To My Father, by Wing Tek Lum (1946-) In our store that day they gathered together my grandfather among them each in his turn to cut off their queues: the end of subservience. They could have returned the Republic soon established or, or on the safe side, waited a year to grow back that braid. […]
Recession, by Sydney Lea (1942-) A grotesquerie for so long we all ignored it: The mammoth plastic Santa lighting up On the Quik-Stop’s roof, presiding over pumps That gleamed and gushed in the tarmac lot below it. Out back, with pumps of their own, the muttering diesels. And we, for the most part ordinary folks, […]
The Story, by Michael Ondaatje (1943-) 1. For his first forty days a child is given dreams of previous lives. Journeys, winding paths, a hundred small lessons and then the past is erased. Some are born screaming, some full of introspective wandering into the past — that bus ride in winter, the sudden arrival […]
The Wind Blows Through the Doors of My Heart, by Deborah Digges (1950-2009) The wind blows through the doors of my heart. It scatters my sheet music that climbs like waves from the piano, free of the keys. Now the notes stripped, black butterflies, flattened against the screens. The wind through my heart blows all […]
After Fifty Years, by William Faulkner (1897-1962) Her house is empty and her heart is old, And filled with shades and echoes that deceive No one save her, for still she tries to weave With blind bent fingers, nets that cannot hold. Once all men’s arms rose up to her, ‘tis told, And hovered like […]
Taking Time to Grow, by Mary Mapes Dodge (1831-1905) ‘Mamma! mamma!’ two eaglets cried, ‘To let us fly you’ve never tried. We want to go outside and play; We’ll promise not to go away.’ The mother wisely shook her head: ‘No, no, my dears. Not yet,’ she said. ‘But, mother dear,’ they called again, […]
The Eternal, by Eugenio Florit (1903-1999) You didn’t know that the sea with its colors –green, yellow, blue, gray, black,lunar — would come to possess you forever. Its rocky shore so much yesterday, so far away, saw you enter into its love when it was tame enclosed in its circle of harsh mountains, and saw […]
The Avenues, by David St. John (1949-) Some nights when you’re off Painting in your studio above the laundromat, I get bored about two or three A. M. And go out walking down one of the avenues Until I can see along some desolate sidestreet The glare of an all-night cafeteria. I sit at the […]
Reluctant Whispers of Kissed Lips, by Jaroslav Seifert (1901-1986) Reluctant whispers of kissed lips which are smiling Yes — I’ve long since ceased to hear them. Nor do they belong to me. But I’d still love to find words kneaded from bread dough or the fragrance of lime trees. Yet the bread’s become mouldy and […]
Common Blue, by Melissa Kwasny (1954-) Their eggs are laid on lupine. Tiny jade hairstreaks I could easily mistake for dew. Too precious. Too incidental, and besides that, blue, these trills that flounce in my potato patch, drawn from dryland origins to the domestic stain of water from my hose. What an old woman would […]