Another translation by Mary Tang on her blog Life is But This
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an invitation by Rumi
Come, come, you will never find a friend like me.
Where is a beloved like me in all the world?
Come, don’t waste your life running back and forth.
You are like a dry valley, I am the rain.
You are a city laid to waste, I am the architect.
Come!
translated by Talat S. Halman
Rumi on pronoun use
At one time when life was real, your soul was one with my soul:
All we were, open or secret, was part of the same whole.
If “you” and “I” are pronouns I use, they are only terms–
In truth, there can be no separate you or I at all.
translated by Talat S. Halman
The Lone Firefly by Bai Yu Chan (translation)
another translation from Mary Tang on her blog Life is But This
Whole Summer by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar
How well the whole summer passed,
nights in a small garden. . .
you white as lilies
and in a furtive thought. . .
as if in the full moon night
the reverie can’t be crossed
becoming a palace
as if in house arrest
How well the whole summer passed,
nights in the small garden. . .
translated by Murat Nemet-Nejat
summer shower
unexpected
but welcome
a wet head
and shirt
an easy trade
for relief
from heat and sun
and then memory
comes intruding
a summer shower
thousands of years ago
your hair waist length
dripping on my chest
the white of your teeth
the green of your eyes
the touch of a hand
skin on skin
as rain beat down
on a tin roof
a trailer in Ohio
the sound of corn
serenading in the wind
and sleep
when it came
never felt so good
again
Summer by Georg Trakl
At evening the complaint of the cuckoo
Grows still in the wood.
The grain bends its head deeper,
The red poppy.
Darkening thunder drives
Over the hill.
The old song of the cricket
Dies in the field.
The leaves of the chestnut tree
Stir no more.
Your clothes rustle
On the winding stair.
The candle gleams silently
In the dark room;
A silver hand
Puts the light out;
Windless, starless night.
translated by Robert Bly
Thomas Jefferson speaks
“I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion.”
1820
so don’t forget to vote!!!
“Whenever [the people] grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it.”
another timely quote from Douglas Moore’s Art of Quotation
“This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it.”
– Abraham Lincoln, president, statesman, political figure
from Douglas Moore’s The Art of Quotation blog
“However [political parties] may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines […]
Leonard Durso 