Tag Archives: verse
Constanzo Allione – fried shoes, cooked diamonds
Birago Diop -Viaticum
In none of the three jugs
The three jugs where on certain evenings return
the tranquil souls,
the breaths of the ancestors,
the ancestors who were men,
the ancestors who were sages,
Mother has dipped three fingers
three fingers of her left hand:
thumb, forefinger and middle finger
Velimir Khlebnikov – Incantation By Laughter
Olga Orozco- No Doors
Charles Bukowski – No Title
Birago Diop – Vanity
VANITY
If we tell, gently, gently
All that we shall one day have to tell,
Who then will hear our voices without laughter,
Sad complaining voices of beggars
Who indeed will hear them without laughter?
If we roughly of our torments
Ever increasing from the start of things
What eyes will watch our large mouths
Shaped by the laughter of big children
What eyes will watch our large mouth?
What hearts will listen to our clamoring?
What ear to our pitiful anger
Which grows in us like a tumor
In the black depth of our plaintive throats?
When our Dead comes with their Dead
When they have spoken to us in their clumsy voices;
Just as our ears were deaf
To their cries, to their wild appeals
Just as our ears were deaf
They have left on the earth their cries,
In the air, on the water, where they have traced their signs
For us blind deaf and unworthy Sons
Who see nothing of what they have made
In the air, on the water, where they have traced their signs
And since we did not understand the dead
Since we have never listen to their cries
If we weep, gently, gently
If we cry roughly to our torments
What heart will listen to our clamoring,
What ear to our sobbing hearts?
Senegalese folktale poet Birago Diop 1906-1989 educated in Dakar and related tales of the wolof people
on notable sea
tone dialing remedy
better than those gulls
filling the air with
pull of sea,
encroaching on ears
cochlea tremors
insistent and provocative,
life needed to be in boxes
without labels,
identifying was not the issue
it was separation,
the telephone a child
cradled under chin
suckling on words,
spectacles perched with vertigo
on top of a crooked nose,
lips always poised
to speak but that was of
no consequence as sound
could carry further than voice,
a scream long prolonged
that was what pain brought,
gulls worse than cicadas
blood curled into fingers
then returned leaving them white
and grasping
still nothing,
slit your veins and fill a boat
with a swilling legacy
of something that
should of been,
letting gulls fall
bathing feathers redder
Man Ray – Lautgedicht (1924)
Charles Bukowski – Last Straw
Charles Bukowski one of his last readings in 1980