Serranilla - Íñigo López de Mendoza

From Calatrava as I took my way
At holy Mary's shrine to kneel and pray,
And sleep upon my eyelids heavy lay,
There where the ground was very rough and wild,
I lost my path and met a peasant child:
From Finojosa, with the herds around her,
There in the fields I found her.

With a Green Scarf - Marin Sorescu

Listen.

With a green scarf I blindfolded
the eyes of the trees
and asked them to catch me.

Every church sings its own soft part - Osip Emilevich Mandelstam

Every church sings its own soft part
In the polyphony of a girl's choir,
And in the stone arches of the Assumption
I make out high, arched brows.

Conscience - Walter Wingate

'Twas a bonnie day – and a day o' dule
The day I plunkit the Sawbath schule!

The bear - Oleh Lysheha

After dining in the moonlight,
He sorted the bones —

the grandmother - Humberto Ak'abal

The night begins,
when the moon
—Grandmother of the villages—
comes out with her lime-white candle
to light up the silence.

A Song for My Father - Delores Gauntlett

Against the yam-vine quiet of the garden
a nightingale stirred with my father: the lift
and fall of the pickaxe, the heaving throat
of the hidden bird exacting
the subtleties of song.
This would become the memory of high grass
brushing wet against the black waterboots.

The Poet’s Voice - Khalil Reza Uluturk

I don’t want freedom gram by gram, grain by grain.

Some Bright Elegance - Kayo Chingonyi

For the screwfaced in good shoes that paper
the walls of dance halls. I have little patience.
I say dance, not to be seen but to be free, your feet
are made for better things. Feel the bitterness
in you lift as it did for a six year old Bojangles
tapping a living out of Richmond beer gardens
to the delight of a crowd that wasn’t lynching
today but laughing at the quickness of the kid.

The way leaves crackle - Eugene Dubnov

The way leaves crackle, snow crunches on the ears,
The way the dog scrabbles at the rustling leaves and the snow.