Osip Mandelstam, untitled

You took away all the oceans and all the room.
You gave me my shoe-size in earth with bars around it.
Where did it get you?  Nowhere.
You left me my lips, and they shape words, even in silence.




Osip Mandelstam

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Mahmoud Darwish, "The Earth Is Closing On Us"

The earth is closing on us, pushing us through the last passage, and we tear off our limbs to pass through. The earth is squeezing us. I wish we were its wheat so we could die and live again. I wish the earth was     our mother So she'd be kind to us. I wish we were pictures on the rocks for our dreams to carry As mirrors. We saw the faces of those to be killed by the last of us in the last defense of the soul. We cried over their children's feast. We saw the faces of those who'll throw our children Out of the windows of the last space. Our star will hang up in mirrors. Where should we go after the last frontiers? Where should the birds fly after the last sky? Where should the plants sleep after the last breath of air? We will write our names with scarlet steam. We will cut off the head of the song to be finished by our flesh. We will die here, here in the last passage. Here and here our blood will plant its olive tree. Mahmoud Darwish
Read more

Eavon Boland, "An Elegy for My Mother in which She Scarcely Appears"

I knew we had to grieve for the animals a long time ago: weep for them, pity them. I knew it was our strange human duty to write their elegies after we arranged their demise. I was young then and able for the paradox. I am older now and ready for the question: What happened to them all? I mean to those old dumb implements which have no eyes to plead with us like theirs no claim to make on us like theirs? I mean— there was a singing kettle. I want to know why no one tagged its neck or ringed the tin base of its extinct design or crouched to hear its rising shriek in winter or wrote it down with the birds in their blue sleeves of air torn away with the trees that sheltered them. And there were brass fire dogs which lay out all evening on the grate and in the heat thrown at them by the last of the peat fire but no one noted down their history or put them in the old packs under slate-blue moonlight. There was a wooden clotheshorse, absolutely steady, without sinews, with no mane and no mea...
Read more

Carl Dennis, "Birthday"

 Now that the time remaining is insubstantial, I need to review my history while asking What exactly it suggests I've lived for, What pleasures or duties, what moods Of brief elation or extended calm. To expect a meaning deeper than that, To believe in a purpose beyond my own Furthered by me all along without my knowing, Is to warm myself at a fire painted on canvas. If I want the company of the nonexistent, I'm better off with the crowd of shadows who lost Their only chance to escape the darkness On the night I happened to be conceived. I wonder how many of them would have felt more lucky With the family allotted me than I did, more pleased With the neighborhood. So many chances for them To go out and investigate, in streets that often bored me, Rumors that the beautiful had been sighted locally. The sassafras tree in the lot behind the shoe store Might have been mentioned by some, Or the straight-backed, white-haired woman Waiting for the bus in the rain at Main and Biddle. E...
Read more