POETRY

DADDY – You do not do, you do not do any more, black shoe in which I have lived like a foot for thirty years, poor and white, barely daring to breathe or Achoo. Daddy, I have had to kill you. You died before I had time. Marble-heavy, a bag full of God, ghastly statue with one gray toe, big …

THE PEOPLE, YES – The people yes, the people will live on. The learning and blundering people will live on. They will be tricked and sold and again sold, and go back to the nourishing earth for rootholds, the people so peculiar in renewal and comeback, you can’t laugh off their capacity to take it. The mammoth rests between his …

STOPPING BY WOODS ON A SNOWY EVENING – Whose woods these are I think I know. His house is in the village though. He will not see me stopping here, to watch his woods fill up with snow. My little horse must think it queer, to stop without a farmhouse near, between the woods and frozen lake, the darkest evening …

THE FISHERMAN, by William Butler Yeats > Although I can see him still, the freckled man who goes to a gray place on a hill, in gray Connemara clothes, at dawn to cast his flies. It’s long since I began to call up to the eyes, this wise and simple man. All day I’d looked in the face what I …

Among the Roman dialect poets, Trilussa (1871/1950), is by far the most well-known and appreciated outside his own hometown. His mature work falls broadly into two types (sonnets and fables), however, it wasat the poetic fable that Trilussa truly excelled, developing a distinctly cynical Roman version (of the genre of Aesop and La Fontaine). Among his many artistic merits, he …

THINGS GET REARRANGED – The world changes subtly as it goes around. The morning coffee aroma feels like the glow from a honeycomb, while outside the window the olive grove still soaks in the twilight mist. Tiny footsteps follow faint sounds to distant places, but the fisherman has returned and is sitting in the courtyard, watching a bird foraging in …

LETTER TO A FRIEND – Let me tell you about these sheep. In many ways they are like the ocean creatures you know so well: in the benevolence of the creator, they bear children, each has a face of a lad or an old man. These days they are on the hills, a tight flock, a warm flock, with a …

THE GREAT YUNNAN KINGDOM – Wumeng likes to sing after a few drinks, and he always sings the same old song. I’ve heard it many times, but still can’t remember a word of it. Wumeng dreams of building his own empire, calling it The Great Yunnan Kingdom, but the soberer he gets, the more his empire looks like a castle …

WHAT IF YOU SLEPT – What if you slept, and what if in your sleep you dreamed, and what if in your dream you went to heaven, and there plucked a strange and beautiful flower, and what if when you awoke you had that flower in you hand. Ah, what then? http://www.amazon.com/Complete-Poems-Penguin-Classics/dp/0140423532

IF YOU FORGET ME – I want you to know one thing. You know how this is: if I look at the crystal moon, at the red branch of the slow autumn at my window, if I touch near the fire the impalpable ash or the wrinkled body of the log, everything carries me to you, as if everything that …