Even if I now saw you
only once,
I would long for you
through worlds,
worlds.
— Translated by Jane Hirshfield and Mariko Aratani, from The Ink Dark Moon: Love Poems by Onono Komachi and Izumi Shikibu, Women of the Ancient Court of Japan
Don’t worry, spiders,
I keep house
casually.
— Kobayashi Issa (trans. Robert Hass)
The cruelty of ages past affects us now
Whoever it was who lived here lived a mean life
Each door has locks designed for keys unknown
Our living room was once somebody’s home
Our bedroom, someone’s only room
Our kitchen had a hasp upon its door.
Door to a kitchen?
And our lives are hasped and boundaried
Because of ancient locks and madnesses
Of slumlord greed and desperate privacies
Which one is madness? Depends on who you are.
We find we cannot stay, the both of us, in the same room
Dance, like electrons, out of each other’s way.
The cruelties of ages past affect us now
— Lorenzo Thomas (1979)
Anything can be a bird if you’re not careful.
I should say something nice about the weather.
I should be in awe of the living, but the world dulls
when I step into it. The squirrels scatter, the branches
lift. Sure, I’ve hurt the ones I’ve loved
by not paying attention. Not alone — never alone
is a lesson I need to understand. It was you who said that.
It’s you still. You who says, Look! You who points
to the sky. You who tilts my chin toward the heron,
who cups the minnow in your hands,
who spots the deer miles ahead, who dulls
the world with your absence. You who says, Look!
& when I look, you are gone, replaced
by the whitetail’s hind legs, fading into the bush.
— Hieu Minh Nguyen (2018)
