Marina Tsvetaeva (1892-1941

x x x

The street awakens. She looks, exhausted With the mute windows' sullen eyes, On sleepy faces, red from the cold, That with thoughts chase the stubborn sleep away. The blackened trees with rime are covered - With trace mysterious of the night's fun, In gleaming brocade sad ones are standing, Just like the dead the alive among. The gray coat mingles, trampled upon, The forage-cup with a wreathe, a bored look, And the red arms, pressed to the ears, And the black apron with the tied books. The street awakens. She looks, unpleasant With mute windows' sullen eyes, it would seem. To sleep, in a happy thought be forgotten, What life seems to us, this is a dream!

A.S.Kline - Poetry In Translation

A Wing, a Flower

A dry, pale winged transient, over water
a day, then a day, this fifty million
times goes back to the start, more than we are,
though not even the first age.
Tiny, winged, pallid darts over
wrinkled grey water. See, in the small,
the minute, the idea, that uniqueness conceals,
the inferred, the wrong
generalisation. Time to begin
again. New, yellow flowers like stars,
tiny in oceans of grass, tormentil’s yellow.
You can’t play games with the Void,
only bow with the mind.
The wing lifts, the flower
creeps, waits, shines.

Janeen Parigrin Rastall

Kyrie
With beads I pray, whisper to
Vincenzo Grossi, Maria Romero,
all the novice saints. I beg
for fear to fall away – the clatter
of unlocked shackles
 
like the child lost
in a crowd pressing
toward a subway door,
who reaches up to grasp
any stranger’s empty hand.

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1192-1822)

Ozymandias

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: `Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear --
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.'

 

Percy Bysshe Shelley :

Sharon Olds (b1942)

Japanese-American Farmhouse, California, 1942

Everything has been taken that anyone
thought worth taking. The stairs are tilted,
scattered with sycamore leaves curled
like ammonites in inland rock.
Wood shows through the paint on the frame
and the door is open--an empty room,
sunlight on the floor. All that is left
on the porch is the hollow cylinder
of an Albert's Quick Oats cardboard box
and a sewing machine. Its extraterrestrial
head is bowed, its scrolled neck
glistens. I was born, that day, near there,
in wartime, of ignorant people.

 

Sharon Olds :

Jane Kenyon (1947-1995)

The Blue Bowl

Like primitives we buried the cat
with his bowl. Bare-handed
we scraped sand and gravel
back into the hole.
They fell with a hiss
and thud on his side,
on his long red fur, the white feathers
between his toes, and his
long, not to say aquiline, nose.

We stood and brushed each other off.
There are sorrows keener than these.

Silent the rest of the day, we worked,
ate, stared, and slept. It stormed
all night; now it clears, and a robin
burbles from a dripping bush
like the neighbor who means well
but always says the wrong thing.

 

Jane Kenyon :

Leonard Cohen - You Want It Darker (Audio)