Léopold Sédar Senghor – Elegy Of Midnight

 

Summer, splendid Summer, nourishing the Poet on the milk of your light
I who grew up like the wheat of spring, which made me drunk
From green water, from the green steaming in the gold of Time
Ah! no longer can I tolerate the midnight light.
The splendor of such honors resembles a Sahara,
An immense void, with neither erg nor rocky plateau,
With no grass, no twinkling eye, no beating heart.
Twenty-four hours a day like this, and my eyes are wide open
Like Father Cloarec’s, crucified on a boulder by the Joal pagans
Who worshipped snakes. In my eyes the Portuguese lighthouse
Turns round and round, twenty-four hours a day,
A precise and restless mechanism, until the end of time.

I jumped out of bed, a leopard about to be snared,
A sudden gust of Simoom filling my throat with sand.
Ah! if I could just collapse in the dung and blood, in the void.
I turn around among my books watchilng me with their deep eyes
Six thousand lamps burning twenty-four hours a day.
I stand up lucid, strangely lucid. And I am handsome,
Like the one-hundred-runner, like the rutting black stallion
From Mauritania. I carry in my blood a river of seeds
That can fertilize all the plains of Byzantium
And the hills, the austere hills.
I am the Lover and the locomotive with a well-oiled piston.

Her sweet strawberry lips, her thick stone body,
Her secret softness ripe for the catch, her body
A deep field open to the black sower.
The Spirit germinates under the groin, in the matrix of desire
The sex is one antenna mong many where flashing messages are exchanged.
Love music no longer can cool me down, nor the holy rhythm of poetry.
Against this despair, Lord, I need all my strength
—A soft dagger in the heart as deep as remorse.
I am not sure of dying. If that was Hell: the lack of sleep
This desert of the Poet, this pain of living, this dying
From not being able to die, the agony of shadows, this passion
For death and light like moths on hurricane lamps at night,
In the horrible rotting of virgin forests.

Lord of light and shadows,
You, Lord of the Cosmos, let me rest in Joal-of-the-Shades,
Let me be born again in the Childhood Kingdom full of dreams,
Let me be the shepherd of my shepherdess on the Dyilôr tanns
Where dead men flower, let me burst out applauding
When Téning-Ndyaré and Tyagoum-Ndyaré enter the circle
And let me dance like the Athlete to the drum of this year’s Dead.
This is only a prayer. You known my peasant’s patience.
Peace will come, the Angel of dawn will come, the singing of birds
Never heard before will come, the light of dawn will come.
I will sleep at dawn, my pink doll in my arms,
My green- and gold-eyed doll with a voice so marvelous,
It is the very tongue of poetry.

—Translated from the French by Melvin Dixon

(from Nocturnes, 1961)

Martin Adan – Sea and Shell

A woman and a ball: out of a sudden agreement
the world forms, in its inane rotation.
It begins with the fish, which inhabits the wasteland.

A curve sighs. Nothing swells immediately.
A mathematical point: the sphere,
void, terrestrial, a cloud of breath.

If the chimera doesn’t declare itself
in service and pure verse,
it will wail its words of truth.

The world revolves in an animal rush.
The most humble fish, of all the mud,
mired in the eye, bearing the colure.

A leg, or terror, arises, expands:
the air is the passion of the bather:
light, in recess, flashes and dies out.

A woman and a ball drop from a bristle,
a thin line of ice in which everything concludes,
matter the hand raises into view.

World in the air, simple being and aspect:
algae rising boldly within the descent.
A fish that bites its own tail bleeds mud.

Fabio, this passage and flow and writhing I’m thinking of
is the world: element, eruption: everything, nothing,
in the immense power.

From the rhythm: figures and the first creed,
and happiness, a lesson for the universe as it rolls
into time, pulling along its shell and ancient verse.

translated by Katie Silver and Rick London

Richard Brautigan – Candlelion

Richard Brautigan

the other line

she  listened to

the cd bought by you

two birthdays ago,

classic love songs,

phone cradled by her mouth

waiting

to hear a real human

not the automated response

only the real voice had come

masked by the music,

a thousand miles away

in a call center ,

he heard her breathing

murmur of lyrics

as she sang,

his phone did not move

from his ear,

waiting to speak

too afraid to lose

the connection,

waited for her to speak first

 

Charles Bukowski – Last Straw

Charles Bukowski one of his last readings in 1980

Woman As A Season

a woman has a correct eye

one that penetrates deep

between lines of sunlight

reading clouds, tasting air,

flavor is there

cool musty lychee dawn

fleshy pulp of golden coming,

resonant sounds filled the clouds

adding iron to the silence,

winter was a long breath away

autumn came first,

shed of green leaves burn bronze

streams fill and swell

nature laying down

a woman has an automated touch

fingertip brush that works the earth,

cooling firm soil

soon discover frost,

suspended as belief,

apples and cinnamon

warm pie and ale,

ashes in fire rekindles embers,

forests lay paths of leaves

moist and cling to feet,

then dry curling crisp,

kicked into piles by laughing children

a woman has a malleable heart

shaped and formed on whispered breath

clouded from mouth in morning,

days shorten,

clock has no time

fingers bent in persuasion

to the season,

she found a place now

a place she liked,

glad summer was evaporating

in it’s own heat,

and winter held it’s snow at bay,

she related to this

feel and consider her life

a moment at a time,

autumn was her time,

her time alone and here she

remained