QUILTS

Like a fading piece of cloth

I am a failure.

No longer do I cover tables filled with food and laughter

My seams are frayed my hems falling my strength no longer able

To hold the hot and cold

I wish for those first days

When just woven I could keep water

From seeping through

Repelled stains with the tightness of my weave

Dazzled the sunlight with my 

Reflection

I grow old though pleased with my memories

The tasks I can no longer complete

Are balanced by the love of the tasks gone past

I offer no apology only 

this plea:

When I am frayed and strained and drizzle at the end

Please someone cut a square and put me in a quilt

That I might keep some child warm

And some old person with no one else to talk to

Will hear my whispers

And cuddle

near

Nikki Giovanni

1943-

Yolande Cornelia "Nikki" Giovanni Jr. is an American writer, commentator, activist, and educator. She is currently a distinguished professor of English at Virginia Tech.

END OF THE WORLD

The day the world ends

will be clean and orderly

like the notebook

of the best student in the class.

The town drunk

will sleep in a ditch,

the express train will pass

without stopping at the station

and the regimental band 

will endlessly practice

the march they have played in the square for twenty years.

Only some children

will leave their kites tangled

in telephone lines

to run home crying

not knowing what to tell their mothers

and I will carve my initials

in the bark of a linden tree

knowing that it won’t do any good.

The kids will play football

in the empty lot on the edge of town.

The holy sects will come out 

to sing on the street corners.

The crazy old woman will pass with her parasol.

And I will say to myself: “The world cannot end,

because here on the patio the pigeons and the sparrows

 are still squabbling over the grains."

Jorge Teillier
1935-1996

translated from the Spanish by Miller Williams

WITH A GREEN SCARF

With a green scarf I blindfolded 

the eyes of the trees

and asked them to catch me.

At once the trees caught me,

their leaves shaking with laughter.

I blindfolded the birds

with a scarf of clouds

and asked them to catch me.

The birds caught me

with a song.

Then with a smile I blindfolded

my sorrow

and the day after it caught me

with a love.

I blindfolded the sun

with my nights

and asked the sun to catch me.

I know where you are, the sun said,

just behind that time.

Don’t bother to hide any longer.

Don’t bother to hide any longer,

said all of them,

as well as all the feelings

I tried to blindfold.

Marin Sorescu
1936-1997

Translated from the Romanian by Michael Hamburger

AND WE LOVE LIFE

And we love life if we find a way to it.
We dance in between martyrs and raise a minaret for violet or palm trees.

We love life if we find a way to it.

And we steal from the silkworm a thread to build a sky and fence in this departure.
We open the garden gate for the jasmine to go out as a beautiful day on the streets.

We love life if we find a way to it.

And we plant, where we settle, some fast growing plants, and harvest the dead.
We play the flute like the colour of the faraway, sketch over the dirt corridor a neigh.
We write our names one stone at a time, O lightning make the night a bit clearer.

We love life if we find a way to it. . . . .




Mahmoud Darwish
1942-2008

translated from the Arabic by Fady Joudah

THE ANGEL HANDED ME A BOOK

Placing a book in my hands, the angel said, “It holds all you would wish to know.” And he vanished.
So I opened the book, which wasn’t thick.
It was written in an unknown alphabet.
Scholars translated it, but produced very different versions.
They disagreed even about their own readings, agreeing neither upon the tops or bottoms of them, nor the beginnings, nor the ends.
Toward the close of this vision, it seemed to me that the book
melted, until it could no longer be told apart from the world that surrounds us.





Paul Valéry
1871-1945

translated from the French by Carolyn Forché 


Ambroise-Paul-Toussaint-Jules Valéry was a French poet, essayist, and philosopher. His interests were sufficiently broad that he can be classified as a polymath.