Trojan Poetry 23: "The Daughter" by Carmen Giménez Smith

The Daughter
By Carmen Giménez Smith

We said she was a negative image of me because of her lightness.
She's light and also passage, the glory in my cortex.
Daughter, where did you get all that goddess?
Her eyes are Neruda's two dark pools at twilight.
Sometimes she's a stranger in my home because I hadn't imagined her.
Who will her daughter be?
She and I are the gradual ebb of my mother's darkness.
I unfurl the ribbon of her life, and it's a smooth long hallway, doors flung open.
Her surface is a deflection is why.
Harm on her, harm on us all.
Inside her, my grit and timbre, my reckless.

Trojan Poetry 22: "Earthworm" by Louise Glück

Earthworm

By Louise Gluck

Mortal standing on top of the earth, refusing

to enter the earth: you tell yourself

you are able to see deeply

the conflicts of which you are made but, facing death,

you will not dig deeply—if you sense

that pity engulfs you, you are not

delusional: not all pity

descends from higher to lesser, some

arises out of the earth itself, persistent

yet devoid of coercion. We can be split in two, but you are

mutilated at the core, your mind

detached from your feelings—

repression does not deceive

organisms like ourselves:

once you enter the earth, you will not fear the earth;

once you inhabit your terror,

death will come to seem a web of channels or tunnels like

a sponge’s or honeycomb’s, which, as part of us,

you will be free to explore. Perhaps

you will find in these travels

a wholeness that eluded you—as men and women

you were never free

to register in your body whatever left

a mark on your spirit.

Trojan Poetry 21: "Bats" by Henri Cole

Bats

By Henri Cole

Each night they come back, chasing one another

among the fronds after gorging on papayas,

to drink from the swimming pool. With my sleep-

stiffened bones, I like to watch them, careening

into the bright pool lights, spattering the walls with pulp

and guano, like graffiti artists. Sometimes, when they meet,

they hit one another's furred wings—Love thy neighbor

like thyself—and then soar off again to drink

more bleached water. Sometimes, it seems as if

they are watching me, like a Styrofoam head

with a wig on it. "The patient reports that he has

been lonely all his life," one screams to the other.

I can hardly stand it and put my face in my hands,

as they dive to-and-fro through all their happiness.

Trojan Poetry 20: "An Ox Looks at Man" by Carlos Drummond de Andrade

An Ox Looks at Man
By Carlos Drummond de Andrade
(translated by Mark Strand)


They are more delicate even than shrubs and they run
and run from one side to the other, always forgetting
Something. Surely they lack I don't know what
basic ingredient, though they present themselves
as noble or serious, at times. Oh, terribly serious,
even tragic. Poor things, one would say that they hear
neither the song of the air nor the secrets of hay;
likewise they seem not to see what is visible
and common to each of us, in space. And they are sad,
and in the wake of sadness they come to cruelty.
All their expression lives in their eyes--and loses itself
to a simple lowering of lids, to a shadow.
And since there is little of the mountain about them --
nothing in the hair or in the terribly fragile limbs
but coldness and secrecy -- it is impossible for them
to settle themselves into forms that are calm, lasting
and necessary. They have, perhaps, a kind
of melancholy grace (one minute) and with this they allow
themselves to forget the problems and translucent
inner emptiness that make them so poor and so lacking
when it comes to uttering silly and painful sounds: desire, love, jealousy
(what do we know?) -- sounds that scatter and fall in the field
like troubled stones and burn the herbs and the water,
and after this it is hard to keep chewing away at our truth.

Trojan Poetry 19: "The Tea and Sage Poem" by Fady Joudah

Trojan Poetry 18: Valentines Day Special: Wordsworth, Cummings, and Seth

Trojan Poetry 17: "Pity" by Stan Rice