born.

Clearing out my desktop, I found a short poem and remembered I haven't been posting here enough.
Translations from Polish:
o boże boli= oh god it hurts
kwiatuszki= flowers in a sweet way, something like "little flowers"
tuśki= the way I'd say kwiatuszki when I was small :P

There are also references to a Polish poem about the soldiers of Westerplatte, and though the translation is really bad, at least you'll understand this poem better.

Oh god explaining is as long as the poem itself. Anyway, here it is:
___________

born out of o boże boli and sunlight whipping up the air.
born here and not there.
behind the walls they sing the song of the soldiers
of westerplatte.
but it is not summer, and there are no flowers;
only the memory of how I'd say kwiatuszki, tuśki, and throw them
above my head,
giving birth to a completely new gesture.
but sometimes I doubt there was any birth, ever.
soil is eternal, ever-present, bitter and smiling.

bbc (again!): man drowns rescuing two children

man drowns rescuing two children

How the sea's lullaby rocks the rubber ring,
and every wave speaks the universal language
of tide, of force, of the feminine:
shhhh for she and seducing the moon.
But children are no moon. They are bodies
in a ring, the ring is rubber, is a ring because of its hole.

He also has a hole in him now.
Death could be a hole in which there is no air.
Dying could be slow elimination,
like water disappearing from the beach,
like the moon smiling at his lover
and kissing her goodnight.

bbc: thousands take part in 10km run

I haven't done my whole bbc thing for ages, though I was so excited about it. My excuse is travel, but I laze around so much (watching eurovision, for example) that it's not a real reason at all. Anyway, I'm in a good poetry mood today, so I'll share my good mood and bad poetry with everyone else <3

thousands take part in 10km run

the run of the sole
the run of the soul
the run of the lung that ties you to your breath
until it's lost in a plethora of air
the run of a shoe pointing east
because heading east is shoe factories not money
only when you head too far
you bump into the statue of liberty which is a
stone symbolising standing

this is why i'm on the run, you're on it, and the road

the philosophy obsession.

 BBC day 2 and I'm reading philosophy.


no breakthrough in greek talks


oh plato poor plato banging his elbows against the table spilling the soup
nobody wants to discuss this there there
what of the utopian country on which the philosopher is throned
now he asks as he bangs and there is euro falling from the sky
how strong the soul can be

but you know money is more than an idea
beneath the toga
it throbs

new stuff new stuff

NaPo came and went. I didn't care too much; now I have more of a challenge facing me. My friend from youngwritersonline.net and I decided to write a poem or so a day inspired by headlines from the almighty BBC. Here is yesterday in poetry:

mexico police find bodies in bags

A list of art (definition: asphalt, on other wavelengths- headlines):

49 bodies 49 nouns
110 miles (180 kilometers) 110 verbs (180 irregular)
04:00 local time 12:00 time of the muse
18 people in 2 abandoned vehicles 18 words in 2 stanzas
35 corpses in Veracruz 35 rhymes in a masterpiece
26 corpses in Guadalajara 26 similes in Poemcity
47,000 people killed in 6 years 47,000 commas vanquished by 6 poets
1 me reading 1 me writing

nepal's mystery language on the verge of extinction

To fall out of a language like a myap at night.
Even the frogs have their hymns after darkness steps in.
Silence is guiltiest of all. Bells remind of sin.
A woman is trying to break the chair she is sitting on
to get rid of the voice, and the voice follows the creak
of wood, a full sentence like a stomach overflowing with plums.
Your language expresses your guilt
while a confessional takes it, hand-washes and hangs
on a metaphysical line until it's bleached.

What if the moon spoke to you, child of the myap?
What if you are the moon, dying, as the chair creaks?

rise and fall of underwater volcano revealed

there are uprisings and there are falls
there are rainbow lollies melting in sun
heat always makes the headlines
the pacific also feels like fame

the mountains of underworld
have special cores for reciting poetry
that advertise once in a while
but art is drying up
and hades is snoring

his sheets violent waves
sweeping us off the mattress of the world

Bilingual/Bilingüe- Rhina P. Espaillat

My father liked them separate, one there,

one here (allá y aquí), as if aware

that words might cut in two his daughter’s heart

(el corazón) and lock the alien part

to what he was—his memory, his name

(su nombre)—with a key he could not claim.

“English outside this door, Spanish inside,”

he said, “y basta.” But who can divide

the world, the word (mundo y palabra) from

any child? I knew how to be dumb

and stubborn (testaruda); late, in bed,

I hoarded secret syllables I read

until my tongue (mi lengua) learned to run

where his stumbled. And still the heart was one.

I like to think he knew that, even when,

proud (orgulloso) of his daughter’s pen,

he stood outside mis versos, half in fear

of words he loved but wanted not to hear.

Across a Great Wilderness without You - Keetje Kuipers

The deer come out in the evening.

God bless them for not judging me,

I'm drunk. I stand on the porch in my bathrobe

and make strange noises at them—
                                                  language,

if language can be a kind of crying.

The tin cans scattered in the meadow glow,

each bullet hole suffused with moon,

like the platinum thread beyond them

where the river runs the length of the valley.

That's where the fish are.

                                   Tomorrow

I'll scoop them from the pockets of graveled

stone beneath the bank, their bodies

desperately alive when I hold them in my hands,

the way prayers become more hopeless

when uttered aloud.

                            The phone's disconnected.

Just as well, I've got nothing to tell you:

I won't go inside where the bats dip and swarm

over my bed. It's the sound of them

shouldering against each other that terrifies me,

as if it might hurt to brush across another being's

living flesh.

                But I carry a gun now. I've cut down

a tree. You wouldn't recognize me in town—

my hands lost in my pockets, two disabused tools

I've retired from their life of touching you.