– William Shakespeare. Sonnet 73
Monthly Archives: September 2014
– Langston Hughes. House In the World
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– Lal Ded
translated by Sonam Kachru
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Spill, spread, unpetal, bleed
your soft flowers through great wounds.
Dove-hauled Venus girds her loins
with roses—
see the summer’s last puff of blue
drift on seas of asters to distant
pine-brown coasts; see
this final hour of our mendacious
southern happiness
held aloft.
– Gottfried Benn. excerpt from Caryatid
translated by Michael Hofmann
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– Geoffrey Hill. Mercian Hymns XXV
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Where are they all? Some bloom again as tulips or as roses
There in the dust how many forms forever lie concealed!
I too remembered gatherings rich in all kinds of beauty
Now they are only forms and patterns on oblivion’s shelf
Sleep is for him, and pride for him, and nights for him
Upon whose arm your tresses all dishevelled lay
I went into the garden, and it seemed a school assembled
The nightingales heard my laments, then sang their songs of love
How ill my fate! her lowered eyes show only eyelashes
Why then, O God, is it that they can pierce right through my heart?
How, even if I reached her, could I answer her revilings?
All my fair words were spent in gaining access to her house
Wine gives such life to man that on the hand that takes the goblet
Every line seems like a vein through which the life-blood runs
Our creed is ‘God is one’, our cry, ‘Abandon rituals!’
So that communities dissolve to constitute one faith
When one becomes inured to sorrow, sorrow vanishes
Such hardships have befallen me that life is easy now.
– Mirza Ghalib
translated by Ralph Russell
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A beryl-blue sea flows into a jade-green sea,
a peacock-colored phoenix mingles with a phoenix of golden opalescence.
Twenty-seven petals of a lotus succumb, bloom scarlet—
reflecting in ice, the moonlight, cold.
– Nansŏrhŏn Hŏ
translated by Ian Haight and T’ae-yong Hŏ
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taḫsistu 
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