I leave thee not - Wolfgang Christoph Dessler

I leave thee not, thou art my Jesus ever,

Though earth rebel,

And death and hell

Would, from its steadfast hold, my faith dissever;

Long life with peace - Xasan Sheekh Muumin

Long life with peace, long life with peace

Long life with peace, long life with peace

Vivos plango - Putinas

Now I depart. With benedictory grace

A world of silence summons me to go,

I feel the gentle shroud of endless space,

The Night that soothes and softens all our woe.

In the Circle of the Veranda, 15 - Ivar Ivask

This tiny watch will soon have measured

its century. An heirloom of Father's sister Adelheid.

Frozen Jews - Avrom Sutzkever

Did you ever see in fields of snow

Frozen Jews, in row upon row?

The Will to Life - Abu al-Qasim al-Shabbi

If, one day, the people wills to live

Then fate must obey

Darkness must dissipate

And must the chain give way

Before the Melbourne Reading - Norman Erikson Pasaribu

​You spent

the entire morning

digging

out the online dictionaries

Infinite Love - Søren Kierkegaard

Thou loving Father, 

everything goes wrong for me

and yet Thou art love. 

Life is Short - Francisco Gorrindo

Let’s see, boys—I want to be joyful,

I want to be dazed, so I don’t have to think.

The Conversation - Loidology

Come sit here dear,

Come tell me about that gloomy face you wear.

Because the melancholy i can no longer bear.

Let us put all things clear.

Lately you jeer every time i come near,

It seems it is me you fear.

The Prayer of the Little Bird - Carmen Bernos de Gasztold

Dear God,

I don't know how to pray by myself

very well,

Curling her tail - Mimi Khalvati

Curling her tail

      and staring

I am like a slip of comet - Gerard Manley Hopkins

— I am like a slip of comet,

Scarce worth discovery, in some corner seen

Bridging the slender difference of two stars,

How a Dragon is Born - Gueorgui Konstantinov

The beginning is a fight

Between the falling cross

Of a bird

And a serpent,

From the Bridge - Claribel Alegría

I have freed myself at last

it has been hard to break free

near the end of the bridge

I pause

the water flows below

The Eye of Poetry - Lilian A. Aujo

Poetry is the school I will never graduate from

because no matter how hard – I try

I will never tell it all – the secret way of its patterns

And how the same letters form different syllables to form different words,

And how they fall – in front or behind one another, and if re-arranged would create a whole different story...

I love you, my gentle one - Ralph Bitamazire

I love you, my gentle one;

My love is the fresh milk in the rubindi

Which you drank on the wedding day;

A Sudden Storm - Pius Oleghe

The wind howls; the trees sway,

The loose housetop sheets clatter and clang; 

The open window shuts with a bang,

And the sky makes night of day.

A godlike man - Narsimha Mehta

A godlike man is one,

Who feels another’s pain

Who shares another’s sorrow,

And pride does disdain.

Haidouks - Hristo Botev

Father and Son

Come, Grandfather, blow on your pipe now,

And I will take up the tune

With songs of our heroes, of haidouks,

Songs of voivodes, of chieftains,

Of Chavdar the terrible haidouk,

Of Chavdar the captain of old,

The son of Petko the Fearsome!

Monolog of an Effigy - Yevgeny Yevtushenko

When my charitable fellow-writers

               were burning my effigy

and not poking my guts with their pocket-knives —

                    thank God!

Guard Duty - Tomas Tranströmer

I’m ordered out to a big hump of stones

as if I were an aristocratic corpse from the Iron Age.

The rest are still back in the tent sleeping,

stretched out like spokes in a wheel.

i am the richest - Dhal Jirel 'Ravi'

I have a couple of feet

My hut and my rugs

I eat cheap bread and laugh at Fate

I toil through the livelong day

Report me to you - Robert Wever

Now I beshrew his herte, that to that wyll not agree,

But yet because the tyme shall not seme very longe,

Or eate we departe, let vs haue a mery songe

The sing as folow'eth.

Yogyakarta - Albert Hagenaars

The line from the volcano’s summit

past the sultan’s palace to the sea’s abyss

spans the sacred space of the culture

in which until the end you are embedded.

If I Could Only Write - Ramón de Campoamor

“And will you write a letter for me, padre?”—

  “Yes, child—no need to tell me the address!”

“Do you know whom it’s for because on that dark evening

        You saw us walking?”—“Yes.”

 

The Inquiry - John Dyer

Ye poor little sheep! Ah! well may ye stray,

While sad is your shepherd, and Clio away!

Tell where have you been; have you met with my love,

On the mountain, or valley, or meadow, or grove?

Alas-a-day! No — ye are starv'd and half dead;

Ye saw not my love, or ye all had been fed.

Of the voice of things – Fiama Hasse Pais Brandão

Only the wind’s blast

gives lyrical sound

to the windmill’s blades.

The Journey Prayer - Brendan of Clonfert

God, bless to me this day,

God bless to me this night;

Bless, O bless, Thou God of grace,

Each day and hour of my life;

Our Assorted Quarantines - Elizabeth Kate Switaj

I’m running thirty miles of quarantine with wandering pigs and semi

-feral dogs. Beach and coral and islets complete

the two-lane road’s atoll. You said that you were strangely proud

A north-country song - Anonymous

Says t'auld man tit oak tree,

Young and lusty was I when I kenn'd thee;