Pass Around the Cup Fair Maiden

By Hafiz


Pass around the cup fair maiden,
Because Love seemed easy at first,
But now I see how difficult it is.

The hearts of Lovers bleed,
and will be doomed to break,
when the scent of the Beloved blows away in the wind.

How can the traveller stay safe
when the clarion calls its sound of parting?

The Master tells us:
"soak your prayer rug red with wine, my friend".

Those who are still on the shore
feel they have peace of mind,
they don't know our storms and dark nights.

But at last, I find the Secret,
hidden in street corners,
revealed before me.

Hafiz, enjoy her Love
And instruct her,
"suffer the darkness for the sake of the light".

From the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

Translation by Fitzgerald:


Ah, Love! could thou and I with Fate conspire
To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire!
Would not we shatter it to bits-and then
Re-mould it nearer to the Heart's Desire!

Dawn

By Federico Garcia Lorca




Dawn in New York has
Four columns of mire...
And a hurricane of black pigeons
Splashing in the putrid water.


Dawn in New York groans
On enormous fire escapes
Searching between the angles
For spikenards of drafted anguish.


Dawn arrives and no one receives it in his mouth
Because tomorrow and hope are impossible there:
Sometimes the furious swarming coins
Penetrate like drills and devour abandoned children.


Those who go out early know in their bones
There will be no paradise or loves that bloom and die:
They know they will be mired in numbers and laws,
In mindless games, in fruitless labors.


The light is buried under chains and noises
In an impudent challenge of rootless science.
And crowds stagger sleeplessly through the boroughs
As if they had just escaped a shipwreck of blood

The Museum, The Hands III.

By Anthony Sobin

On display in Paleontology is the huge slab of petrified sea floor
separated carefully and carried away intact from fossil ocean -
"Each half-inch of strata represents roughly two thousand years."
Clear impressions offer solid evidence for the lives of the extinct,
The curling patterns in the mud of burrowing sea worms,
The death masks of trilobites like fingerprints of the Paleozoic.
In the dents and furrows we can focus on the outlines of their bodies
Just as the they were at death, before there was an Atlantic Ocean.

Last year's student, a woman who will always be too young for me,
stands intently watching the display as if something
Were happening in it - as if it were the movie at the drive-in
Complete with plot and action. As she looks up and sees me
My old recurring dream flashes by - the one that always ends
With Queen Bess ordering me beheaded and quartered, the dream
Which always begins cloudy, with me watching intensely,
As if through a half-inch layer of translucent bog water,
Tiny worms curling under my fingernails like thin brown threads,
Their trails beginning to fall into just the right patterns -
My own hands beginning to give me away. She is happy to see me,

And tells me all about he European summer, her new car and lover
And art history paper she's in the middle of - the one concerning
Michaelangelo's "Creation" far out on the Sistine Chapel ceiling.
We talk about how "unpainterly and statue-like the figures are,
Yet how they nonetheless seem real in spite of their look of being
Frozen there in stone." Only I am uneasy. It's cold she says
And jokes about wishing they'd start a huge fire in the English Room
I focus on her hair and her hand curling the bracelet at her wrist
I measure with my eye the hard transparent distance between us and
Hear her asking me if I know the statistics - the ratio in a lifetime
Of things we can see to the things we can touch.