Less Time poem – Andre Breton poems
Less time than it takes to say it, less tears than it takes to die; I’ve taken account of everything, there you have it. I’ve made a census of the stones, they are as numerous as my fingers and some others; I’ve distributed some pamphlets to the plants, but not all were willing to […]
Freedom of Love poem | L’Union Libre (Ma Femme) – Andre Breton poems
(Translated from the French by Edouard Rodti) My wife with the hair of a wood fire With the thoughts of heat lightning With the waist of an hourglass With the waist of an otter in the teeth of a tiger My wife with the lips of a cockade and of a bunch of stars of […]
Le Verbe Etre poem – Andre Breton poems
Je connais le désespoir dans ses grandes lignes. Le désespoir n’a pas d’ailes, il ne se tient pas nécessairement à une table desservie sur une terrasse, le soir, au bord de la mer. C’est le désespoir et ce n’est pas le retour d’une quantité de petits faits comme des graines qui quittent à la […]
Five Ways To Kill A Man poem – Andre Breton poems
There are many cumbersome ways to kill a man. You can make him carry a plank of wood to the top of a hill and nail him to it. To do this properly you require a crowd of people wearing sandals, a cock that crows, a cloak to dissect, a sponge, some vinegar and […]
Always for the first time
Always for the first time Hardly do I know you by sight You return at some hour of the night to a house at an angle to my window A wholly imaginary house It is there that from one second to the next In the inviolate darkness I anticipate once more the fascinating rift […]
What would I do without this world by Samuel Beckett
what would I do without this world faceless incurious where to be lasts but an instant where every instant spills in the void the ignorance of having been without this wave where in the end body and shadow together are engulfed what would I do without this silence where the murmurs die the pantings the […]
Cascando by Samuel Beckett
1 why not merely the despaired of occasion of wordshed is it not better abort than be barren the hours after you are gone are so leaden they will always start dragging too soon the grapples clawing blindly the bed of want bringing up the bones the old loves sockets filled once with eyes like […]
To a Commencement of Scoundrels by Samuel Hazo
To a Commencement of Scoundrels by Samuel Hazo My boys, we lied to you. The world by definition stinks of Cain, no matter what your teachers told you. Heroes and the fools of God may rise like accidental green or gray saharas, but the sand stays smotheringly near. Deny me if you can. Already you […]
The Nearness That Is All by Samuel Hazo
The Nearness That Is All by Samuel Hazo Love’s what Shakespeare never said by saying, “You have bereft me of all words, lady.” Love is the man who siphoned phlegm from his ill wife’s throat three times a day for seven years. Love’s what the Arabs mean when they bless those with children: “May God […]
The Middle of the World by Samuel Hazo
The Middle of the World by Samuel Hazo Call it the dark wood’s year. Call it a year of hell and mountains and a guide to keep at bay the leopard, lion and the wolf. Call it something! I am ripe for parables. My only mountain is the one I climb to work, and I […]
The First Sam Hazo at the Last by Samuel Hazo
The First Sam Hazo at the Last by Samuel Hazo A minor brush with medicine in eighty years was all he’d known. But this was different. His right arm limp and slung, his right leg dead to feeling and response, he let me spoon him chicken-broth. Later he said without self-pity that he’d like to […]
The Cleaving by Samuel Hazo
The Cleaving by Samuel Hazo Imagining my wife dead, I am stopped, stilled, halved and driven singly back to fears too real for loneliness alone to name. Then, nothing. Slowly intimidations shame me back and up from hell like Orpheus, saying it was not time, it was not time to leave her rouged and coffined […]
Carol of a Father by Samuel Hazo
Carol of a Father by Samuel Hazo He runs ahead to ford a flood of leaves— he suddenly a forager and I the lagging child content to stay behind and watch the gold upheavals at the curb submerge his surging ankles and subside. A word could leash him back or make him turn and ask […]