapping the keys Bei – Xiao – Huang?
• Like his name, he still lives quietly in the light of the day.

           *a search engine

          ^Bei Xiao Huang, little northern wasteland, the poet’s pen name.

• from 21st Century Chinese Poetry, No. 6