Returning this week where I left off last week in "Part III: The Post  Classical World (A.D. 250-1200" in World Poetry, an Anthology of Verse from Antiquity to Our Time. As I  said last week, it's a huge book with over 1,200 pages of poetry.

Also, I have a few other poems from my library, plus my stuff, new from last week, and old, from my second eBook, Goes Around, Comes Around.

Photos are  from the Gulf coast around Corpus Christi, where we lived for fifteen years and then, moving north, from the Texas hills around San Antonio where we have lived since 1993..













For all of you who have been waiting (yes, I mean both of you), here's my first new poem of the week.





















My first library poem this week is not from my library but by poet-friend and freelance writer Bharat Shekhar.












Outside In - Inside Out

Lamp now
lampoon shadows
throwing no light
on substance
that casts them

Words too
scurry past
their meanings
to hide in
Xerox machines,
presentation templates
advertisement billboards,
political pamphlets
and daily doublespeak...
from where they re-emerge
banal photocopies of themselves,
or precast fabricated molds
that dull, obscure, hype up
play down aggrandize , falsify...

Inside flags,
there's a riot of colours
as the dominant hue
tries to rub others out,
or make them wear
its own shades.

And I ma chaos,
leading my wolves,
being led by them,
loaning them out,
(the good one or the bad)
to  the mood of  the moment,
which is their highest bidder












This piece is the first this week from my second eBook, Goes Around, Comes Around.

The book is a collection of 85  my favorite poems I wrote in 2010.


 





















This poem from my library is by Rosmarie Waldrop, taken  from her book Another Language, published by Talisman Publishers in 1997.

A poet,  translator, and publisher, Waldrop was born in Germany in 1935 and has lived in the United States since 1958.











Between
      for Ingo

I'm  not quite at home
on either side of the Atlantic
I'm not irritated the fish
kept me
a home makes you forget
unaware
where you are
unless you  think you'd like
to be some other place
I can't think I'd like to be
some other place
places are much the same
aware
I'm nowhere
I stand securely in a liquid pane
touched on all sides
to change your country
doesn't make you
grow (a  German doll
into  an image of America?)
it doesn't make you change so much
you can't remember
I remember
things are much the same
so much the same the
differences are barbed
I try out living at a distance
watching from a window
immobile
not all here
or there
a creature  with gills and lungs
I live in shallow water
but
when it rains
I inherit the land












Here's another new, inspired as usual by olden days.

















I ended last week with Number 1 of Part III with the "Golden Age of Courtly Verse in India." Next from there is the length title "China: Three Kingdoms Period Through the Tang Dynasty; Korea; Early Poetry in the Chinese Style."

And from that period in China, one of the greatest of the Chinese masters, Wang Wei (699-761).

The poem was translated by Tony Barnstone, Willis Barnstone and  Xu Haixin.












Arriving at Ba Gorge in the Morning

Daybreak in late spring, I embark at Ba Gorge,
already missing the emperor's city.
A solitary woman washes in the clear river
as many cocks crow into the morning sun.
Junks for a floating market in this land of waters.
A mountain bridge steps over the treetops.
Climbing high, I see thousands of wells
and two bright rivers far below.
Here  people use a strange dialect
but birds repeat the sound of my old home.
The sorrow at leaving my city fades
before the old joy of being in new mountains.



And from the same period, Li Po (701-762), said by many to be the greatest of all the Chinese masters, as translated by Elling O.Eide.


Inscribed on the Wall of  Hsu Hsuan Ping's Retreat

   I go  along chanting the way-house  poem
And come to visit the immortal's dwelling.
   His lofty tracks are lost on misty ranges,
The Great Void blocked by clouded forests.
I peer into the courtyard deserted and silent,
     I lean on a  column to dawdle in vain.
   No doubt turned to a far-flying crane,
   He'll be back in a thousand years of so.












Here's another from my book, Goes Around, Comes Around.























This poem  is by Reginald Gibbons. It's  taken  from his book Creatures of the Day, published by Louisiana  State University Press in 2008.

Born and Raised in  Houston, Gibbons  earned his BA in Spanish and Portuguese at Princeton University and his MA and Ph.D in comparative literature at Stanford.








Enough

                       Walking in  a small park,
I  ask myself  what to
                        think of Thebes, Leeds  Baghdad
Dacca, Lagos ,Lhasa,
                        Rome, Prague, Perth, La Paz, Guam,
Ho Chi  Minh, Pskov, Lodz, Durg,
                        Dresden, Elabuga.

-

Constant splashing of the
                         fountain - shapeless water
 thrown from iron birds,
                         tall  cranes, into all
ways yielding air, air strong
                          enough,though, to carry
on its bright back the scents
                           of yellow,  red, peach, pink
petals on this cloudy
                           morning of cool summer,
the white light  is wrong, it
                           is sifting down as  slow
as snow, church bells, nine times,
                          make a dull comforting
sound but cannot make sense .

-

Alone till now, I hear
                              others nearby, and led
into this flower park
                              by her  grandmother  comes
on tiptoe a pale small
                               girl  with straight red hair,  in
a fine blue  dress  and white
                               stockings and  shiny shoes,
they're red,  too, abruptly
                               she  pulls her  hand free,with
her own flourishing she
                               prances ahead on  the
as yet untrodden, art-
                               fully raked gravel walk,
she's enough for herself.

-

I  yield to her her place,
                               retreat to a bench that
says who it remembers,
                               as I'm always doing,
the little girl laughs with
                               joy at the cranes, joy's real,
the water and  cranes real,
                              among  these quieter streets,
in the midst of lucky
                              houses never  damaged.












This next, another military memory from San Angelo, Texas, pretty remote, only there for three months, but not a bad place.
























Still in the third part of the World Poetry anthology, I move into number 3, "Japan: From the Earliest Verse Though the Heian Period."

The ladies, as well as the men of the Court, we expected to learn the arts, including poetry. This series is by one of the most well known of them, Lady Ise (875?-(38?). Her poem was translated by Estuko Terasaki with Irma Brandeis.









Four Poems

1
Lightly forsaking
the Spring mist as it rises,
the wild geese are setting off.
Have they learned to live
in a flowerless country?

2
Because we suspected
the pillow could say "I know,"
we slept without it.
Nevertheless my name
is being bandied like dust.

3
A flower of waves
blossoms in  the distance
and ripples shoreward,
as though a breeze had quickened
the sea and set it blooming.

4
If it is you there
in the light boat  on  the pond,
I long to beg you
"Do not go; linger a while
among us here in this place."












Another from Goes Around, Comes Around.














I wanted to write something outrageous today...

but it's still too close
to the election
and my outrage gauge
is hung on
empty...

so I thought I'd write
something serious instead,
a serious consideration
of the nation's and the world's
condition
but that only ignites
panic
attacks
and howling hysterical
laughter

then I was thinking
I'd write about
sex
but I'm getting kind of
old and my memory isn't
as good as it used to be,
nor so stiffly resistant to the
lassitude
of time

so maybe I could write
about love,
o one's ever too old
for love, they say, but that's
the problem,
poets young and old
have been writing about love
for ten thousand years, longer
than  that if you believe the drawings
on the walls in the caves of
Poontanghia,
so how could I possibly
compete,
what new is there to be said
about love,
except that I caught it and unlike
a three-day flue, it has stayed with me,
fevers morning and night
for 40 years,
resistant through the liquid
flow of time
to all natural or supernatural
events
that might deny and
discourage
it...

or
I could write about my lover's legs
and the amazing way they
join at the hip
but I don't want to get too graphic
this morning
because that would be outrageous
in this august company
and I'm completely out of outrage
since the last
election








The next two pieces is from Yo Soy Joaquin/I am Joaquin, an epic poem, one of the earliest and most widely read of works associated with the Chicano movement of the 1960s. It is a bilingual book, in Spanish and English. The first piece is the first lines of the epic. The second is further on in the book.

The poet is Rodolfo "Corky" Gonzales, born the son of a migrant worker  in Denver  in 1928. He was a professional boxer, packing house worker, lumberjack, farm worker, human  rights activist, publisher and businessman






from Yo Soy Joaquin/I Am Joaquin

I am Joaquin,
lost  in a world of confusion,
caught up in the whirl of a
               gringo  society,
confused by the rules,
scorned by attitudes,
suppressed by manipulation,
and destroyed by modern society.
My fathers
    lost the economic battle
and won
    the struggle of cultural survival
And now!
   I must choose
                         between
the paradox of
victory of the spirit
despite physical hunger,
                             or
   to  exist in the grasp
of American social neurosis,
sterilization of the soul
     and a full stomach...


~~~~~~~


I am  Cuauhtemoc,
proud and noble,
            leader of men,
king of an empire
civilized beyond the dreams
    of the gachupin Cortes,
who also is  the blood
    the image of myself.
I am the Mayan prince.
I am Nezahualcoyotl,
graet leader of the Chichimecas.
I am the sword and flame of Cortes
                                        the despot
                                                And
I am the eagle and serpent of
                       the Aztec civilization
I owned the land as far as the eye
could see under the crown of Spain,
and I toiled on my earth
and gave my Indian sweat and blood
           for the Spanish master
who ruled with tyranny over man and
beast and all the he could trample.
                                          but...
            THE GROUND WAS MINE.
I was both tyrant and slave.

As Christian church  took its place
    in God's good  name,
to take and use my virgin strength and
                                    trusting faith,
the priests,
           both good and bad,
                                           took -
but
     gave a lasting rruth that
             Spaniard
                     Indian
                             Mestizo
were all God's children.
And
      from these words grew men
                      who prayed and fought
                                                        for
their own worth as human beings,
                     for
                             that
               GOLDEN MOMENT
                              of
                      FREEDOM...












A little fun with  current events.
























Moving on now to section 4, "Arabia: From Pre-Islamic Verse Through the Eleventh Century", still from the third part of the World Poetry anthology.

There are mostly long poems in this section, but I did find this shorter one, a poem of mourning by Abu Dhu'ayb Al-Hudhali (died 649). The poem was translated by Omar S. Pound.










Lament for Loss of Five Sons in a Plague

Run down by fate's spite
my body hangs, a mantle on a broom;

with wealth enough to ease all pain
I turn at night from back to belly
side after side after side.

Who put pebbles on my couch when my sons died?

I tried but could not shield
them well enough from fate
whose talon-grip
turns amulet to toy.

Thorns tear out my eyes. I  lie,
a flagstone at the the feet of Time
all men wear me down
but even those my pain delights
envy that I cannot cringe
at fortune's spite.












Again, Goes Around, Comes Around.



















These two poems are by Wendy Barker, taken from her book Way of Whiteness, published in 2000  by Wings Press.

Barker was born in 1942 in New Jersey, but grew up in Arizona. She earned her BA and Ma at the University of Arizona and her Ph.D at the University of California at Davis. She taught high school English in Arizona and Berkeley. She is currently Poet-in-Residence  and Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Texas - San Antonio where she has taught since 1982.







Liquid Poem

It is not true that water has no color.
Nor that milk is white.

During the years  I nursed out son,
sometimes when I  leaned over you in love

the milk let down and rained
warm over your chest, rippling you hir.

From how far inside it had come.
We could never describe its translucent

clarity, fluidity, digestible sweetness.
And the cologne in this bottle

is lighter than even  a petal of Jasmine,
easier to smooth

across  the inside of my elbow
than anything I know except your mouth


Practicality, Foam and Nighties

Not very practical, you said,, when I brought home
the satiny lace nightie, wont hold up. Funny:
made for water.Pale green foam

of ocean, pearl bubbles of white lace.
Sometimes when you're floating in the shallows
and a  wave folds in, pushes you under,
you gasp at such sudden immersion.

When a breast spills from a slipped strap,
when we sink down under the sheets,
sometimes  I would like (wickedly) to whisper
we are not being very practical.












From last week, a memory poem about  lost memories

























Moving on now to section 5, "Medieval Latin Poetry, Fourth Through Twelfth Centuries," from Section III of the World Poetry anthology. From early in the period I have two poets, the first with two poems and the second with one.











The first poet is Asonius (c. 310-395). The first of his poems was translated by Helen Waddell; the second by Kenneth Rexroth.


The Fields of Sorrow

They wander in deep woods, in mournful light,
Amid long reeds and drowsy-headed poppies,
And lakes where no wave laps, and voiceless streams,
Upon whose banks in the dim light grow old
Flowers that were once bewailed names of kings.


I Used to Tell You

I used to tell you, "Frances,  we grow old.
The years fly by. Don't be so private
With those parts. A chaste maid is an old maid."
Unnoticed by your disdain, old age crept
Close to us. Those days are gone past recall.
And now you come, penitent and crying
Over your old lack of courage, over
Your present lack of beauty. It's all right.
Closed in your arms, we'll share our smashed delights.
It's give and take now. It's what I wanted.
If not what I want.


The second poet is Sulpicius Lupercus Servasius (c. 400). The poem was translated by Kenneth Rexroth.


Rivers level granite mountains
Rains wash the figures from the sundial,
The plowshare wears thin in the furrow;
And on the fingers of the mighty,
The gold of authority is bright
With the glitter of attrition.









Back to Goes Around, Comes Around

The book's cover photo, by the way, is a young fellow by the name of Thomas Costales. I met him at a  Border's Coffee Shop, saw some of his photos and used them here as  feature some years ago. I haven't seen him in at least ten years. Photography was his hobby; I hope it kept at it because he was very good, both his eye and his technicals.












habits of mercy

I was thinking this
morning
about what I want to do
with the rest of my
life

and decided
it's the same thing
I want to do
with the rest of
my day...

kiss
my wife at  least  once or twice

eat
some good food

write
some good poems

sleep
a nice nap

communicate
with my better nature

and forgive myself
for all recent sins,  known, as well as
secret,
even to me...

easier for some
than for
others, those

whit no true love
to  kiss

no food to
eat

no bed
to sleep in

no poetry
in their soul

those
with no key
to unlock  the door to self, their
true self as unknown to them as
a stranger passing dark
on the street

and most difficult of all for
those who  can't find withing
themselves
forgiveness of themselves

poor
miserable
ego-obsessed creatures that we are,
sinners almost from our first thoughts,
if we cannot forgive ourselves
how could we  ever learn to forgive
others

and if we cannot forgive  others,
how can we ever live
in this world
that needs cleansed hearts
as much as it needs clean air and water

habits of mercy
are what will save this world;
human sins
forgiven
by human sinners









Here are two poems by Linda Rodriguez, from her book, Heart's Migration, published by Tia Chucha Press in 2009.

Poet and mystery writer Rodriguez was born  in Kansas, but moved frequently throughout her  childhood due to her  father's  career in the  US Navy. She earned a BA and MA at the University of Missouri  - Kansas City.

I assume that the character/figure Coyote in these poem refers to a frequent  indigenous myth and fable. Coyote is a trickster, a flouter of rules and convention, and at the same time a very powerful, leader of all the animals.








Three O'clock in  the Morning, Alone

Coyote wails in the far field
beside his woods.
He runs yelping,
baying among the trees,
hot on your trail
across farms and highways,
down city streets to prowl
outside your triple-locked doors.

Coyote could splinter
that wood,  shatter
your windows, plunge
into your life, drag you
to his den.
He  will be civilized instead,
phone you in the morning, pretend
he has  left  a book behind.

Coyote moves back
into his woods,  voice
fading.
He dials your number
ow,  growls into your sleepy ear.


Coyote at the Poetry Reading

He walks i late,
of course,
and sits in the back row
even though he's on the program.
Coyote wraps a storm
around him like a  protective shield,
wears his leather like  armor,
stares the woman in business suit
and her partner  in high-style casual
into  dropping their  eyes. Coyote
makes everyone nervous.

Whispers circle the room.
Who asked him  to read?
"Must have been some woman,"
one bearded man says, with a sniff.
"A guy I would have known better."
"Probably thinks it's some kind of slam,"
one professor tells another.

When they call his name,
Coyote stalks to the podium
and growls into the microphone,
while,  around the room, the air
burns with after-lightning
ozone and smells of blood
and splintered bones.












I promised myself  I  wouldn't write another political poem until all  this business is finished. But who  can  watch a train wreck and not  talk about it? Not me.





















This is the last piece this week from the World Poetry anthology. It is from near the end of "Medieval Latin Poetry, Fourth Through Twelfth Centuries" part of the book.

The poet is Peter Abelard (d. 1142) and it was translated by Kenneth Rexroth.













I Am Constantly Wounded

I am constantly wounded
By the deadly gossip that adds
Insult to injury, that
Punishes me mercilessly
With the news of your latest
Scandal in my ears.Wherever
I gol the smirking fame of each
Fresh  despicable  infamy
Has run on ahead of me.
Can't you learn to be cautious
About your lecheries?
Hide your practices in darkness;
Keep  away from raised eyebrows.
If you must murder love, do  it
Covertly, with your candied
Prurience and murmured lewdness.

You were never the heroine
Of dirty stories in the days
when love sound us together.
Now those links are broken, desire
Is frozen, and you are free
To indulge every morbid lust,
And filthy jokes about your
Latest amour are the delight
Of every cocktail party.

Your boudoir is a brothel;
You salon is a saloon;
Even your sensibilities
And your depraved innocence
Are only special premiums.
Rewards of a shameful commerce.
O he heart breaking memory
Of days like flowers, and your
Eyes that shone like Venus the star
In our brief nights, and the soft bird
Flight of your love about me;
And now your eyes are as bitter
As a rattlesnake's dead eyes,
And your disdain as malignant.
Those who give off the smell of coin
You warm in bed; I  who have
Love to bring am  not even
Allowed to speak to you now.
You receive charlatans and fools;
I have only the swindling
Memory of poisoned honey.












This is a good poem to end the post, as I  desert the field  for another week.














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