Wake Up by Adam Zagajewski

Wake Up

 

Wake up, my soul.

I don’t know where you are,

where you’re hiding,

but wake up, please,

we’re still together,

the road is still before us,

a bright strip of dawn

will be our star.

 

(translated by Clare Cavanagh)

While Everything Else Was Falling Apart by Ada Limón

While Everything Else Was Falling Apart

In the Union Square subway station nearly fifteen

years ago now, the L train came clanking by

where someone had fat-Sharpied a black heart

on the yellow pillar you leaned on during a bleak day

(brittle and no notes from anyone you crushed upon).

Above ground, the spring sun was the saddest one

(doing work, but also none). What were you wearing?

Something hopeful to show the world you hoped?

A tall man was learning from a vendor how to pronounce

churro. High in the sticky clouds of time, he kept

repeating churro while eating a churro. How to say

this made you want to live? No hand to hold

still here it was: someone giving someone comfort

and someone memorizing hard how to ask for it again.

I Cannot Live With You by Emily Dickinson

I Cannot Live With You

 

I cannot live with You –

It would be Life –

And Life is over there –

Behind the Shelf

 

The Sexton keeps the Key to –

Putting up

Our Life – His Porcelain –

Like a Cup –

 

Discarded of the Housewife –

Quaint – or Broke –

A newer Sevres pleases –

Old Ones crack –

 

I could not die – with You –

For One must wait

To shut the Other’s Gaze down –

You – could not –

 

And I – could I stand by

And see You – freeze –

Without my Right of Frost –

Death's privilege?

 

Nor could I rise – with You –

Because Your Face

Would put out Jesus’ –

That New Grace

 

Glow plain – and foreign

On my homesick Eye –

Except that You than He

Shone closer by –

 

They’d judge Us – How –

For You – served Heaven – You know,

Or sought to –

I could not –

 

Because You saturated Sight –

And I had no more Eyes

For sordid excellence

As Paradise

 

And were You lost, I would be –

Though My Name

Rang loudest

On the Heavenly fame –

 

And were You – saved –

And I – condemned to be

Where You were not –

That self – were Hell to Me –

 

So We must meet apart –

You there – I – here –

With just the Door ajar

That Oceans are – and Prayer –

And that White Sustenance –

Despair –

Columbine by Javier Zamora

Columbine

 

I’d never seen one like it: the flower

with its many orange cups. Dad drove me to Yosemite

the second month in this country.

He didn’t know the name of it. I didn’t know the name of it,

only that I loved the cups & that

they reminded me of the hibiscus

outside the glassless window I’d left months ago.

I hadn’t started school yet. There were many things I didn’t know,

English

the most important. Didn’t have friends.

Entire days spent inside the apartment

memorizing words, reading bilingual picture books,

comparing couch to the picture, to the couch

in my parents’ living room. In the news,

earlier, much earlier, before I arrived in June: headlines

I could not read. Could not understand. Parents

shared a fear I’d never known. Though

I’d seen guns on the way up here. Though

there had been war; I did not know the way to school yet.

The names of highways that would show me blooms.

 

Persimmons by Li-Young Lee

Persimmons

 

In sixth grade Mrs. Walker

slapped the back of my head

and made me stand in the corner

for not knowing the difference

between persimmon and precision.

How to choose

 

persimmons. This is precision.

Ripe ones are soft and brown-spotted.

Sniff the bottoms. The sweet one

will be fragrant. How to eat:

put the knife away, lay down newspaper.

Peel the skin tenderly, not to tear the meat.

Chew the skin, suck it,

and swallow. Now, eat

the meat of the fruit,

so sweet,

all of it, to the heart.

 

Donna undresses, her stomach is white.

In the yard, dewy and shivering

with crickets, we lie naked,

face-up, face-down.

I teach her Chinese.

Crickets: chiu chiu. Dew: I’ve forgotten.

Naked:   I’ve forgotten.

Ni, wo:   you and me.

I part her legs,

remember to tell her

she is beautiful as the moon.

 

Other words

that got me into trouble were

fight and fright, wren and yarn.

Fight was what I did when I was frightened,

Fright was what I felt when I was fighting.

Wrens are small, plain birds,

yarn is what one knits with.

Wrens are soft as yarn.

My mother made birds out of yarn.

I loved to watch her tie the stuff;

a bird, a rabbit, a wee man.

 

Mrs. Walker brought a persimmon to class

and cut it up

so everyone could taste

a Chinese apple. Knowing

it wasn’t ripe or sweet, I didn’t eat

but watched the other faces.

 

My mother said every persimmon has a sun

inside, something golden, glowing,

warm as my face.

 

Once, in the cellar, I found two wrapped in newspaper,

forgotten and not yet ripe.

I took them and set both on my bedroom windowsill,

where each morning a cardinal

sang, The sun, the sun.

 

Finally understanding

he was going blind,

my father sat up all one night

waiting for a song, a ghost.

I gave him the persimmons,

swelled, heavy as sadness,

and sweet as love.

 

This year, in the muddy lighting

of my parents’ cellar, I rummage, looking

for something I lost.

My father sits on the tired, wooden stairs,

black cane between his knees,

hand over hand, gripping the handle.

He’s so happy that I’ve come home.

I ask how his eyes are, a stupid question.

All gone, he answers.

 

Under some blankets, I find a box.

Inside the box I find three scrolls.

I sit beside him and untie

three paintings by my father:

Hibiscus leaf and a white flower.

Two cats preening.

Two persimmons, so full they want to drop from the cloth.

 

He raises both hands to touch the cloth,

asks, Which is this?

 

This is persimmons, Father.

 

Oh, the feel of the wolftail on the silk,

the strength, the tense

precision in the wrist.

I painted them hundreds of times

eyes closed. These I painted blind.

Some things never leave a person:

scent of the hair of one you love,

the texture of persimmons,

in your palm, the ripe weight.

Let the Last Thing Be Song by Hannah Fries

Let the Last Thing Be Song

 

i.

 

Memory is safest in someone with amnesia. 

Behind locked doors 

glow the unmarred pieces— 

musical notes humming 

in a jumble, only 

waiting to be 

arranged.

 

ii.

 

What is left in one 

who does not remember? 

Love and music.

 

Not a name but the fullness. 

Not the sequence of events 

but order of rhythm and pitch,

 

a piece of time in which to exist.

 

iii.

 

A tone traveling through space has no referent, 

and yet we infer, and yet it 

finds its way between our cells 

and shakes us.

 

Aren’t we all still quivering 

like tuning forks 

with the shock of being, 

the shock of being seen?

 

iv.

 

When I die, I want to be sung across the threshold. 

Don’t you? Doesn’t the universe, 

with its loosening warp 

and weft, still 

unspool its symphony?

 

Sing to me — please — 

and I will sing for you as all unravels, 

as time continues past the final beat 

of the stutter inside your chest.

 

Harmonize, at the edge of that horizon,

with the black hole’s 

fathomless B-flat.

Hymn by Marie Howe

Hymn

It began 

as an almost inaudible hum, 

low and long for the solar winds 

     and far dim galaxies,

a hymn growing louder, for the moon and the sun, 

a song without words for the snow falling, 

     for snow conceiving snow

conceiving rain, the rivers rushing without shame, 

the hum turning again higher — into a riff of ridges 

     peaks hard as consonants,

summits and praise for the rocky faults and crust and crevices 

then down down to the roots and rocks and burrows 

     the lakes’ skittery surfaces, wells, oceans, breaking

waves, the salt-deep: the warm bodies moving within it: 

the cold deep: the deep underneath gleaming: some of us rising 

     as the planet turned into dawn, some lying down

as it turned into dark; as each of us rested — another woke, standing 

among the cast-off cartons and automobiles; 

     we left the factories and stood in the parking lots,

left the subways and stood on sidewalks, in the bright offices, 

in the cluttered yards, in the farmed fields, 

     in the mud of the shanty towns, breaking into

harmonies we’d not known possible. finding the chords as we 

found our true place singing in a million 

     million keys the human hymn of praise for every

something else there is and ever was and will be: 

     the song growing louder and rising. 

          (Listen, I too believed it was a dream.)

The Three Cypress Trees by Mourid Barghouti

The Three Cypress Trees

 

Transparent and frail,

like the slumber of woodcutters,

serene, foreshadowing things to come,

the morning drizzle does not conceal

these three cypresses on the slope.

Their details belie their sameness,

their radiance confirms it.

I said:

I wouldn’t dare to keep looking at them,

there is a beauty that takes away our daring,

there are times when courage fades away.

The clouds rolling high above

change the form of the cypresses.

The birds flying towards other skies

change the resonance of the cypresses.

The tiled line behind them

fixes the greenness of the cypresses

and there are trees whose only fruit is greenness.

Yesterday, in my sudden cheerfulness,

I saw their immortality.

Today, in my sudden sorrow,

I saw the axe.

(Translated by Radwa Ashur)