Despedida
Entre mi amor y yo han de levantarse
trescientas noches como trescientas paredes
y el mar será una magia entre nosotros.
No habrá sino recuerdos.
Oh tardes merecidas por la pena,
noches esperanzadas de mirarte,
campos de mi camino, firmamento
que estoy viendo y perdiendo...
Definitiva como un mármol
entristecerá tu ausencia otras tardes.
-Jorge Luis Borges

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Myth
This morning, in bracken
beyond the east field,
I find the blown bulbs of sunset;
on the wet lawn,
after the snow,
the snowman's spine.
-Robin Robertson
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Books
It is when we are near the end of a book that we
enjoy it.
Guests whom we anxiously expect often fail to come.
So the world runs always contrary to our wishes.
How rarely in a hundred years do we open our hearts!
-Chen Shidao

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What He Said
What could my mother be
to yours? What kin is my father
to yours anyway? And how
did you and I ever meet?
But in love our hearts are as red
earth and pouring rain:
mingled
beyond parting.
-Cempulappeyanirar

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At Day's End
At day's end
fearing to lose her lover
the Cakravaki bird
one eye full of anger
watches the sun set
other eye full of tears
watches her lover
as a great actress
showing two feelings at once.
-Candraka

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Laughter In The Pantheon
I enjoyed the laughter
old poets
as you welcomed me
but I won't be staying
here for long
You won't either
-Leonard Cohen

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A young beech tree
On the edge of the forest
Stands still in the evening.
-Aldington

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A trout leaps;
Clouds are moving
In the bed of the stream.
-Onitsura

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The wren
Earns his living
Noiselessly.
-Issa

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This is all there is;
The path comes to an end
Among the seri.
-Buson

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That's the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over,
Lest you should think he never could recapture
The first fine careless rapture!
-Robert Browning

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Arabia is a mess, a bloodbath.
The light of velocities is ground into a beam
which stands on my retina
with its oblique soles.
-Osip Mandelstam

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Heaped hills of human heads go off into the distance.
I grow smaller there, they won't notice me anymore;
but in much loved books and children's games
I shall arise to say that the sun is shining.
-Osip Mandelstam


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Yes, I am lying in the ground but my lips are still moving.
-Osip Mandelstam


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Your encounters are people of peace,
So unlike the man of war --
The dark curly-haired enemy eats iron
And uproots trees...
-Vazha Pshavela

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...The cameras
have gone. I used to kid myself on cold
evenings walking home from school, and wonder
in the quiet after such a difficult birth;
the cries of sea-birds leaving me old
beyond my years in the youngest place on earth.
-Paul Farley

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An artistic image
is one that ensures its own development,
its historical viability.
An image is a grain,
a self-evolving retroactive organism.
It is a symbol of actual life,
as opposed to life itself.
Life contains death.
An image of life, by contrast,
excludes it, or else sees in it
a unique potential
for the affirmation of life.
-Andrei Tarkovsky

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Grace
Then, like a sudden, easy birth, grace --
rendered as light to the softening earth,
the moon stepping slowly backwards
out of the morning sky, reward
for the dark hours we took to arrive and kneel
at the silver river's edge near the heron priest,
anointed, given -- what we would wish ourselves.
-Carol Ann Duffy

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