Tonight I can Write

By Pablo Neruda

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

Write, for example, 'The night is starry

and the stars are blue and shiver in the distance.'

The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.

Through nights like this one I held her in my arms.

I kissed her again and again under the endless sky.

She loved me, sometimes I loved her too.

How could one not have loved her great still eyes.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her.

To hear the immense night, still more immense without her.

And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.

What does it matter that my love could not keep her.

The night is starry and she is not with me.

This is all. In the distance someone is singing. In the distance.

My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

My sight tries to find her as though to bring her closer.

My heart looks for her, and she is not with me.

The same night whitening the same trees.

We, of that time, are no longer the same.

I no longer love her, that's certain, but how I loved her.

My voice tries to find the wind to touch her hearing.

Another's. She will be another's. As she was before my kisses.

Her voice, her bright body. Her infinite eyes.
I no longer love her, that's certain, but maybe I love her.
Love is so short, forgetting is so long.

Because through nights like this one I held her in my arms

my soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer

and these the last verses that I write for her.

(translated by WS Merwin)
 The Way Spain Was
By Pablo Neruda

Spain was a taut, dry drum-head

Daily beating a dull thud
Flatlands and eagle's nest
Silence lashed by the storm.
How much, to the point of weeping, in my soul
I love your hard soil, your poor bread,
Your poor people, how much in the deep place
Of my being there is still the lost flower
Of your wrinkled villages, motionless in time
And your metallic meadows
Stretched out in the moonlight through the ages,
Now devoured by a false god.

All your confinement, your animal isolation

While you are still conscious
Surrounded by the abstract stones of silence,
Your rough wine, your smooth wine
Your violent and dangerous vineyards.

Solar stone, pure among the regions

Of the world, Spain streaked
With blood and metal, blue and victorious
Proletarian Spain, made of petals and bullets
Unique, alive, asleep - resounding.
 A Far Cry from Africa
By Derek Walcott (1930-2017)
A wind is ruffling the tawny pelt
Of Africa. Kikuyu, quick as flies,
Batten upon the bloodstreams of the veldt.
Corpses are scattered through a paradise.
Only the worm, colonel of carrion, cries:
"Waste no compassion on these separate dead!"
Statistics justify and scholars seize
The salients of colonial policy.
What is that to the white child hacked in bed?
To savages, expendable as Jews?

Threshed out by beaters, the long rushes break

In a white dust of ibises whose cries
Have wheeled since civilization's dawn
From the parched river or beast-teeming plain.
The violence of beast on beast is read
As natural law, but upright man
Seeks his divinity by inflicting pain.
Delirious as these worried beasts, his wars
Dance to the tightened carcass of a drum,
While he calls courage still that native dread
Of the white peace contracted by the dead.

Again brutish necessity wipes its hands

Upon the napkin of a dirty cause, again
A waste of our compassion, as with Spain,
The gorilla wrestles with the superman.
I who am poisoned with the blood of both,
Where shall I turn, divided to the vein?
I who have cursed
The drunken officer of British rule, how choose
Between this Africa and the English tongue I love?
Betray them both, or give back what they give?
How can I face such slaughter and be cool?
How can I turn from Africa and live?
 Names
By Derek Walcott
- for Edward Brathwaite

My race began as the sea began,

with no nouns, and with no horizon,

as a fishline sinks, the horizon

with pebbles under my tongue, sinks in the memory.

with a different fix on the stars.  

  Have we melted into a mirror,

But now my race is here, leaving our souls behind?

in the sad oil of Levantine eyes, The goldsmith from Benares,

in the flags of Indian fields. the stone-cutter from Canton,

  the bronzesmith from Benin.

I began with no memory,  

I began with no future, A sea-eagle screams from the rock,

but I looked for that moment and my race began like the osprey

when the mind was halved by a with that cry,

horizon.
that terrible vowel,
 
that I!
I have never found that moment
 
when the mind was halved by a
horizon-- Behind us all the sky folded

for the goldsmith from Bentares, as history folds over a fishline,

the stone-cutter from Canton, and the foam foreclosed

with nothing in our hands names for the sour apples

  and green grapes

but this stick of their exile.

to trace our names on the sand  

which the sea erased again, to our Their memory turned acid
indifference.
but the names held;
 
Valencia glows
II
with the lanterns of oranges,
 
Mayaro's
And when they named these bays
charred candelabra of coca.
bays,
Being men, they could not live
was it nostalgia or irony?
except they first presumed
 
the right of every thing to be a noun.
In the uncombed forest,
The African acquiesced,
in uncultivated grass
repeated, and changed them.
where was there elegance
 
except in their mockery?
Listen, my children say:
Where were the courts of Castille?
moubain:  the hogplum,
Versailes' colonnades
cerise:       the wild cherry,
supplanted by cabbage palms
baie-la:      the bay,
with Corinthian crests,
with the fresh green voices
belittling diminutives,
they were once themselves
then, little Bersailles
in the way the wind bends
meant plans for a pigsty,
our natural inflections.

These palms are greater than

Versailles,

for no man made them,

their fallen columns greater than

Castille,

no man unmade them

except the worm, who has no helmet,

but was always the emporer,

and children, look at these stars

over Valencia's forest!

Not Orion,

not Betelgeuse,

tell me, what do they look like?

Answer, you damned little Arabs!

Sir, fireflies caught in molasses.

 Revolving Days
By David Malouf
That year I had nowhere to go, I fell in love — a mistake
of course, but it lasted and has lasted.
The old tug at the heart, the grace unasked for, urgencies
that boom under the pocket of a shirt. What I remember
is the colour of the shirts. I'd bought them
as an experiment in ways of seeing myself, hoping to catch
in a window as I passed what I was to be
in my new life as lover: one mint green, one
pink, the third, called Ivy League, tan
with darker stripes, my first button-down collar.

We never write. But sometimes, knotting my tie

at a mirror, one of those selves I had expected
steps into the room. In the next room you
are waiting (we have not yet taken back
the life we promised to pour into each other's mouths
forever and for ever) while I choose between
changes to surprise you.

Revolving days. My heart

in my mouth again, I'm writing this for you, wherever
you are, whoever is staring into your blue eyes. It is me,
I'm still here. No, don't worry, I won't appear out of
that old time to discomfort you. And no, at this
distance, I'm not holding my breath for a reply.
 Wild Lemons
By David Malouf
Through all those years keeping the present
open to the light of just this moment:
that was the path we found, you might call it
a promise, that starting out among blazed trunks
the track would not lead nowhere, that being set
down here among wild lemons, our bodies were
expected at an occasion up ahead
that would not take place without us. One
proof was the tough-skinned fruit among
their thorns; someone had been there before us
and planted these, their sunlight to be sliced
for drinks (they had adapted
in their own way and to other ends); another
was the warmth of our island, sitting still
in its bay, at midnight humming
and rising to its own concerns, but back,
heat-struck, lapped by clean ocean waters
at dawn. The present is always
with us, always open. Though to what, out there
in the dark we are making for as seven o’clock
strikes, the gin goes down and starlings
gather, who can tell? Compacts made
of silence, as a fl ute tempts out a few
reluctant stars to walk over the water. I lie down
in different weather now though the same body,
which is where that rough track led. Our sleep
is continuous with the dark, or that portion of it
that is this day’s night; the body
tags along as promised to see what goes.
What goes is time, and clouds melting into
tomorrow of our breath, a scent of lemons
run wild in another country, but smelling always of themselves.
 Small Towns and the River
By Mamang Dai
Small towns always remind me of death.
My hometown lies calmly amidst the trees,
it is always the same,
in summer or winter,
with the dust fl ying,
or the wind howling down the gorge.

Just the other day someone died.

In the dreadful silence we wept
looking at the sad wreath of tuberoses.
Life and death, life and death,
only the rituals are permanent.

The river has a soul.

In the summer it cuts through the land
like a torrent of grief. Sometimes,
sometimes, I think it holds its breath
seeking a land of fi sh and stars

The river has a soul.

It knows, stretching past the town,
from the fi rst drop of rain to dry earth
and mist on the mountaintops,
the river knows
the immortality of water.

A shrine of happy pictures

marks the days of childhood.
Small towns grow with anxiety
for the future.
The dead are placed pointing west.
When the soul rises
it will walk into the golden east,
into the house of the sun.

In the cool bamboo,

restored in sunlight,
life matters, like this.
In small towns by the river
we all want to walk with the gods.
 The Voice of the Mountain
By Mamang Dai
From where I sit on the high platform

I can see the ferry lights crossing

criss-crossing the big river.

I know the towns, the estuary mouth.

There, beyond the last bank
where the colour drains from heaven
I can outline the chapters of the world.

The other day a young man arrived from the village.

Because he could not speak
he brought a gift of fish
from the land of rivers.
It seems such acts are repeated:
We live in territories forever ancient and new,
and as we speak in changing languages.

I, also, leave my spear leaning by the tree

and try to make a sign.

I am an old man sipping the breeze

that is forever young.
In my life I have lived many lives.
My voice is sea waves and mountain peaks,
In the transfer of symbols
I am the chance syllable that orders the world
Instructed with history and miracles.

I am the desert and the rain.

The wild bird that sits in the west.
The past that recreates itself
and particles of life that clutch and cling
For thousands of years –
I know, I know these things
as rocks know, burning in the sun’s embrace,
about clouds, and sudden rain;
as I know a cloud is a cloud is a cloud,
A cloud is this uncertain pulse
that sits over my heart.

In the end the universe yields nothing

except a dream of permanence.
Peace is a falsity.
A moment of rest comes after long combat:

From the east the warrior returns

with the blood of peonies.
I am the child who died at the edge of the world,
the distance between end and hope.
The star diagram that fell from the sky,
The summer that makes men weep.
I am the woman lost in translation
who survives, with happiness to carry on.

I am the breath that opens the mouth of the canyon,

the sunlight on the tips of trees;
There, where the narrow gorge hastens the wind
I am the place where memory escapes
the myth of time,
I am the sleep in the mind of the mountain.
 I Shall Return to this Bengal
By Jibanananda Das
(Translated by Sukanta Chaudhuri)

I shall return to this Bengal, to the Dhansiri’s bank;

Perhaps not as a man, but myna or fishing kite;

Or dawn crow, floating on the mist’s bosom to alright

In the shade of this jackfruit tree, in this autumn harvest-land.

Or maybe a duck – a young girl’s – bells on my red feet,

Drifting on kalmi-scented waters all the day;

For love of Bengal’s rivers, fields, crops, I’ll come this way

To this sad green shore of Bengal, drenched by

the Jalangi’s waves.

Perhaps you’ll see a glass-fly ride the evening breeze,

Or hear a barn owl call from the silk-cotton tree;

A little child toss rice-grains on the courtyard grass,

Or a boy on the Rupsa’s turgid stream steer a dinghy

With torn white sail – white egrets swimming through red clouds

To their home in the dark. You will find me among their crowd.
 Toba Tek Singh
By Gulzar
(Translated by Anisur Rahman)

I’ve to go and meet Toba Tek Singh’s Bishan

at Wagah

I’m told he still stands on his swollen feet

Where Manto had left him,

He still mutters:

Opad di gud gud moong di dal di laltain

I’ve to locate that mad fellow

Who used to speak up from a branch high

above:

“He’s god

He alone has to decide – whose village to

whose side.”

When will he move down that branch

He is to be told:

“There are some more – left still

Who are being divided, made into pieces –

There are some more Partitions be done

That Partition was only the first one.”

I’ve to go and meet Toba Tek Singh’s Bishan at

Wagah,

His friend Afzal has to be informed –

Lahna Singh, Wadhwa Singh, Bheen Amrit

Had arrived here butchered –

Their heads were looted with the luggage on

the way behind.

Slay that “Bhuri”, none will come to claim her

now.

That girl who grew one finger every twelve

months,

Now shortens one phalanx each year.

It’s to be told that all the mad ones haven’t yet

reached their destinations

There are many on that side

And many on this.

Toba Tek Singh’s Bishan beckons me often to

say:

“Opad di gud gud di moong di dal di laltain di

Hindustan te Pakistan di dur fitey munh.”