Browsing the archives for the rhyme category

Jorge Luis Borges, “No eres los otros” (plus a rant on translations)

No te habrá de salvar lo que dejaron
Escrito aquellos que tu miedo implora;
No eres los otros y te ves ahora
Centro del laberinto que tramaron
Tus pasos. No te salva la agonía
De Jesús o de Sócrates ni el fuerte
Siddharta de oro que aceptó la muerte
En un jardín, al declinar el día.
Polvo también es la palabra escrita
Por tu [...]

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Paul Muldoon, “Longbones”

When she came to me that night in Damascus Street
she was quite beside herself. Her father was about to die
and his mirror was covered with a sheet
so his spirit might not beat
against it but fly as spirits fly.
When she came to me that night in Damascus Street
Longbones has driven through freezing rain or sleet
all the [...]

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Rough draft poem – “Jim Harrison’s Left Eye”

While his body,
hands, hair, toes, lips, nose
sense the world directly -
kiss a thigh, cradle a body in the arms
wriggle in the bushy grass
play with the wind that
blows cool out of the north
scent gun smoke as
buckshot drops the duck from the sky
prickle on the straw chaff
run a hand through the purple alfalfa flowers
or the girl’s blond [...]

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James Whitcomb Riley, “A Barefoot Boy”

A barefoot boy! I mark him at his play –
  For May is here once more, and so is he, –
  His dusty trousers, rolled half to the knee,
And his bare ankles grimy, too, as they:
Cross-hatchings of the nettle, in array
  Of feverish stripes, hint vividly to me
  Of woody pathways winding endlessly
Along the creek, where even yesterday
He plunged [...]

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A.E. Housman, Nos. X and XI from “More Poems”

X
The weeping Pleiads wester,
  And the moon is under seas;
From bourn to bourn of midnight
  Far sighs the rainy breeze:
It sighs from a lost country
  To a land I have not known;
The weeping Pleiads wester,
  And I lie down alone.
XI
The rainy Pleiads wester,
  Orion plunges prone;
The stroke of midnight ceases,
  And I lie down alone.
The rainy Pleiads wester
  And seek beyond the [...]

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