Affirmative Action

- Pádraig Ó Tuama, readings from the book of exile

A n d i s n' t i t t r u e f o r a l l o f u s

-  Pádraig Ó Tuama, Sorry for your troubles 

Odes

Held by Neha 

1.
Of the gardens of Adonis, Lydia, I love
Most of all those fugitive roses
         That on the day they are born,
         That very day, must also die.
Eternal, for them, the light of day:
They're born when the sun is already high
         And die before Apollo's course

         Across the visible sky is run.
We too, of our lives, must make one day:
We never know, my Lydia, nor want
        To know of nights before or after
        The little while that we may last.
2.
To be great, be whole: nothing that's you
         Should you exaggerate or exclude.
In each thing, be all. Give all you are
         In the least you ever do.
The whole moon, because it rides so high,
         Is reflected in each pool.

- Ricardo Reis ( Fernando Pessoa), Translated by Edouard Roditi

Thanks

Signs by Neha

Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water thanking it
standing by the windows looking out
in our directions

back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging
after funerals we are saying thank you
after the news of the dead
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you

over telephones we are saying thank you
in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators
remembering wars and the police at the door
and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you
in the banks we are saying thank you
in the faces of the officials and the rich
and of all who will never change
we go on saying thank you thank you

with the animals dying around us
taking our feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
thank you we are saying and waving
dark though it is

- W.S.Merwin, Migration: New and Selected Poems, Copper Canyon Press, 2005

Long Afternoon At The Edge Of Little Sister Pond

चलना और स्थिरता by Neha 

As for life,
I’m humbled,
I’m without words
sufficient to say

how it has been hard as flint,
and soft as a spring pond,
both of these
and over and over,

and long pale afternoons besides,
and so many mysteries
beautiful as eggs in a nest,
still unhatched

though warm and watched over
by something I have never seen –
a tree angel, perhaps,
or a ghost of holiness.

Every day I walk out into the world
to be dazzled, then to be reflective.
It suffices, it is all comfort –
along with human love...

**********************

Still, what I want in my life
is to be willing
to be dazzled —
to cast aside the weight of facts

and maybe even
to float a little
above this difficult world.
I want to believe I am looking

into the white fire of a great mystery.
I want to believe that the imperfections are nothing —
that the light is everything — that it is more than the sum
of each flawed blossom rising and fading. And I do.

- Mary Oliver

Ye Khayal Accha Hai

बूगनबेल by Neha 

Aur bazaar se le aaye agar toot gayaa
Saagar-e-Jam se mera jaam-e-sifaal achaa hai

unke dekhe se jo aa jaati hai munh par raunaq,
woh samajhtey hain ke beemaar ka haal achaa hai

dekhiye  paate hain  ushshaaq buton se kya faiz,
ik brahman ne kaha hai, ke yeh saal achaa hai

ham ko ma.alūm hai jannat kī haqīqat lekin
dil ke ḳhush rakhne ko 'ġhālib' ye ḳhayal achaa hai

- Mirza Ghalib

A Speech at the Lost-and-Found

- Wislawa Szymborska, Map, Collected and Last Poems

The Secret

Tabiir by Neha 

Two girls discover  
the secret of life  
in a sudden line of  
poetry.

I who don’t know the  
secret wrote  
the line. They  
told me

(through a third person)  
they had found it
but not what it was  
not even

what line it was. No doubt  
by now, more than a week  
later, they have forgotten  
the secret,

the line, the name of  
the poem. I love them  
for finding what  
I can’t find,

and for loving me  
for the line I wrote,  
and for forgetting it  
so that

a thousand times, till death  
finds them, they may  
discover it again, in other  
lines

in other  
happenings. And for  
wanting to know it,  
for

assuming there is  
such a secret, yes,  
for that  
most of all.

- Denise Levertov

Star-gazer

Miniature, India, Bundi,18th century

Forty-two years ago (to me if to no one else
The number is of some interest) it was a brilliant starry night
And the westward train was empty and had no corridors
So darting from side to side I could catch the unwonted sight
Of those almost intolerably bright
Holes, punched in the sky, which excited me partly because
Of their Latin names and partly because I had read in the textbooks
How very far off they were, it seemed their light
Had left them (some at least) long years before I was.

And this remembering now I mark that what
Light was leaving some of them at least then,
Forty-two years ago, will never arrive
In time for me to catch it, which light when
It does get here may find that there is not
Anyone left alive
To run from side to side in a late night train
Admiring it and adding noughts in vain.

- Louis Macneice

Mera Pata (My Address)

Sky in by Neha

Aaj main apne ghar da number mittaiyan hai /
Today I have erased the number of my house

Te gali de matthe de lagaa gali da naam hataaiya hai/
And removed the stain of identity from my street’s forehead

Te har sadak di disha da naam punjh ditta hai/
And I have wiped off the directions on each road

Par je tussa mainu zaroor labhna hai/
But if you really want to meet me

Ta har des de, har sheher di, har gali da booha thakoro /
Then knock at the doors of every country, every city, every street

Ih ik sraap hai, ik var hai/
This is a curse, a blessing. 

Te jitthe vi sutantar rooh di jhalak paavey /
And wherever the glimpse of a free spirit exists
.
........samajhna uh mera ghar hai /
Understand that as my home. 

- Amrita Pritam

Ode to Dirt

Spring Canvas by Neha

Dear dirt, I am sorry I slighted you,
I thought that you were only the background
for the leading characters—the plants
and animals and human animals.
It’s as if I had loved only the stars
and not the sky which gave them space
in which to shine. Subtle, various,
sensitive, you are the skin of our terrain,
you’re our democracy. When I understood
I had never honored you as a living
equal, I was ashamed of myself,
as if I had not recognized
a character who looked so different from me,
but now I can see us all, made of the
same basic materials—
cousins of that first exploding from nothing—
in our intricate equation together. O dirt,
help us find ways to serve your life,
you who have brought us forth, and fed us,
and who at the end will take us in
and rotate with us, and wobble, and orbit.

—Sharon Olds

Lightly, Lightly, Ever so Lightly

Lis by Neha 

Lightly, lightly, ever so lightly
A wind passes so lightly
And dies away, ever so lightly
And I know not what I think
Nor do I try to know

- Albero Careiro ( Fernando Pessoa), Translators - E. Honig, S.M.Brown, Translations. Spring, `999

The poem is a temple

-  Upstream by Mary Oliver 

The lost thought

Orientation by Neha

I felt a cleaving in my mind
        As if my brain had split;
I tried to match it, seam by seam,
       But could not make them fit.

The thought behind I strove to join
       Unto the thought before, ,
But sequence ravelled out of reach
        Like balls upon a floor.

- Emily Dickinson

The house was quiet and the world was calm

La lettrice in abito viola by Henri Matisse 

The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night

Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.

The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,

Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom

The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.

The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.

And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself

Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.

- Wallace Stevens, from The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens

A Work Of Artifice

Penzai (penjing) on a mural (706 CE) — in the Tang Dynasty tomb of Prince Li Xian, Wiki Commons

The bonsai tree

in the attractive pot
could have grown eighty feet tall
on the side of a mountain
till split by lightning.
But a gardener
carefully pruned it.
It is nine inches high.
Every day as he
whittles back the branches
the gardener croons,
It is your nature
to be small and cozy,
domestic and weak;
how lucky, little tree,
to have a pot to grow in.
With living creatures
one must begin very early
to dwarf their growth:
the bound feet,
the crippled brain,
the hair in curlers,
the hands you
love to touch.

- Marge Piercy

The Dream Keeper

The Gladioli Les Glaïeuls 1 by Marc Chagall 

Bring me all of your dreams,
You dreamers,
Bring me all your
Heart melodies
That I may wrap them
In a blue cloud-cloth
Away from the too-rough fingers
Of the world.

- Langston Hughes

The heart asks pleasure first

Untitled Self Portrait by Amrita Sher-Gil

The heart asks pleasure first
And then, excuse from pain-
And then, those little anodynes
That deaden suffering;

And then, to go to sleep;
And then, if it should be
The will of its Inquisitor,
The liberty to die.

- Emily Dickinson

Thy fingers make early flowers

Violet Robe and Anemone by Henri Matisse

Thy fingers make early flowers
of all things.
thy hair mostly the hours love:
a smoothness which
sings, saying
(though love be a day)
do not fear,we will go amaying.

thy whitest feet crisply are straying.
Always
thy moist eyes are at kisses playing,
whose strangeness much
says; singing
(though love be a day)
for which girl art thou flowers bringing?

To be thy lips is a sweet thing
and small.
Death, thee i call rich beyond wishing
if this thou catch,
else missing.
(though love be a day
and life be nothing, it shall not stop kissing).

- e e cummings

What Have I Ever Lost By Dying?

Portrait IV, 1938 by Joan Miro

I lived for hundreds of thousands of years as a mineral,

And then I died and was reborn as a plant.

I lived for hundreds of thousands of years as a plant,

And then I died and was reborn as an animal.

I lived for hundreds of thousands of years as an animal,
And then I died and was reborn as a human being.

What have I ever lost by dying?

- Rumi ( version by Robert Bly)