Poem for 5/9/22 - Al idioma alemán (To the German Language) by Jorge Luis Borges

Jorge Luis Borges

Al idioma alemán (translation below)

Mi destino es la lengua castellana,

El bronce de Francisco de Quevedo,

Pero en la lenta noche caminada,

Me exaltan otras músicas más íntimas.

Alguna me fue dada por la sangre—

Oh voz de Shakespeare y de la Escritura—,

Otras por el azar, que es dadivoso,

Pero a ti, dulce lengua de Alemania,

Te he elegido y buscado, solitario.

A través de vigilias y gramáticas,

De la jungla de las declinaciones,

Del diccionario, que no acierta nunca

Con el matiz preciso, fui acercándome.

Mis noches están llenas de Virgilio,

Dije una vez; también pude haber dicho

de Hölderlin y de Angelus Silesius.

Heine me dio sus altos ruiseñores;

Goethe, la suerte de un amor tardío,

A la vez indulgente y mercenario;

Keller, la rosa que una mano deja

En la mano de un muerto que la amaba

Y que nunca sabrá si es blanca o roja.

Tú, lengua de Alemania, eres tu obra

Capital: el amor entrelazado

de las voces compuestas, las vocales

Abiertas, los sonidos que permiten

El estudioso hexámetro del griego

Y tu rumor de selvas y de noches.

Te tuve alguna vez. Hoy, en la linde

De los años cansados, te diviso

Lejana como el álgebra y la luna.

(1972)

To The German Language

My destiny is in the Spanish language,

the bronze words of Francisco de Quevedo,

but in the long, slow progress of the night,

different, more intimate musics move me.

Some have been handed down to me by blood--

voices of Shakespeare, language of the Scriptures--

others by chance, which has been generous;

but you, gentle language of Germany,

I chose you, and I sought you out alone.

By way of grammar books and patient study,

through the thick undergrowth of the declensions,

the dictionary, which never puts its thumb on

the precise nuance, I kept moving closer.

My nights were full of overtones of Virgil,

I once said; but I could as well have named

Hölderlin, Angelus Silesius.

Heine lent me his lofty nightingales;

Goethe, the good fortune of late love,

at the same time both greedy and indulgent:

Keller, the rose which one hand leaves behind

in the closed fist of a dead man who adored it,

who will never know if it is white or red.

German language, you are your masterpiece:

love interwound in all your compound voices

and open vowels, Sounds which accommodate

the studious hexameters of Greek

and undercurrents of jungles and of nights.

Once, I had you. Now, at the far extreme

of weary years, I feel you have become

as out of reach as algebra and the moon.

 

Poem for Mother's Day - The Lanyard by Billy Collins

 The Lanyard

BY BILLY COLLINS

The other day I was ricocheting slowly

off the blue walls of this room,

moving as if underwater from typewriter to piano,

from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor,

when I found myself in the L section of the dictionary

where my eyes fell upon the word lanyard.

No cookie nibbled by a French novelist

could send one into the past more suddenly—

a past where I sat at a workbench at a camp

by a deep Adirondack lake

learning how to braid long thin plastic strips

into a lanyard, a gift for my mother.

I had never seen anyone use a lanyard

or wear one, if that’s what you did with them,

but that did not keep me from crossing

strand over strand again and again

until I had made a boxy

red and white lanyard for my mother.

She gave me life and milk from her breasts,

and I gave her a lanyard.

She nursed me in many a sick room,

lifted spoons of medicine to my lips,

laid cold face-cloths on my forehead,

and then led me out into the airy light

and taught me to walk and swim,

and I, in turn, presented her with a lanyard.

Here are thousands of meals, she said,

and here is clothing and a good education.

And here is your lanyard, I replied,

which I made with a little help from a counselor.

Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,

strong legs, bones and teeth,

and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered,

and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp.

And here, I wish to say to her now,

is a smaller gift—not the worn truth

that you can never repay your mother,

but the rueful admission that when she took

the two-tone lanyard from my hand,

I was as sure as a boy could be

that this useless, worthless thing I wove

out of boredom would be enough to make us even.

 

“The Lanyard” from The Trouble With Poetry: and Other Poems by Billy Collins, copyright © 2005 by Billy Collins. Used by permission of Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. 

Poem for 5/5/22 - Israel Independence Day - An Arab Shepherd is Searching for His Goat on Mount Zion by Yehuda Amichai

An Arab Shepherd is Searching for His Goat on Mount Zion

Yehuda Amichai, translated by Chana Bloch

An Arab shepherd is searching for his goat on Mount Zion
and on the opposite mountain I am searching
for my little boy.
An Arab shepherd and a Jewish father
both in their temporary failure.
Our voices meet
above the Sultan's Pool in the valley between us.
Neither of us wants
the child or the goat to get caught in the wheels
of the terrible Had Gadya machine.

Afterward we found them among the bushes
and our voices came back inside us, laughing and crying.

Searching for a goat or a son
has always been the beginning
of a new religion in these mountains.

Poems for 5/4/22 - Two Poems by May Sarton - from Letters from Maine (1985)

Two Poems by May Sarton

from Letters from Maine (1985)

The Wood Pigeons

The wood pigeons

Punctuate the silence

With coos, over and over,

Over and over,

One long, three shorts,

Then pause,

Then resume.

Nothing else moves

Or makes a sound,

Flat blue sky

Over silent shining sea.

Peace

Interrupted

By the wood pigeons

Insistent, monotonous

"Spring is coming

Spring is coming."

Coo, coo-coo,

How can we stand it?

Madness is in the air.

April in Maine

The days are cold and brown,

Brown fields, no sign of green,

Brown twigs, not even swelling,

And dirty snow in the woods.

But as the dark flows in

The tree frogs begin

Their shrill sweet singing,

And we lie on our beds

Through the ecstatic night,

Wide awake, cracked open.

There will be no going back.

Poem for 5/3/22 - I, 10 from The Book of Mercies by Leonard Cohen

From The Book of Mercies, by Leonard Cohen

I, 10

You have sweetened your word on my lips. My son too has heard the song that does not belong to him. From Abraham to Augustine, the nations have not known you, though every cry, every curse is raised on the foundation of your holiness. You placed me in this mystery and you let me sing, though only from this curious corner. You bound me to my fingerprints, as you bind every man, except the ones who need no binding. You led me to this field where I can dance with a broken knee. You led me safely to this night, you gave me a crown of darkness and light, and tears to greet my enemy. Who can tell of your glory, who can number your forms, who dares expound the interior life of god? And now you feed my household, you gather them to sleep, to dream, to dream freely, you surround them with the fence of all that I have seen. Sleep, my son, my small daughter, sleep - this night, this mercy has no boundaries.

Poem for 5/2/22 - The Big Heart by Anne Sexton

 The Big Heart by Anne Sexton

"Too many things are occurring for even a big heart to hold." - From an essay by W. B. Yeats

Big heart,
wide as a watermelon,
but wise as birth,
there is so much abundance
in the people I have:
Max, Lois, Joe, Louise,
Joan, Marie, Dawn,
Arlene, Father Dunne,
and all in their short lives
give to me repeatedly,
in the way the sea
places its many fingers on the shore,
again and again
and they know me,
they help me unravel,
they listen with ears made of conch shells,
they speak back with the wine of the best region.
They are my staff.
They comfort me.

They hear how
the artery of my soul has been severed
and soul is spurting out upon them,
bleeding on them,
messing up their clothes,
dirtying their shoes.
And God is filling me,
though there are times of doubt
as hollow as the Grand Canyon,
still God is filling me.
He is giving me the thoughts of dogs,
the spider in its intricate web,
the sun
in all its amazement,
and a slain ram
that is the glory,
the mystery of great cost,
and my heart,
which is very big,
I promise it is very large,
a monster of sorts,
takes it all in--
all in comes the fury of love.

Poem for 4/29/22 - Yiddishland by Erika Meitner

 Yiddishland

BY ERIKA MEITNER

The people who sang to their children in Yiddish and worked in Yiddish

and made love in Yiddish are nearly all gone. Phantasmic. Heym.

Der may kumt shoyn on. The month of May has arrived. At the cemetery

my aunt has already draped my grandmother's half of the tombstone

with a white sheet. The fabric is tacked to the polished granite

by gray and brown rocks lifted from my grandfather's side of the plot.

He's been gone over twenty-five years. We are in Beth Israel Cemetery,

Block 50, Woodbridge, New Jersey for the unveiling and the sky is like lead.

We are in my grandmother's shtetl in Poland, but everyone is dead.

The Fraternal Order of Bendin-Sosnowicer Sick & Benevolent Society

has kept these plots faithfully next to their Holocaust memorial—

gray stone archway topped with a menorah and a curse: Pour out Thy wrath

upon the Nazis and the wicked Germans for they have destroyed the seed of Jacob.

May the almighty avenge their blood. Great is our sorrow, and no consolation is to be found!

My sister, in her cardboard kippah, opens her prayer book—a special edition

she borrowed from rabbinical school—and begins to read in Aramaic.

Not one of us can bring ourselves to add anything to the fixed liturgy.

My son is squatting at the next grave over, collecting decorative stones

from the Glickstein's double plot. We eat yellow sponge cake and drink

small cups of brandy to celebrate my grandmother's life. We are no longer mourners,

says Jewish law. Can we tell this story in Yiddish? Put the words in the right places?

My son cracks a plastic cup until it's shredded to strips, looks like a clear spider,

sounds like an error. When my sister finally pulls back the sheet, all the things

my grandmother was barely fit on the face of the marker. A year ago at the funeral,

her friend Goldie told me she was strong like steel, soft like butter—women like that

they don't make any more. My mother tries to show my grandmother—now this gray marker—

my son, how he's grown, but he squirms from her arms. Ihr gvure iz nit tzu beshraiben.

Her strength was beyond description. The people who sang to their children in Yiddish

and admonished them in Yiddish are nearly all gone, whole vanished towns that exist now

only in books, their maps drawn entirely by heart: this unknown continent, this language

of nowhere, these stones from a land that never was. Der may kumt shoyn on.

The month of May has arrived. Der vind voyet. The wind howls,

says I'm not a stranger anywhere. On the stones we write all we remember,

but we are poor guardians of memory. Can you say it in Yiddish? Can you bless us?

 

Erika Meitner, "Yiddishland" from Copia. Copyright © 2014 by Erika Meitner.  Reprinted by permission of BOA Editions, Ltd.