triomphes

[triomphes]

My daughter, my lovely wreck, my immense, forgive me this day my daily. Release me not from anger, from error, but please know trains run in me, & many dead. Sense sometimes deserts me. Fogged, fickle, my lens. Hallowed be thy name. Cedar-like, thy trees. Thy kingdom come. Thy kingdom come, though don’t forget palms who raised you to the window so you could see the rain. Who heard your scream first. I sound desperate because I am. Won’t lie. Won’t stop. O dear magnificent glow, don’t you see your mother, lonely, supreme?

Don’t you see us mothers, lonely, supreme?

— Zeina Hashem Beck, from "Poem Beginning & Ending with My Birth," O

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Across the plain, flat joy a boat sails. Though many have before, this one draws a simple line on water for which I love it. Its journey ends at a pine that’s been standing all this time alone. You look for another by which the pine must have stood, which I understand has nothing to do with truth. Yes, you have lost too. I see that now.

Suphil Lee Park, “End of a Journey”

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While death is both necessary and loved The cello still needs tuning

Maureen Thorson, “Conditions of Work”

[triomphes]

风熟知爱情 夏日闪烁着皇家的颜色 钓鱼人孤独地测量 大地的伤口 敲响的钟在膨胀 午后的漫步者 请加入这岁月的含义 　　 有人俯向钢琴 有人扛着梯子走过 睡意被推迟了几分钟 仅仅几分钟 太阳在研究阴影 我从明镜饮水 看见心目中的敌人 　　 男高音的歌声 像油轮激怒大海 我凌晨三时打开罐头 让那些鱼大放光明 The wind is intimate with love summer shimmers with imperial colors someone fishing lonesomely measures the earth’s wounds the chiming clock is swelling those of you strolling through the afternoon please join in the meaning of the age some people bow to a piano others carry a ladder by sleepiness has been checked for a few minutes only a few minutes the sun is researching the shadow I quaff water from a bright mirror and spot the enemy in my mind’s eye the tenor’s singing enrages the sea like an oil tanker at 3 A.M. I open a can releasing those fish into the light

This Day (这一天) by Bei Dao (北岛). 1993-1994. Translated by Clayton Eshleman and Lucas Klein.

Bei Dao is the pen name for poet Zhao Zhenkai, born in Beijing in 1949. He is one of the most prominent Chinese writers of his generation; his poetry has been translated into over thirty languages, and he has been repeatedly nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Bei Dao was a leader of the Misty Poets (朦胧诗人) movement, and was a founder of the influential underground literary magazine Today (今天) which inspired many dissenting youth at the time. In 1989, he was exiled from mainland China due to his alleged connection with and influence on the protests at Tiananmen Square. Bei Dao currently resides in Hong Kong, where he is an honorary professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Follow sinθ magazine for more daily posts about Sino arts and culture.

(via sinethetamagazine)

[triomphes]

There is a trick to brushing your hair from your eyes, to leaning one-legged against the lemon tree in your front yard with a red ribbon around your wrist to watch the white picket fence sink into the white snow. A mayfly dies the same day it’s born. A long-lived mayfly. Nothing in this world is unlike anything else. So many people will ask you to be beautiful and urgent, to discover what you cannot have and desire it. Don’t desire. Don’t despair. Rain is only rain in mid-air.

Annelyse Gelman, “How to Be Mysterious” (via kerumie)

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Because there is so little time, she sets her watch back, for more of everything. Unbounded hunger for the tug of the living tree, have mercy for this moment between fences. She does not know how to stay unfolded for too long in this absolute pounding. She says, Big star, big star, bold in its opening, bowled over in its oneness, she says, This is the same hand I use for fetching what I fear, and now I am pointing to you.

Ada Limón, “Big Star”

[triomphes]

But everyone is busted a little. No consciousness of the breaking, just the history of a dirty footprint—even the easy stuff, the small conversations about our worth. (To be an anonymous object,  the innocuous heart, the smallest part of flesh.) On Withers Avenue, a rat circled the bottom of a trash can,  threw itself against the plastic green walls of its new world. I heard it. I removed the top. I put the top back on. (Small brilliant hole in the dark, let me out.) Standing in my ridiculous human clothes, I argued with the rat. I asked him, Are you rabid? Are you crazy? Are you responsible for the plague? He didn’t answer; he threw himself again. Are you mean? Did you hurt your children? Did you hurt anyone? I wanted to tell you that I let that rat out, that kindness overwhelmed the tough pout of people-cleanliness. I want to tell you I put him in a shoe box and brought him to the country, fed him corn and taught him to read. (Un-gettable parallel time, fathomless choices.) I say to a stranger, I am harmless. But the word doesn’t seem right. I have been harmed, but I do not wish to do harm, but I could do harm. (I am not without desire.) I want to tell you the rat moved in with me, we made a good living. But, I tell you, I let him be. I think he might have managed to release himself, he was not harmless. He had intent. Flirting with the world. He’ll show up one day, long-wandered in the weather. He just needed someone subversive to bend in real close and say, You can rustle all you want, you can reinvent the shout, but you got your rat-self in there, now get your cunning rat-self out.

Ada Limón, “To the Busted Among Us”

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I dreamed the tangled crush of magic peels in the wax leaves made a spell of bones, and everything bloomed big and better than before. Beyond the barbed wire, beyond this fence of angry fists there's a breathing, there's a breathing underwater. Love  the body bending, the useless hair, the when of the skin, the when of the wrist, the witching, the now, the now, the insist.

Ada Limón, “The Undressing Day”

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She says not to put the cart before the horse— the heart before the course. But when she moves, so much light escapes.

Ada Limón, “The Bird Knows He Is Going to Die and Wishes Not To”

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What's left of the woods is closing in. Don't run. Open your mouth big to the rising and hope to your god your good heart knows how to swim.

Ada Limón, “Flood Coming” from Sharks in the Rivers

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YOU KNOW THE FAILING OF THE SIGN IS IN ITSELF A SIGN.

Anne Carson, Antigonick

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ANTIGONE: you did nothing you shared nothing leave my death alone ISMENE: i want to row the boat with you ANTIGONE: save yourself ISMENE: i'll be so lonely

Anne Carson, Antigonick

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It is as if the beloved object were an object within the lover's heart. Someone has drawn it out of doors, so the lover is longing to fetch it back inside again. There is the opposite situation as well. When the heart fails to perceive its desires and passions in the external world, it tries hard to fashion their image with its own hands out of various ingredients. In this way, the heart's longing to make the world its own and itself the world's is constantly at work. To express oneself in the outside world is part of this process. That is why when it comes to expression, the heart makes one agree to lose everything one has.

Rabindranath Tagore, “World Literature”

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The heart knows that all through the world there is one heart that continually expresses itself.

Rabindranath Tagore, “World Literature”  

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Here it seems we cannot avoid condemning the phrase "the sun shines on the slanting roofs and on the windows." Enrique Banchs wrote these lines in a suburb of Buenos Aires, and in the suburbs of Buenos Aires there are no slanting roofs, but rather flat roofs. "Nightingales try to say they are in love": the nightingale is less a bird of reality than of literature, of Greek and Germanic tradition. However, I would say that in the use of these conventional images, in these anomalous roofs and nightingales, Argentine architecture and ornithology are of course absent, but we do find in them the Argentine's reticence, his constraint; the fact that Banchs, when speaking of this great suffering which overwhelms him, when speaking of this woman who has left him and has left the world empty for him, should have recourse to foreign and conventional images like slanted roofs and nightingales, is significant: significant of Argentine reserve, distrust and reticence, of the difficulty we have in making confessions, in revealing our intimate nature.

Jorge Luis Borges, “The Argentine Writer and Tradition”

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What interests me most are the countless glossy black stag beetles in the Windheim woods. I track their crooked wanderings with a patient eye. At times it looks as if something has shocked them, physically, and it seems as if they have fainted. They lie there motionless, and it feels as if the world's heart had stopped. Only when you hold your own breath do they return from death to life, only then does time begin to pass again. Time. What time was all that? How slowly the days passed then! And who was that strange child, walking home, tired, with a tiny blue and white jay's feather in her hand?

W. G. Sebald, The Emigrants

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[She] was sitting in her armchair in the dark living room when I went in to her that evening. Only the glow of the street lights was on her face. The aches have eased off, she said, the pain is almost over. At first I thought I was only imagining that it was getting better, so slow was the improvement. And once I was almost without pain, I thought: if you move now, it'll start again. So I just stayed sitting here.

W. G. Sebald, The Emigrants