Poetry collection
The silent road
the glowing moonlit road—
the trees
the oh so still and aged trees—
the water
the gently tautened contented water,
And beyond, far off, the sunken sky
with the stars’ wheedling cry.
From: Gorter, Herman, Poems of 1890: A Selection, 2015, UCL Press, p. 33.
(https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1g69z4p.3)
Date: 1890 (original in Dutch); 2015 (translation in English)
By: Herman Gorter (1864-1927)
Translated by: Paul Vincent (19??- )
Winter — might pray to green trees
to see the star bring in a season in
which I sit metastasizing in my briefs
by the breeze of a blue fan with some
same complaints so that if you came
upon me — there, now — you would
not recognize me, but it’s me. The curve
of my back — same emails, same friend
requests ignored. Should I give up
for Martians don’t speak through me?
I’m observing this lack of purpose
proliferate in my cell walls; my whole
awareness is of distraction. Doubt
the erotic verse will get me a residency
or exile on the Black Sea where I’d stare
at brutal resorts built over the beach.
Can’t say I’m fond of this coercion, but
every night I try to do something
meaningful, and break what keeps
coming back. So I tie up a sack and
anchor a word to the bottom of
water. It’s a syntax, but it’s not a life.
From: https://www.lyrikline.org/en/poems/winter-might-pray-green-trees-13019
Date: 2021
By: Matvei Yankelevich (1973- )
Here in the columnar appendixes of lives
(Those human injuries) where sod and marsh land
Wake in the starkness white-blind
Even the quick tender surplus in the love economy
Got barred for transgressing the norms
Said it lost its vulgarity and fast
Became entertainment wise and lost the salve.
From: https://www.conjunctions.com/online/article/sean-negus-09-15-2015
Date: 2015
By: Sean Negus (19??- )
What is it makes me
hear in the sound of my air
coming on, the sound
of a zombie-dragged foot?
My father isn’t particularly
skittish. I’m at home alone.
I don’t look behind me.
I look like my father.
I’m writing. The room dims
and brightens with sunlight.
More lines,
the scar on my father’s lip.
I’m writing lines in the light.
I’ve been dead twice,
clinically. What makes me ready,
when I hear the neighbor’s
door slam, my apology?
From: http://www.gutcult.com/Site/litjourn6/html/MR.htm
Date: 2005
By: Marc Rahe (19??- )
In the fall we were nostalgic for the summer. In the winter we were nostalgic for
the fall. In the summer we were nostalgic for the spring. But in the spring we
were not nostalgic for the winter, not even for its quiet, or its hot cocoas, or its
video fires, though we did ask our father from time to time to tell us about how,
when he was a child, the man-made lake in the middle of our city froze over
every winter, and how one December day he broke through the ice and was only
saved from drowning by a neighbor boy whose name he can no longer
remember. We were nostalgic for the frozen lake we had never seen, that is, for
the lake we had never seen frozen, the man-made lake we had swum in during
the summers after the lake froze. It was hard to imagine the summer lake frozen.
It was hard to imagine the winter lake summery. It was hard to imagine the lake
being made, and not just spontaneously welling up its murky green effluence.
We were nostalgic for winters that had descended before we were sentient, as if
those winters existed in snow globes we could stow on our nightstands and
dream of falling and falling through the ice we are always rescued from by
neighbors who become strangers over time. The lake is always melting in the
ruins of nostalgia.
From: https://thespectacle.wustl.edu/?p=771
Date: 2022
By: Donna Stonecipher (1969- )
I have never been
citizen to a nation that
hasn’t tried to kill
me, some idea of me, my
people. Free until we aren’t.
From: https://www.terrain.org/2022/poetry/sagirah-shahid/
Date: 2022
By: Sagirah Shahid (19??- )
O hoverfly and gnat and aphid,
stitched music of the sallow plough.
Mosquitoes, draw out my blood
for him. Make me a cloud of wings.
O insects, knitting a song for him
in the sways of the sycamore dark,
lay your veil across my head.
Marry me. I am a bride for you tonight.
From: https://granta.com/three-poems-sean-hewitt/
Date: 2023
By: Seán Hewitt (1990- )
Today I rose and put on summer
clothes and sat in the corner chair.
I can’t say when I first settled
into the habit of noticing wind
in the trees. I do it and wonder
about how things began. Wind
and leaf-shimmer: the all of it.
If you read the first book, it was
finished at chapter one: in the image
he created them, male and female
he created them. But then this
out of clay, that from the other:
the lack of childhood memory,
rapt in dark bone and suddenly
woman, stunned in the new
light, the necessary thrum of bees
pulsing everywhere and nowhere—
she closed her eyes to shut it out.
He didn’t know good, evil, her name.
It was orchard and garden all around.
They must have found themselves
locked into a position that left them
breathless. Because there was a first time—
even and especially without words
to ask or raise the possibility of asking
like even and especially or how was it
because there was nothing but garden
all around and no shadow of leaf-litter
beneath the outline of even a single tree.
From: http://www.boxcarpoetry.com/030/bazzett_michael_002.html
Date: 2012
By: Michael Bazzett (19??- )
Your hands dig me
Out of my tomb of ivory,
Carve the mark of my eyes,
Open so the whites are white and
Guileless, onlooking, sand down
The apple of my hips, chisel
The dips of my back, every stroke by
Calloused hands, those yellowed
And aching hands, those coarse and
Clawing, cloying hands that wrench
Me into unmovingness. I’m made
More perfect by the cold, skin
Unknown to blemish but by the
Weathering of your running hands,
The wearing of your knobby hands
Only a man’s gaze to awaken me
To praise the pure expanse of
My impassive beauty, to linger
On the sheen of my jaw and my
Roman-column neck, earthly-globen
Breasts, the way I gleam under summer
Sun or by cavernous torchlight.
How your eyes frighten me, lingering
And you finger every mountain,
Every cavity, wish me awake, fervently
Pray I would take to your breath
Step down from the dais and down
To your feet, plead Aphrodite make
Me soften and melt at your body
But if heat came to me, it would come
First to my legs, like fire, and burn
All at once, and I would roil and churn,
And I would run, I would run, I would run.
From: http://greensbororeview.org/stories/the-amon-liner-poetry-award-pygmalion/
Date: 2021
By: Megan Gower (19??- )
From Troubles of The World 