PRUNING TREES – Po Chu-I “Before my window grow trees; tall trees and dense foliage grows. Sad, alas, the distant view of the mountains: obscured, between them, can be seen just One morning I took a knife and hatchet; with my own hands cut the flourishing branches. Myriads of leaves fall around me in the head, thousands of mountains appear …
Read More »RAINER MARIA RILKE: To be loved is to pass, but love is last
HOW COULD I: “How could I hold it in me, my soul, that your material does not touch; as you remove it over, ad infinitum? I could hide it in a remote corner in the darkness; a stranger quiet refuge, which is not followed to vibrate if it vibrates your deep. But everything that touches us, you and me, together, …
Read More »NOCTURNAL OF CHINA: Where the ice crystals fill the sky, begging you to not wait to take a stem blight
NIGHT THOUGHTS – Li Bai In front of my bed the moon illuminates the earth As reflections of frost. I look up to the shining moon, then bowed his head: my land is far away. MOORING AT NIGHT BRIDGE MAPLE – Zhang Ji The moon sets, ice crystals fill the sky, cry of a crow. In the river a …
Read More »THE NIGHT OF AKIKO YOSANO: A whole spring enclosed inside a peony, observing the body where it remains something of yesterday
“Love or blood? Throughout the spring peony is in this that haunts me. Night falls, I’m alone, alone without a poem.” Her name is Akiko and was born in a winter day in 1878, giving us by her death – in the spring of 1942 – the indelible charm of its tanka poems, where the five lines formed syllables (5, …
Read More »FERNANDO ANTONIO NOGUEIRA PESSOA: I get lost if I encounter, I doubt if I find
“I get lost if I encounter, I doubt if I find, I do not have if I got it. As if I walk, I sleep, but I’m awake. As if asleep, I wake up, and I do not belong. At the end of life is in itself a great insomnia and there’s a shiny rude awakening in everything we think …
Read More »BEHIND THE CHINESE MOUNTAINS: Autumn Wind and white clouds, yellow dust above the cornice
Song of autumn at midnight (Anonymous) “The autumn wind coming through windows The silk curtains come agitated by the breath moves. I raise my head and look at the moon that shines, And I feel joy for the rays that come from thousands of them.” What’s in the mountains? (Tao Hongjing) “What’s in the mountains? Over the mountains there …
Read More »LISTENING TO LI PO: The emotion of a moment in the moonlight, enclosed in syllables that smell of reeds and spring
Thoughts on a quiet night “Before the bed a bright moonbeam on earth seems to be frost shine. He raises his head looking at the bright moon, he bends his head thinking about the native country.” He speaks of daily life in a poetic way, and sometimes with many words. Whatever the emotion of the moment, a monastery or the …
Read More »MARY KONOPNICKA: Her tears still flow, for us, inside the white of the Vistula
“Dead crying … In the great days of the tomb, As I stand in birch Izach and in mourning, Which one wears me about life, after you! Bones on the widely whiten, Ghosts of August have carried Wichrowa zaweieja, Wounded eagle upon me croak, Dead crying. Crying past and the people and things, Cry pennants with the siege of Vienna, …
Read More »A WOMAN CALLED FLORBELA: The sadness that tears apart all, the love that everything blends
Today it is easy, even for a woman to talk about sex and femininity, but have the courage to express their intimate existential anxiety in the early years of the twentieth century, it was a challenge, and a Portuguese poet named Florbela – an illegitimate daughter, born and died in the same month and day, 8th December – had took …
Read More »MATSUO BASHO: PENETRATES THE SILENCE IN THE ROCK
The silence penetrates into the rock a song of cicadas. The first snow! Just to fold the leaves of asphodel. Traveling, sick the way of my dreams on a marsh drained. The old pond! The frog dives – The sound of water. (Matsuo Bashō – 1644/1694)
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