– Gwendolyn Brooks. The Rites for Cousin Vit

And some time make the time to drive out west
Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
In September or October, when the wind
And the light are working off each other
So that the ocean on one side is wild
With foam and glitter, and inland among stones
The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit
By the earthed lightning of a flock of swans,
Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,
Their fully grown headstrong-looking heads
Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.
Useless to think you’ll park and capture it
More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.

– Seamus Heaney. Postscript

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• irishtimes/seamus-heaney-on-writing-postscript

Except by returning to libate the soil
With the Cock of Abuja’s blood,
Will exile not offend martyred ones?
For all its refuge, the foreign home
Remains a night whose dawn
I wish arrives before its time.

– Tanure Ojaide. excerpt from When It No Longer Matters Where You Live

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• http://www.ajol.info/index.php/tvl/article/viewFile/63823/51642

And when you sit this way by the
   hearth,
and its gold plays over your inclined
   chestnut head,
the light drizzles through your fingers,
and in the mirror of your black silk
   dress
the flame’s splendour dances.
Apples on your table glow in the
   stillness,
a wealth of golden grapes overflows
   the basket,
and blessing gives off its ripe scent.
The forest thunders and roars
and sweet is its song
from within the stillness
of your precious corner.

– Avraham Ben Yitzhak. excerpt from I Scarcely Knew Myself

translated by Robert Alter

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• literary-passports-modernist-hebrew-fiction

– Alice Oswald. excerpt from Dart

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• http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-files/Books/documents/2002/07/12/review_130702_page36.pdf
• http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-files/Books/documents/2002/07/12/review_130702_page37.pdf

Your description puts
an end to all narration.
Your precious name becomes
the seal of my lips.

My loaf of bread stays
dry like the watermill,
Parched like my tongue
inside my mouth.

The physician failed to catch
the ailment within.
The tongue was silent,
the pulse even more so.

The furnace of the sky
was short of firewood.
To bake my bread it
stokes itself with my desire.

Engrossed such in praising
your dark eyes,
The tongue in my mouth has
turned a kohl stick.

The world’s hunting ground
still holds a promise for me.
Searching for a prey,
my bow might hunt itself.

Scattered around the millstone
are my white strands.
Grains to the sky’s revolving mill
are my bones.

– Ghani Kashmiri

translated by Mufti Mudasir Farooqi & Nusrat Bazaz

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• http://kashuradab.wordpress.com/2013/07/05/the-captured-gazelle-the-poems-of-ghani-kashmiri-with-the-recent-review/

i’ve been a woman
 with my legs stretched by the wind
    rushing the day
       thinking i heard your voice
          while it was only the nite
             moving over
                 making room for the dawn.

–  Sonia Sanchez. Poem No. 8

For whom
if not for the one who subjugates the nights
while leaning on star and flute
does silk flutter black in abandonment’s beds

For whom if not for those who walk lightly on earth
does reed puncture insomnia’s breath

– Amjad Nasser. Meritocracy

translated by Fady Joudah

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• http://www.pen.org/translation/six-poems-amjad-nasser

Those whom I love have gone
And I remain, like a sword, alone.

Gone, yes, or going, determination hardens
Into a self-destructive stubbornness.

What melody will resonate its presence
If you play the same old self-reflective chord alone? 

Someone who wrote, “Never to lose you again,” 
Moved, sent no message with a new address

And in that memory there is a mountain,
Above it, a reddish hawk that swooped and soared alone.

Who held a sword and said that he resembled
A sword, in his solitude was nothing less.

Between the old man and the steely angel,
A sleep-drunk intern holding down the ward alone.

The word-root’s there, you look into the branches’
cadence and contexts you can only guess.

Translating from a slow-emerging language
Resembles dialogue, and I’m less bored, alone.

Though it’s a doubled blade to be a weapon
And turn yourself onto your own distress.

Silent among her servants, Balqis riding
Back toward her queendom praised the Lord alone. 

If the beloved asked, what would you wish of me?
That without my asking, you would answer “Yes”. 

The glass of wine not offered to the stranger,
The nightly second glass of wine I poured alone.

– Marilyn Hacker. Fugue on a line of Amr bin M’ad Yakrib

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• http://www.cortlandreview.com/features/11/winter/hacker.php

On what mountain,
for how long, 
and of what name was his austerity?
I mean this little parrot’s,
that he should bite into a cherry
as pink as is your lip?

– Dharmakirti

translated by Daniel H. H. Ingalls