Drink This Cola!: Poem

Showing posts with label Poem. Show all posts

Beale Street Love

By Langston Hughes

from Fine Clothes to the Jew

Love

Is a brown man's fist

With hard knuckles

Crushing the lips,

Blackening the eyes,--

Hit me again,

Says Clorinda.

Dimensions of a Five Point Star

Gravity

What is the reason that as soon as one human being shows he needs another (no matter whether his need be slight or great) the latter draws back from him? Gravity

-Simone Weil

"Gravity and Grace" (1947, 1952)

Paris Review: The Art of Poetry no. 3 (1961)

The Broome Street Review no. 2

The Broome Street Review

www.broomestreetreview.com

For Richie

blancito … puro … purito

i mean …
a snow white
all-american
precioso.

coverman
for the most
for the most
delicate
interpretation
of americana

yet
inside
the cubicles
of his
jones act

invasion
law
to make us
puerto rican soldiers

to die
brown
or black
or white
or indigenous

in any war
that we were used
to transport us
world-wide
chained colonialists

he understood
the doctrine
of that principal

so he always paraded
to challenge imperialism

for he knew
that we were
the last colony

for he knew that
puerto rico last
will be first

for we scrambled
our intentions
not to be
ever defined
by the united states

but he knew …
but he knew
in his philosophical
intellectual
community gatherings

that the united states
lives in ultimate
(me esta saliendo)
in ultimate hell

trying to figure out
why we will never
be a state

thank you, richie

Tato Laviera

Note

Remember how the naked soul

comes to language and at once knows

loss and distance and believing

--Merwin

I will never sell this. I've only ever intended to place this in the hand of an individual--one I know will not neglect it. To this day I have only made two. Neither alike, for different individuals. I am truly grateful for the incredible beauty and kindness of the people who have received them.

an absence of red--"kerning the post-hoc fantasies of a lonely revolution"

Translating Borges

I'm losing my sight, like Borges. 1964, is composed of two elegiac sonnets in Spanish (perhaps in Argentine dialect, almost entirely like traditional Castilian Spanish). Because translating the poem directly as sonnets in english would be pointless I tried to transmute the aesthetic. In part 1 I do my best to maintain a continuity of sound--Borges top-loads rueful images. In part 2 the rhythm is almost entirely lost--as it closes, in the second half, I wanted the poem to be slightly more dissonant.

The image of life (the aesthetic structure of the poem) remains, but the sound (representative of metaphysical representation itself), unravels. I doubt this would meet with Borges' approval, but, in a sense, we are aware of the same things--kindred spirits.

reading and transcription of original here.