from Jerusalem 1967 - Yehuda Amichai
In this summer of wide-open-eyed hatred
and blind love, I'm begining to belive again
in all the little things that will fill
the holes left by the shells: soil, a bit of grass,
perhaps, after the rains, small insects of every kind.
I think of the children growing up half in the ethics of their fathers
and half in the science of war.
The tears now penetrate into my eyes from the outside
and my ears invent, every day, the footsteps of
the messenger of good tidings.
Translated from the Hebrew by Stephen Mitchell
Big Book Of Poetry
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Beyond the Ash Rains - Agha Shahid Ali
'What have you known of loss That makes you different from other men?'
- Gilgamesh.
When the desert refused my history, Refused to acknowledge that I had lived there, with you, among a vanished tribe,
two, three thousand years ago, you parted the dawn rain, its thickest monsoon curtains,
and beckoned me to the northern canyons. There, among the red rocks, you lived alone. I had still not learned the style of nomads:
to walk between the rain drops to keep dry. Wet and cold, I spoke like a poor man,
without irony. You showed me the relics of our former life, proof that we'd at last found each other, but in your arms I felt
singled out for loss. When you lit the fire and poured the wine, "I am going," I murmured, repeatedly, "going where no one has been and no one will be... Will you come with me?" You took my hand, and we walked through the streets
of an emptied world, vulnerable to our suddenly bare history in which I was,
but you said won't again be, singled out for loss in your arms, won't ever again be exiled, never again, from your arms.
Big Book Of Poetry
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Dream Song - 14 - John Berryman
Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so. After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns, we ourselves flash and yearn, and moreover, my mother told me as a boy (repeatingly) "Ever to confess you're bored means you have no
Inner Resources." I conclude now I have no
inner resources, because I am heavy bored.
Peoples bore me,
literature bores me, especially great literature,
Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes
as bad as achilles,
who loves people and valiant art, which bores me.
And the tranquil hills, & gin, look like a drag
and somehow a dog
has taken itself & its tail considerably away
into the mountains or sea or sky, leaving
behind: me, wag.
Big Book Of Poetry
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