This Sky
This
Sky
Where we live
Is no place to lose your wings
So love, love,
Love.
-Hafiz

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Pongo estos seis versos en mi botella al mar
con el secreto designio de que algún día
llegue a una playa casi desierta
y un niño la encuentre y la destape
y en lugar de versos extraiga piedritas
y socorros y alertas y caracoles.
-Mario Benedetti

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I know the customs and the souls
and the dialects of allusions and idioms
which any human group contrives for itself.
I need not claim or deny any privileges:
I am well enough known by those around me,
who know well enough my sorrows and my weaknesses.
This is to attain the highest goal,
what may perhaps await us in heaven:
not admiration or victory
but simply to be accepted
as part of an undeniable Reality,
like the stones and the trees.
-Jorge Luis Borges

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...Rubble lights played on
Broken walls.
The faces of the undercities
Were on the windows
Patched with rags.
There were no rooms
He could explore...
-Ben Okri

________________


Ebb
I know what my heart is like
Since your love died:
It is like a hollow ledge
Holding a little pool
Left there by the tide,
A little tepid pool,
Drying inward from the edge.
-Edna St. Vincent Millay

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...And once again the buds will swell
And nature will explode in green,
But your spinal cord is snapped,
My wonderful but sorry age.
And with an idiotic grin
You gaze backward, weak and cruel,
Like a beast that once was supple
At the spoor you've left behind...
-Osip Mandelstam

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To fling into space
Correspondences oblique
Of mirrored spheres --
Insane parabolas
Ringing, arise
In sprouting stems.
With zodiacal flame
Fields are ablaze,
Ether boils,
But all interstices
Outline a scheme
Of the immobile letters
Of your name!
-Mikhail Kuzmin
(translated from Russian by Michael A Green and Stanislav A. Shvabrin)

__________________


Eating Alone
eating alone
my alphabet soup
speaks to me
Brenda S. Duster

_________________


In the morning
you'll find a
piece of paper
on your doormat.
I wonder what
you'll think when
you read,
'Please
don't ever
take your
hat away.'
-Philip Ridley

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No One
No heart bleeds as red as mine, beloved,
No heart.
No voice sounds as strong as mine, beloved,
No voice.
No eyes see the sun like mine, beloved,
No eyes.
No soul flies so close to you, beloved,
No soul.
No ghost is so close to you, beloved.
-Marjolijn Antsey

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(She laments Her Fortune, She Hints
of Her aversion to All Vice, and Justifies
Her Diversion with the Muses)
In my pursuit, World, why such diligence?
What my offence, when I am thus inclined,
insuring elegance affect my mind,
not that my mind affect an elegance?
I have no love of riches or finánce,
and thus do I most happily, I find,
expend finances to enrich my mind
and not mind expend upon finánce.
I worship beauty not, but vilify
that spoil of time that mocks eternity,
nor less, deceitful treasures glorify,
but hold foremost, with greatest constancy,
consuming all the vanity in life,
and not consuming life in vanity.
-Sor Juana Inés De La Cruz

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En perseguirme, Mundo, ¿qué interesas?
¿En qué te ofendo, cuando sólo intento
poner bellezas en mi entendimiento
y no mi entendimiento en las bellezas?
Yo no estimo tesoros ni riquezas;
y así, siempre me causa más contento
poner riquezas en mi pensamiento
que no mi pensamiento en las riquezas.
Y no estimo hermosura que, vencida,
es despojo civil de las edades,
ni riqueza me agrada fementida,
teniendo por mejor, en mis verdades,
consumir vanidades de la vida
que consumir la vida en vanidades.
-Sor Juana Inés De La Cruz