MAY  

Let me look at those eyes.
I want to know how you are.
—Rainer W. Fassbinder

Look. May has come in.
It’s strewn those blue eyes all over the harbor.
Come, I haven’t had word of you in ages.
You’re constantly terrified,
Like the kittens we drowned when we were little.
Come and we’ll talk over all of the old same things,
The value of being pleasant,
The need to adjust to the doubts,
How to fill the holes we’ve got inside us.
Come, feel the morning reaching your face,
Whenever we’re saddened everything looks dark,
When we’re heartened, again, the world crumbles.
Every one of us keeps forever someone else’s hidden side,
If it’s a secret, if a mistake, if a gesture.
Come and we’ll flay the winners,
Laughing at our self leapt off the bridgeway.
We’ll watch the cranes at work in the port in silence,
The gift for being together in silence being
The principal proof of friendship.
Come with me, I want to change nations,
Change towns. Leave this body aside
And go into a shell with you,
With our smallness, like sea snails.
Come, I’m waiting for you,
We’ll continue the story that ended a year ago,
As if inside the white birches next to the river
Not a single additional ring had grown.

Copyright © 2007 by Kirmen Uribe, English translation copyright © 2007 by Elizabeth Macklin. Reprinted from Meanwhile Take My Hand without the permission of Graywolf Press, Saint Paul, Minnesota.,

Isolation

When your lips see my lips they bring
That sorrowful and outcast thing
My heart home from its wandering.

Then ere your lips have loosed their hold,
I feel my heart’s heat growing cold,
And my heart shivers and grows old.

When your lips leave my lips, again
I feel the old doubt and the old pain
Tight about me like a chain.

After the pain, after the doubt,
A lonely darkness winds about
My soul like death, and shuts you out.

  — Arthur Symons (1865 - 1945), Welsh poet and critic.

Refugee

Loneliness terrific beats on my heart,
Bending the bitter broken boughs of pain.
Stunned by the onslaught that tears the sky apart
I stand with unprotected head against the rain.

Loneliness terrific turns to panic and to fear.
I hear my footsteps on the stairs of yesteryear,
Where are you? Oh, where are you?
Once so dear.

  — Langston Hughes (1902 - 1967), African-American poet, novelist and playwright.