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THIS IS A HUMAN BEING
this is a human being
look what an A-bomb has done to it
the flesh swells so horribly
and both men and women are reduced to one form
"Help me!" says the faint cry
leaking from the swelled lips, the terribly
burned mess of a festered face
this, this is a human being
this is a man's face
-- Tamiki Hara
trans. Ichiro Kono & Rikutaro Fukuda |
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FREDERICK DOUGLASS 1817-1895
Douglass was someone who,
Had he walked with wary foot
And frightened tread,
From very indecision
Might be dead,
Might have lost his soul,
But instead decided to be bold
And capture every street
On which he set his feet,
To route each path
Toward freedom's goal,
To make each highway
Choose his compass' choice,
To all the world cried,
Hear my voice! . . .
Oh, to be a beast, a bird,
Anything but a slave! he said.
Who would be free
Themselves must strike
The first blow, he said.
He died in 1895.
He is not dead.
-- Langston Hughes |
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MUSEUM
So very quiet in the glass case,
a stone ax et cetera.
The constellations rotate,
many we's have perished,
many we's have been born,
and many a time comets have just escaped collision,
many dishes et cetera were smashed,
Eskimo dogs walked on the South Pole,
great tombs were built, both east and west,
collections of poems were dedicated,
only recently,
they split an atom,
and a president's daughter sang a song . . .
O so many things have happened
since then.
Yet so very quiet in the glass case,
a stone ax et cetera.
-- Shuntaro Tanikawa
trans: Ichiro Kono & Rikutaro Fukuda
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ABOUT SOME WHO SURVIVED
When the man
was pulled out
from
under the debris
of his bombed house,
he shook himself
and said:
Never again
At least not right away
-- Gunter Kunert
(trans. Charlotte Melin) |
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THE LAST DROP OF AIR
The sweethearts were dying
buried in the rubble of the cellar.
When there was no more air
and death
forgot to come
who gave who
the last drop of air.
-- Anna Swir |
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THE CITY OF BEGGARS
The wops came down to the port
When we docked
Dressed in the most fantastic rags,
Infantry caps on their heads
And feet tied in flour bags,
A garibaldian cape and throat scarved
With a dirty towel,
Half wild and half starved.
We threw them bread and cigarettes
Crowding over the starboard rail
To see what Italy was like.
They ducked their heads in an awful thanks,
Cramming the bread in a tin pail.
And we who had come on the foreign ship
Risking shark and submarine
Looked at the city the troops had won.
She lay in the Mediterranean sun
Under her moored balloons
With great holes knocked in her
As though with a wild hammer.
Fallen masonry and dust
Hanging balconies and stairs
Iron and iron rust
Abasso Il Duce on warehouse walls
And no glass anywheres.
Ruined and in ruins.
And American and Britisher
Who'd shelled her vias
And mined her waters
Hung on the pitted walls of their quarters
Their bulging aphrodites,
Rinsing their loneliness with cheap wine.
Morte del fascismo! Too late, too late.
The operatic dream and the reclaimed Caesar
Dredged from the swamp
Had climaxed in this:
Typhus and the walls down,
The gas escaping with a slow hiss.
And the adored jaw, the blared news,
To heat the mild Italian blood,
The second empire
From Tunis to the Nile
Had triumphed so:
The kids flopping in soldier shoes,
A cigarette picked out of the mud,
The bread depots and the water doles
In a tin cup,
The garibaldian cape shot full of bullet holes.
Italy, April 1944
--- Alfred Hayes
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THEY
Sadr City, 28 August 2004
took him inside the house
detained
his family on the patio
cut off the plastic cuffs
shot him in the head, twice,
dragged him out
his wife
hysterical, wailing
throwing dirt up in the air
beat on herself with both hands
they watched, shocked
she placed her baby
on the bleeding body
this had not occurred
to the video wars
racketing the screens
of their video games
yellow ribbons
neatly looped and swallow-tailed
on trees and cars, boding
their soldiers coming home
had envisioned nothing
as mad
as a baby's blind warmth
on a man's corpse
--- James Scully
(from Donatello's Version,
from Curbstone Press,
April 2007) |
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LEAFLET No.1 TO THE 11TH GRADE STUDENTS
I will not burn a store
My daughter's boyfriend will not smash shop windows
But you
You
You
The students of the 11th grade
One day you will put Dizengoff Center in flames
And then
The oligarchy that scrubs the pavements with the youth
That brainwashes them
That sends them to kill and be killed
That hangs them out to dry like a rag on the terrace of poverty
Will piss out of fear from under the armchair
And with sweaty hands will take out the book
And write you that big check
That big check
And you'll get your balls back
I see this day with my eyes
From Bar-Kochba Street to King George
Cracking store store bank bank
Dizengoff Center flares like a holiday bonfire
From the ashes of the money burning in the safes
The honour for work the social logic the joy the pride
And AH HA HA HA
Poverty wiped out misery ends
--- Aharon Shabtai, 2007
Note: Dizengoff Center is Tel Aviv's largest shopping mall.
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THE POET'S COAT
for Jeff Male (1946-2003)
When I cough, people duck away,
afraid of the coal miner's disease,
the imagined eruption of blood
down the chin. In the emergency room
the doctor gestures at the X-ray
where the lung crumples like a tossed poem.
You heard me cough, slipped off your coat
and draped it with ceremony across my shoulders,
so I became the king of rain and wind.
Keep it, you said. You are my teacher.
I kept it, a trench coat with its own film noir detective swagger.
The war in Viet Nam snaked rivers of burning sampans
through your brain, but still your hands
filled with poems gleaming like fish.
The highways of Virginia sent Confederate ghost-patrols
to hang you in dreams, a Black man with too many books,
but still you tugged the collar of your coat around my neck.
Now you are dead, your heart throbbing too fast
for the doctors at the veterans' hospital to keep the beat,
their pill bottles rattling, maracas in a mambo for the doomed.
On the night of your memorial service in Boston,
I wore your coat in a storm along the Florida shoreline.
The wind stung my face with sand, and with every slap
I remembered your ashes; with every salvo of arrows
in the rain your coat became the armor of a samurai.
On the beach I found the skeleton of a blowfish,
his spikes and leopard skin eaten away by the conqueror salt.
Your coat banished the conqueror back into the sea.
Soon your ashes fly to the veterans' cemetery at Arlington,
where once a Confederate general
would have counted you among his mules and pigs.
This poet's coat is your last poem.
I want to write a poem like this coat,
with buttons and pockets and green cloth,
a poem useful as a coat to a coughing man.
Teach me.
--- Martin Espada
(from The Republic of Poetry,
W.W. Norton, 2006)
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BEATITUDE / MORTMAIN
Bless the olive
our greenest fuel.
Crushed, savored, lit
it nurtures,
it illuminates.
Sold, it is a living.
Bulldozed . . .
it's history.
But when
the dead hands
of the six million
sow Lebanon's
groves with
evisceration --
they hang,
by the millions
unharvested --
their whirlwind
is yet to be reaped.
-- Robert Bagg
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DEEDS
The smell is of something burning
even when one doesn't know what.
Freedom, so guarded now,
what will it smell like?
How will it look from above
or from inside
or from behind
in ten or twenty years?
How will one explain to children
that once one
let trees be poisoned
let children be burned?
And what will
the history books say
after his death?
With whom will they compare him?
--- Erich Fried
translated by Agnes Stein
(from FOUR GERMAN POETS, Red Dust Books, 1979)
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OLD WOMAN WITH SMALL BOY
Frightened hunched over
looking for the last secrets of life
in the ground she walks on
infinitely tired of not being able
to even make an effort
all her spirit dimmed by the teasing of the light
with nothing to forget and everything present
weighing her down more each day
and she blaming her jitters on the earthquake
but he's all dolled up in his spotless sailor suit
absolutely taken with the birds flying past
-- Roque Dalton
translated by Hardie St. Martin
(from SMALL HOURS OF THE NIGHT,
Curbstone Press)
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IT'S THIS WAY
I stand in the advancing light,
my hands hungry, the world beautiful.
My eyes can't get enough of the trees --
they're so hopeful, so green.
A sunny road runs through the mulberries,
I'm at the window of the prison infirmary.
I can't smell the medicines --
carnations must be blooming nearby.
It's this way:
being captured is beside the point,
the point is not to surrender.
--- Nazim Hikmet
(translated from the Turkish by
Randy Blasing & Mutlu Konuk)
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IS SOMETHING MISSING?
for Grace and Bob
I must have lived my life all wrong,
never having had any grief counselors
or psychologists to comfort me on every move --
Imagine! -- I endured the death of my friend
all by myself and for me every new town
was a great adventure. Maybe that's why
I seldom cry at movies and am always ready
to kiss death on the mouth.
--- Alexander Taylor
(from DREAMING AT THE GATES OF FURY) |
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