Although the way station you want to reach
Is dangerous and the goal distant, do not
Sink into sadness: all roads have an end.
translated by Robert Bly
Month: December 2013
Addressed Humorously to Tu Fu by Li Po (Li Bei)
Here! is this you on the top of Fan-ko Mountain,
Wearing a huge hat in the noon-day sun?
How thin, how wretchedly thin, you have grown!
You must have been suffering from poetry again.
translated by Shigeyoshi Obata
from Singing Out of Key by Hafiz
Almost nowhere now do they appreciate the art of poetry and spiritual talk.
Hafiz says, Don’t worry, to somewhere else that is rich in freedom we will go.
translated by Thomas Rain Crowe
A Walk by Rainer Maria Rilke
My eyes already touch the sunny hill,
going far ahead of the road I have begun.
So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp;
it has its inner light, even from a distance–
and changes us, even if we do not reach it,
into something else, which, hardly sensing it, we already are;
a gesture waves us on, answering our own wave. . .
but what we feel is the wind in our faces.
translated by Robert Bly
from When The Day Comes by Ghalib
Love requires waiting, but desire doesn’t want to wait.
The heart has no patience; it would rather bleed to death.
I know you’ll respond when you understand the state of my soul,
But I’ll probably be earth before all that is clear to you.
translated by Robert Bly
on being foreign
we are all foreign devils
to someone
as in France, say
they wouldn’t care
if you identify with Sartre
or if I love Paul Eluard
neither one of us would still be French
or in Russia, say
they would be oblivious to your love of Gogol
or my love of Turgenev
no matter how many books of theirs we’ve read
we still wouldn’t be Russian
or in China, say
you might know the Classics
and I can handle a pair of chopsticks
but there’s no way we’re passing for Chinese
you can travel
you can mingle
you can know your p’s and q’s
but it all goes
just so far
for you see
you are what you are
and you ain’t what you ain’t
and somewhere, some time, somehow
you can’t be what they are
just a foreigner
stranded on an alien landscape
making do as best you can
Flexions by Paul Blackburn
the rivers of afternoon
flowing about you as you
move . stop, standing
afterward in my bathroom
naked among the young plants
in the green light singing
softly to yourself
on regrets: for the yellowrose
you say I was right
and you regret everything
you want to talk
but somehow never do
always a mystery
even when you’re transparent
to say I’m sorry
is an understatement
but the life you lead now
was your own doing
choices made
cannot be retracted
and the consequences one pays
are on the other side
of the balance sheet
I’ve no idea what you expect
from me anymore
whatever I felt
was used up long ago
and there’s only a hole
you left in my heart
that I’ve learned to live with
there’s no one here
on this end of the line
that you’d recognize
and wherever you knew me
is not where I am
any longer
untitled poem 2 by Antonio Machado
Mankind owns four things
that are no good at sea:
rudder, anchor, oars,
and the fear of going down.
translated by Robert Bly
untitled poem by Antonio Machado
Traveler, your footprints
are the only road, nothing else.
Traveler, there is no road;
you make your own road as you walk.
As you walk, you make your own road,
and when you look back
you see the path
you will never travel again.
Traveler, there is no road;
only a ship’s wake on the sea.
translated by Mary G. Berg & Dennis Maloney
Leonard Durso 