Poetry Saturday: Serhiy Zhadan

Excerpt from Alcohol

— translated by Virlana Tkacz and Wanda Phipps

On the terrace the left-over cups of tea
are filling up with rain water
and cigarette butts,
you and I share a cold
you and I share long conversations —
you don’t notice the morning rain
you go to sleep late
and you wake up late
I write poems about how I love
this woman, and I invent
newer and newer words
to avoid
telling her.

Serhiy Zhadan is the most popular poet of the post-independence generation in Ukraine. His work speaks to the disillusionment, difficulties, and ironies brought by the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Poetry Saturday: Marjana Savka

Books We’ve Never Read (an Excerpt)

— translated from the Ukrainian by Askold Melnyczuk

Books we’ve never read are opening for us.
Towns shimmer in the night air.
Cold dawns. Warm autumn train stations.
The roads turn like pages. Eyes reddened by wind.

_____________

Marjana Savka is a writer, publisher, community activist, and chief editor and co-founder of Vydavny Staroha Leva (Old Lion Publishing House). Born in the village of Kopychyntsi, Ternopil oblast, she currently lives and works in Lviv. Savka is the author of the poetry collections Oholeni rusla (Naked River Beds, 1995), Hirka mandrahora (Bitter Mandragora, 2002), Kokhannia i viina (Love and War, 2002, together with Marianna Kiianovska).

Poetry Wednesday: Liu Xia’s “June 2nd, 1989”

Liu Xia is the widow of Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo. This poem was part of her collection, Empty Chairs, published in a bilingual edition by Graywolf Press.

June 2nd, 1989

— for Xiaobo

This isn’t good weather
I said to myself
standing under the lush sun.

Standing behind you
I patted your head
and your hair pricked my palm
making it strange to me.

I didn’t have a chance
to say a word before you became a character
in the news, everyone looking up to you
as I was worn down
at the edge of the crowd
just smoking
and watching the sky.

A new myth, maybe, was forming there.
but the sun’s sharp light
blinded me from seeing it.

Cee’s Midweek Madness Challenge, 14 Sept 2022: Bright Pink or Magenta

Posting for Cee’s Midweek Madness Challenge: Bright Pink or Magenta

Self painted this for an art project when she was in sixth grade at Assumption Convent in Manila. She brought it with her to graduate school in California. Last year, she pulled it from its usual spot (under the bed) and unrolled it. The colors were still fresh, after all these years! Amazing! She never put any kind of protection over the paint.

On the back, she had written:

If you have two loaves of bread
Sell one and with the other
Buy hyacinths to feed your soul.

She doesn’t know where the quote was from, so she decided to google. Found an article about the original poem in The Paris Review.

When she took it to University Art Center on El Camino Real to be framed, they asked the standard question: estimated value? Self responded, probably nothing. The staff person wrote down: Sentimental Value.

Stay tuned.

Poetry Friday: Palladas

‘Loving the rituals’

Loving the rituals that keep men close,
Nature created means for friends apart:

pen, paper, ink, the alphabet,
Signs for the distant and disconsolate heart.

— translated from the Greek by Tony Harrison

• Palladas was a 4th century AD poet. Greek, he lived in Alexandria.

Buglas, A New Literary Journal from the Central Philippines, Inaugural Issue

All the writers are from two central Philippine islands: Negros (yes, that IS the name of one of the islands, thank you Spanish colonizers who named it after the locals, who were “Negros” — dark-skinned) and Siquijor.

Buglas was the pre-Spanish name for Negros.

It is edited by writers from the Dumaguete Writers Workshop.

Self’s story Dumaguete is in it, which renders her speechless. Just speechless!

Welcome from the Editors.

Submission Guidelines here.

Poetry Wednesday: 1939-1945 War, by Leontia Flynn

Shatter the windows. Tumble down the wall.
Sleep under a curtain in the swimming pool
and shelter in the old gymnasium.
After the talks, the shying and denial,
War has come again. War: the word’s a bomb.

on everyone’s lips: The service men and women,
up in the capital for the campaign
might kip out in an open corridor.
War in the A.R.P. and letter-writing;
War for the volunteers and ground staff. War

in the cafeterias’ military operations:
in the gas shortage, the meat shortage — the rations
of everything but what the club’s now for:
War in the frantic games — the singing and dancing
from dusk till daybreak. War in the ‘R and R’.

Leontia Flynn was the Seamus Heaney Poet in Residence at The Bloomsbury. Her poetry collection Profit and Loss (2011) was a Poetry Book Society Choice and was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize.

Poetry Tuesday: Khalil Gibran

For what is it to die but to stand naked
in the wind and melt in the sun?
And what is it to cease breathing
but to free the breath from its restless tides,
that it may rise and expand
and seek God encumbered?

Only when you drink from the river of
silence shall you indeed sing.
And when you have reached the mountaintop,
then you shall begin to climb.
And when the earth shall claim your limbs,
then you shall truly dance.

I’m a Fan of . . . BOOKS!

Posting for the “I’m a Fan Of” Challenge hosted by Jez.

I love reading books and reading about books. Some of my favorite places in the whole world are bookstores. Here are a couple of photos from my most recent trip:

Train Reading: London Review of Books, 9 June 2022

Migration is a self-splitting, one note observes; it’s “psychotic to live in a different country for ever.”

— Peter Howarth, in his review of Bhanu Kapil’s poetry collection How to Wash a Heart, “poems addressing the wealthy liberal woman who has taken the speaker, an artist whose immigration status is precarious, into her house.”

Perhaps I can write here again.
A ‘fleeting sense of possibility.’ — K