A mother's lament for her drowned son - Anonymous

Alas, alas thine empty seat, my son!

Vainly thy garments I did toil to dry.

Thy mother's joy is clouded o'er with grief,

And darkness veils the lonely sky.

The Battle of Hafur's Bay - Hornklofi

Loud in Hafur’s echoing bay 

Heard ye the battle fiercely bray, 

’Twixt Kiotva rich, and Harald bold! 

Eastward sail the ships of war; 

The graven bucklers gleans afar,  

And monsterous heads adorn the prows of gold. 

Sways, with her trinkets - Hatim al-Tai

Sways, with her trinkets, she, endowed with splendour

With a waist like the fold of flimsy cloth, slim

And a neck like a cup of silver, adorning it

The blaze of the ruby and the strung beads

Vondel's Lucifer (Act II, lines 192-276) - Joost van den Vondel

Lucifer:

Shall then on high

A worm, an alien, wield the greatest power?

Must they who native are to Heaven thus yield

To foreign rule? Shall man then found a throne

Even o'er the Throne of God?

My King - Nachmanides

Ere time began, ere age to age had thrilled, 

I waited in his storehouse, as he willed; 

He gave me being, but, my years fulfilled, 

I shall be summoned back before the King. 

Hands - Laxmi Prasad Devkota

Cooperation and understanding is essential

To build country brick by brick.

Most creatures are four-legged

But human being walks with two legs.

The Executioner's Dream - Kwesi Brew

I dreamt i saw an eye, a pretty eye

In your hands

Glittering, wet and sikening

Like a dull onyx set in a crown of thorns

I did not know you were dead

When you dropped it in my lap

Mount Beysitoun - Nizami Ganjavi

On lofty Beysitoun the lingering sun

Looks down on ceaseless labors, long begun;

The mountain trembles to the echoing sound

Of falling rocks that from her sides rebound.

The Frontier Guard - Anastasius Grün

The sentinel his weary hours

Keeps guard in quarantine;

Across the stream, in paths of flowers,

The Turkish maid is seen.

Memory - Erik Johan Stagnelius

O camp of flowers, with poplars girdled round,

Grey guardians of life’s soft and purple bud!

The First Book of the Æneis (lines 19-43) - Vergil

Against the Tiber’s mouth, but far away,

An ancient town was seated on the sea;

The Happy Islands - Isabel Maud Peacocke

O far away, and far away,

The Happy Islands lie;

In bluer seas of calm than these,

Beneath a bluer sky.

To St. Paul - Peter Damian

Learned Paul, thy sounding voice,

A trumpet, makes the church rejoice

Thou flying cloud of fiery birth,

Thy wisdom circles all the earth.

The fish is waiting - Jessie Kleemann

the one and only

in whose eyes I see

the fish

The Motoka - Theo Luzuka

You see that Benz sitting at the rich’s end ?

Ha! That motoka is motoka

It belongs to the Minister for Fairness

Who yesterday was loaded with a doctorate

At Makarere with whisky and I don’t know what

Plus I hear the literate thighs of an undergraduate.

 

Consider - Munur Mambetaliev

Friend, when you visit cemeteries, don’t be afraid.

All the dead are Kyrgyz, and most of them you know.

Over here is Kerim. You knew him well.

And Karakoichu. Alym. Bekish. Sabyr. And the others . . .

Of Policies And Capacities - Ndaba Sibanda

This economy has whiskey

how can it be so drunk and risky?

A Song of the Road - José Santos Chocano

The way was black,

The night was mad with lightning; I bestrode

My wild young colt upon a mountain road.

Thus sang the burning stars - Otakar Březina

Each second that passes, ever within our places

In the mystic dance of the worlds

We revolve in the cosmos.

In the lustrous spheres of spirits we burn with a living

Beauty.

Around our heads,

In aureoles

Golden tresses are sparkling,

Extended like resonant lassos

In the flight of the whirlwind.

Time is precious, I know - Tua Forsström

Time is precious, I know,

to each enough of one’s own suffering.

The sun is happy that a sparrow loves its life - John Puhiatau Pule

The sun is happy that a sparrow loves its life.

Branches calm the air down to a smooth solitude.

Energy from my psyche drives the stars

that imitate water when its eyes are wished for.

 

A last note on the fat brown woman and shoes - Sia Figiel

No shoe fits the foot of the fat brown woman

No high heel

No low heel

Moles - Sheena Baharudin

By the time I was ten years old

a number of moles have already made

my body and my face, their home.

Funeral Song - Tan Lixin

Not a melody,

not the voice of a songbird,

but quiet trails of tears,

silent prayers, the coarse cries

of a grown man.

There’s a place - José Luis Appleyard

There’s a place in the world where I live

small and unique,

a place of my own,

a piece of land, redolent of wood,

with people like me,

in a captive heart,

diminutive, bleeding and sad.

First Rain - Avrom Sutzkever

What shall I do with so much memory?

Where shall I hide it,

Infuse it in veins —

For my grandchild to find it?

Lo, the signs of our Lord are everlasting - Umayyah ibn Abī aṣ-Ṣalt

Lo, the signs of our Lord are everlasting,

None disputes them except the unbeliever.

Good Morning Lebanon - Majid Al Mohandes

Good morning O Lebanon

Evening of Death O Beirut

Evening of tears in the eyelids

And the injury of our repressed feelings

O Beirut

The prayer of the goldfish - Carmen Bernos de Gasztold

O God,

forever I turn in this hard crystal,

so transparent, yet I can find no way out.

You come up - Alice S. Yousef

You come up,

like the treasure found at the end of a box

Most bitter is the bite of hunger - Elie Rajaonarison

Most bitter is the bite of hunger

which awakens you in the morning

keeps you up at night