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Louise Glück

When Hades decided he loved this girl
he built for her a duplicate of earth,
everything the same, down to the meadow,
but with a bed added.

Everything the same, including sunlight,
because it would be hard on a young girl
to go so quickly from bright light to utter darkness

Gradually, he thought, he’d introduce the night,
first as the shadows of fluttering leaves.
Then moon, then stars. Then no moon, no stars.
Let Persephone get used to it slowly.
In the end, he thought, she’d find it comforting.

A replica of earth
except there was love here.
Doesn’t everyone want love?

He waited many years,
building a world, watching
Persephone in the meadow.
Persephone, a smeller, a taster.
If you have one appetite, he thought,
you have them all.

Doesn’t everyone want to feel in the night
the beloved body, compass, polestar,
to hear the quiet breathing that says
I am alive, that means also
you are alive, because you hear me,
you are here with me. And when one turns,
the other turns—

That’s what he felt, the lord of darkness,
looking at the world he had
constructed for Persephone. It never crossed his mind
that there’d be no more smelling here,
certainly no more eating.

Guilt? Terror? The fear of love?
These things he couldn’t imagine;
no lover ever imagines them.

He dreams, he wonders what to call this place.
First he thinks: The New Hell. Then: The Garden.
In the end, he decides to name it
Persephone’s Girlhood.

A soft light rising above the level meadow,
behind the bed. He takes her in his arms.
He wants to say I love you, nothing can hurt you

but he thinks
this is a lie, so he says in the end
you’re dead, nothing can hurt you
which seems to him
a more promising beginning, more true.

Naomi Shihab Nye

The river is famous to the fish.

The loud voice is famous to silence,
which knew it would inherit the earth
before anybody said so.

The cat sleeping on the fence is famous to the birds
watching him from the birdhouse.

The tear is famous, briefly, to the cheek.

The idea you carry close to your bosom
is famous to your bosom.

The boot is famous to the earth,
more famous than the dress shoe,
which is famous only to floors.

The bent photograph is famous to the one who carries it
and not at all famous to the one who is pictured.

I want to be famous to shuffling men
who smile while crossing streets,
sticky children in grocery lines,
famous as the one who smiled back.

I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous,
or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular,
but because it never forgot what it could do.

Francisco X. Alarcón

ninguna               no
frontera              border
podrá                 can ever
separarnos          separate us

                    The same night, whitening
                         The same trees. We of that time,
                         Are no longer the same.
                                          - Pablo Neruda, Tonight I can write

I am dreaming about you, Abbie,
                        As the world submits
Itself to sleep again and pale
                        Night repaints all
Life into a probable   
                             Miracle:
                                        Another street, perhaps, 
                                  A path of possibility repairing
                                        Loved things lost or broken,
                                 Back into the sanctuary of sight.

I am dreaming about you, and of my grandmother,
              How her breath drifted, coughed
Away from her body, leaving behind the church-
              White hospital bed and downcast
Windows;
        You, and my injured left leg, the chancy
              Subdivision moons, basketball,
And that sour scooter accident—the face, scent, shadow
              Of all that has abandoned me.

I am dreaming about you, and of October,
              The clumsy minutes I’ve pieced
Together, thinking, that things must have
              Their own places in the world,
That what’s here and not here are entirely
              The way things are:
Aratiles, distance, that poem you sent me
              Which I could not understand.

Even then, I knew that the best and worst
              Would come and go,
That loss never really makes sense:
              Not death, not my grandmother,
Not even you, Abbie. Night recalls all
              That will never make sense
Again—which seems just perfect—
              Splendid as in hours when

I close my eyes and dream that I am walking
                        Straight again, while
My grandmother sits back, laughing
              At a memory or a joke.
In these times, I swear there must be
              Something bigger behind
All the senselessness life hands us,
              That we can hold on
To things we’ve lost through the changes
              They leave:

Absence of laughter, fleeting memory of a voice
              Or name, dream, a world
Of photographs, each picture accepting
              What the mind can’t understand.

H.D.

I

So you have swept me back,
I who could have walked with the live souls
above the earth,
I who could have slept among the live flowers
at last;

so for your arrogance
and your ruthlessness
I am swept back
where dead lichens drip
dead cinders upon moss ofash;

so for your arrogance
I am broken at last;
I who had lived unconscious,
who was almost forgot;

if you had let me wait
I had grown from listlessness
into peace,
if you had let me rest with the dead,
I had forgot you
and the past.

II

Here only flame upon flame
and black among the red sparks,
streaks of black and light
grown colourless;

why did you turn back,
that hell should be reinhabited
of myself thus
swept into nothingness?

why did you turn back?
why did you glance back?
why did you hesitate for that moment?
why did you bend your face
caught with the flame of the upper earth,
above my face?

what was it that crossed my face
with the light from yours
and your glance?
what was it you saw in my face?
the light of your own face?
the fire of your own presence?

What had my face to offer
but reflex of the earth,
hyacinth colour
caught from the raw fissure of the rock
where the light struck,
and the colour of azure crocuses
and the bright surface of gold crocuses
and of the wind-flower,
swift in its veins as lightning
and as white.

III

Saffron from the fringe of the earth,
wild saffron that has bent
over the sharp edge of earth,
all the flowers that cut through the earth,
all, all the flowers are lost;

everything is lost,
everything is crossed with black,
black upon black
and worse than black,
this colourless light.

IV

Fringe upon fringe
of blue crocuses,
crocuses walled against blue of themselves,
blue of that upper earth,
blue of the depth upon depth of flowers,
lost;

flowers,
if I could have taken once my breath of them,
enough of them,
more than earth,
even than of the upper earth,
had passed with me
beneath the earth;

if I could have caught up from the earth,
the whole of the flowers of the earth,
if once I could have breathed into myself
the very golden crocuses
and the red,
and the very golden hearts of the first saffron,
the whole of the golden mass,
the whole of the great fragrance,
I could have dared the loss.

V

So for your arrogance
and your ruthlessness
I have lost the earth
and the flowers of the earth
and the live souls of the earth,
and you have passed across the light
and reached
ruthless;
you who have your own light,
who are to yourself a presence;
who need no presence;

yet for all your arrogance
and your glance,
I tell you this:

such loss is no loss,
such terror, such coils and strands and pitfalls
of blackness
such terror
is no loss;

hell is no worse than your earth
above the earth,
hell is no worse,
no, nor your flowers
nor your veins of light
nor your presence,
a loss;

my hell is no worse than yours
though you pass among the flowers and speak
with the spirits above the earth.

VI

Against the black
I have more fervour
than you in all the splendour of that place,
against the blackness
and the stark grey
I have more light;

and the flowers,
if I should tell you,
you would turn from your own fit paths
toward hell,
turn again and glance back

and I would sink into a place
even more terrible than this.

VII

at least i have the flowers of myself,
and my thoughts, no god
can take that;
I have the fervour of myself for a presence
and my own spirit for light;
and my spirit with its loss
knows this;
though small against the black,
small against the formless rocks,
hell must break before i am lost;

before i am lost,
hell must open like a red rose
for the dead to pass.

Lina Sagaral Reyes

1
The current of marchers’ feet
Was of tidewaters rushing out.
The surge flung you off the curbstone.
But because your feet and theirs
Knew the same direction, you kept pace
Along the warps of the street.

There was grace and silent music
In the way you all bannered your fists.
Lowered and raised,
Lowered and raised,
Like blunt spears of intentions.

2
We were mapping your life before this march.
You did not say you were lost.
Only that you did not know where to go.
Maulap, you said. You were not looking at the sky.
Have you an umbrella?

To a march one brings
Only what is useful, you said.
Umbrellas will not shield us
From the evil bullet.
Teargas seeps sharply through nylon.

But what if it rains?

3
You counted your new losses.
Ours, you said.
Seventeen young farmers dead.
It was not loss I saw.
It was rage. Your hands
That once were weeping hands
Now refused to close.

You were hurt, too, at Mendiola?
You laughed, “just a bruised ankle.”
You showed me the slightly clouded flesh.
I am still whole, can’t you see
It was just a bruise, a superficial hurt.

4
I could not be with you in this march.
And saying this to you hurt us both.
I have this story to write, I said.
Of this first lieutenant who, in Samar,
Found rebels among the fallen
Coconut trees and dead children.
He is now honored to guard
The woman president and her daughters.
It is his story I must write.
A wide sky, I tell you, a wide sky
This paining.
It has clouds the color of bruises.

Heather McHugh

In English, we’re in trouble,
Love’s a place
we fall into, so
sooner or later they ask

How deep? Time’s a measure
of extent, so sooner or later
they ask How long? We keep
some comforters inside a box,
the heart inside a chest,

but still it’s there the trouble with the dark
accumulates the most. The end of life
is said to be
a boat to a tropic,
good or bad. The suitor wants
to size up what he’s getting into, so he gets
her measurements. But how much

is enough? The best man cannot
help him out—he’s given to his own
uncomfortable cummerbund. Inside the mirror,
several bridesmaids look
and look, in the worst
half-light,

too long, too little, not enough alike.
And who can stand to be
made up for good? And who can face
being adored? I swear

there is no frame
that I would keep you in.
I didn’t love a shape
and later find you fit it—
every day your sight was a surprise.
You made my taste, made sense,
made eyes. But when you set me up

in high esteem, I was a star
that’s bound, in time,
to fall. The bound’s
the sorrow of the song.
I loved you to no end,
and when you said, “So far,”
I knew the idiom: it meant So long.      

John Brehm

I’m so wildly unprolific, the poems
I have not written would reach
from here to the California coast
if you laid them end to end.

And if you stacked them up,
the poems I have not written
would sway like a silent
Tower of Babel, saying nothing

and everything in a thousand
different tongues. So moving, so
filled with and emptied of suffering,
so steeped in the music of a voice

speechless before the truth,
the poems I have not written
would break the hearts of every
woman who’s ever left me,

make them eye their husbands
with a sharp contempt and hate
themselves for turning their backs
on the very source of beauty.

The poems I have not written
would compel all other poets
to ask of God: "Why do you
let me live? I am worthless.

please strike me dead at once,
destroy my works and cleanse
the earth of all my ghastly
imperfections." Trees would

bow their heads before the poems
I have not written. "Take me,"
they would say, "and turn me
into your pages so that I

might live forever as the ground
from which your words arise."
The wind itself, about which
I might have written so eloquently,

praising its slick and intersecting
rivers of air, its stately calms
and furious interrogations,
its flutelike lingerings and passionate

reproofs, would divert its course
to sweep down and then pass over
the poems I have not written,
and the life I have not lived, the life

I’ve failed even to imagine,
which they so perfectly describe.

E.E. Cummings

somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look will easily unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully ,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;
nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands

W.B. Yeats

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.