[Sajak-sajak saya ambil dari beberapa laman sesawang. Sebenarnya, mereka letak excerpts di laman-laman sesawang berkenaan sebagai salah satu kaedah promosi buku. Saya pula petik lalu letak kat blog saya ni bagi memudahkan saya kaji sajak-sajak ni seiring secara tak langsung tolong promosi buku-buku terbabit. Begitu juga apa yang saya tulis kat blog saya ni boleh anda ambil asal letak sekali nama blog saya ni supaya tak kelihatan sebagai perbuatan mencuri. Tapi, jika anda baca apa-apa tulisan saya di blog saya ni dan buat rumusan secara umum lalu tulis ikut suka hati anda, saya tak kisah pun! Begitupun, jika pemilik-pemilik laman sesawang yang saya petik sajak-sajak ni sebaliknya tak suka saya letak bahan-bahan mereka ni kat blog saya ni, mereka berkenaan boleh talk to me. Panjang pula saya berceloteh! He!He!He!]

Two Poems

by Cho Ji Hoon

translated from the Korean by Sekyo Nam Haines

asymtotejournal.com 21 June 2022

Stone Door

There is a stone door that will open at the brush of your fingertips, without a sound.
Many people are anxious about it, but since the door has been shut, within the stone walls, the green moss grows on the shelves of twelve stair cases.
Until the day you return, I keep a stick of candlelight that will never burn out.
As long as your longed face reflects faintly in the dim light, even if a thousand years
pass, my sad soul will not close my eyes. 

What are those few dewdrops that always linger on my long lashes?
Should I dry my tears with the blue linen robe you left behind?

My two cheeks still look peach colored as before, but what shall I do with
my long sighs that turn my lips blue? 

After crossing several thousand miles of turbulent river, you return and your warm hand strokes my white nape, I will vanish, without a trace, to a handful of dust. In the night sky, like wind, my strip of garment vanishes into empty space, cannot be seen unless one’s eyes are full of tears.

Here is a stone door. It will not open even with the most sincere effort. The animosity is too deeply entrenched. While waiting for you to come back and sit inside for another thousand years to wait, there is a stone door that decays from wind and rain. 

Road

The time accompanies me always. The time cannot drop me.
Only the time doesn’t know how to drink.
When I go to a tavern and have a drink and fall asleep, the time goes alone a little ahead of me,
then, it waits for me. Startled, I get up quickly and run out to catch up with the time. I am already getting ahead of the time. I get a shortness of breath. I faint on the roadside.

Another time runs to me and helps me to get up. Quietly, I walk again. The older time that was ahead of us, comes to us and sits down on the grass. Both times start talking to each other in whispers. I am alone; as I wait for them, I move a little forward.   

I need to stop at the tavern again to have another drink. After slugging down a big glass, I watch people fight, soon join in the shouting match and ends up being held by the throat.
Finally, I sing a long song letting my voice go smoothly over the highest notes. By then, the sun is setting.

The new time brings me a folded piece of paper. A last will from the dead time!
I open the piece of paper. Written in it, was the song, I had sung to him.

The Poem by Mohsen Emadi

translated from Persian by Shoheh Wolpe

wordswithoutborders.org 18 Feb 2022

For Reza A’lameh-zadeh 

1

Words are the burying ground of things.
The trot of a horse through these lines

is a sound I haven’t heard since childhood.

Your laughter wilted in my teenage years.

I write
as if on pilgrimage to the city of the dead.
If time by chance slips backwards,

my father’s murmurs will echo
in the ears of the text, the sound of a bullet
will disturb the sleep of these lines
and a wild-haired poem will pace
a room that’s been decayed for years.

Words have been arranged along the faded lines of a house:

Here is a window,

behind the window a courtyard. No one knows
which nightmare awakens the poem. It sees

sometimes, at the window, the glance of a neighbor’s bride,

sometimes the swing and the bicycle,

or the wall with its cheap paintings.
It looks at them

until they come alive
then, to the inhale and exhale of living things
goes back to sleep.

 

2

Years ago my father’s murmurs
lost their way in the text of sleep

and the poem lit three thousand candles,
built three thousand paper boats
and offered them all to the sea.

Now that I have packed my bags

and wait for the first train
that would not return me here,

the poem is riding a bicycle;

trembling and in haste
it pedals through bumps and puddles,

rings a door bell, stares at whispers and sobs
afraid of being heard.

But the whispers are so loud in the ear

it is impossible to hear the whistle of a train.
I am still in the station

and the poem in Khavaran
protects the dead of these past years
from the gaze of the guards.

 

3

A year ago
the poem slipped through barbed wire
where soldiers patrolled the hills of your breasts,

stole your lips,

your hands;

recreated you piece by piece.

This year, soldiers guard the edge of nothing:

your body long stolen.
In the station,
my bench is occupied by a dead
whose name the poem doesn’t know.

(It wouldn’t learn your name either.)

Bullets and warm blood
find their way into the lines—

no paper can stop the bleeding.

The station is full of passengers who are dead.

The firing squads,

and the hanging ropes
are not waiting for any train.

Mumbling grave-diggers
ring the doorbells of three thousand homes.

Three thousand abandoned bicycles

litter the alleys.

 

4

The poem is not standing in front of a firing squad.

Nor does the firing squad

know where, on the poem, to aim at.

They simply hike the price of utilities,

the rent, and burial expenses.

I cannot buy cigarettes for three thousand dead

but I can bring them all back to life.

I don’t want to make the poem

send them back to a cemetery
that doesn’t exist anymore;

I only want to remind it
that all the abandoned bicycles have decayed by now,

that no one will ever again hear the jangle of their bells.

The dead will remain in the station

and if the poem can secure a ticket from each reader

it will send them off on the first one-way train.
In my country

three thousand dead in a station is normal.

Three thousand dead on a train is normal.

 

5

At the border stations

they arrest our tongues.

Our words decay when they cross that line.

I let go of your hands outside the station,

the train’s whistle hurries my words.
Words have filled up all the cabins,
they dream thousand-year nightmares.

My words are young,
just thirty years old,

but they have piled up
layer by layer
under this prison garb.

Yellow was not the color of my first school shoes,

nor was red the color of my piggy-bank,
or blue the color of my first bicycle.

Words grew up with the colors of your dress;

they were a herd of fleeing horses,
a rainbow that you would take off

and send curving through the air,

falling into mud and dirt,

into handcuffs, darkness, and the command to shoot.

 

6

I’m not standing in this long line for bread and milk.
I stand here to surrender my tongue.

Everything crossing the border becomes lighter.

I stand to be translated.

A bicycle rides my borders

over bumps and puddles.

The poem considers conjunctions and prepositions,

the distance between I and I,
the me to-from-on-or me.

It is raining

on conjunctions and prepositions,
on relationships.
In the rain
the distance between us widens,

and in that distance,
Khavaran grows larger.

 

7

In my language
every time we suddenly fall silent
a policeman is born.

In my language

on the back of each frightened bicycle
sit three thousand dead words.
In my language

people murmur confessions,

dress in black whispers,

are buried

in silence.

My language is silence.

Who will translate my silence?

How am I to cross this border?

Two Poems by Katrine von Hutten

translated from the German by Cristina M Burack

asymtotejournal.com 7 June 2022

Description

gladly would I write two three
sentences that look like you
that are as you are
at best I can describe you

you are a wolf
in wolf’s clothing
and a sheep
in sheep’s clothing
but you know that

the circles under my eyes look like you too
when you jump through I have to laugh
you often say whoopsie
even when you don’t say it
better to say: you mean it

it is only half past six
but already wholly dark
you’re like that too

That’s what I like to hear

the nonsensical certainty
that you mean when you say
oh nothing
not the weighty seriousness
that unburdens itself by posing as nothing
rather the light chatter
that the lips are too smart for

that’s what I like to hear
it comes from you
more from your feet for instance
your own feet
than that said by the head
that you hold high

i call it as i do every head
a nest of all kinds of
thoughts of strangers

notes for a song and Other Poems

translated from French by Conor Bracken

by Jean D’Amérique

17 MAY 2022 theoffingmag.com

notes for a song

if you hear a voice
it’s the utility sink singing
it’s been a long time
since the hearts’ mast laid down
to round out the dust

storm flowers
lives dreams stud the void’s begging bowl
uncountable the wounds
of the city invited to the scavenger’s ball
if you hear a voice
it is the mass grave singing
landfill-mouth gnawing
on a final star

the little blue spot over there
we still want to call sky
the little blue spot over there
is hope
brave name badging the light
that seeps through the razorwire
forecast dawn vamps in

coming out of the pines
the little blue spot over there
is hope
look around
the bullets converging

 

in you my leaf burgeons

I see you and only a mirror can respond
I see your hands and step into the unfashionable
every tenderness arrives from elsewhere

brought into the world by embers
smoke becomes flesh cloud becomes bone
let the flags be burned
your hair propels my credos to their most distant conclusion

sea strands to be braided
from your hips volatility is reborn
the air sharpens your approach
dream in which birds dine

bygone age where the fire’s exiled
your prophetic face perched on the morning
moons face you
and return incoherence
what season without shattering its teeth
can surpass your branches
what wave fallen from your tree
won’t vulcanize my fruit starving for mouths
in you my leaf burgeons
windfall for the poem

 

time slain my tongue

the days heap on my head
gigantic silence
fold to the calendar
that urge-trimming body-snatcher

wanting a heart
and finding oneself weak as a bone besieged by fire

every face
splintered nation where dawns decamp
what wind will reap my fragments

my body
a memory that death begrudgingly dredges up

in my mouth
ramparts that weigh as strongly
as the blazes of indignation
concocting myself a bird
but the wing hyenas surrounded
appropriate punishment
akin to festered blood

autumns in my throat
writing my fall in flowers
which reserves for the flame
an ineluctable hunk

Love and Other Poems

translated from Swedish by CD Eskilson

by Edith Södergran

7 JUN 2022 theoffingmag.com

Love

My soul was a dress pale blue as the sky;
I left it on a rock by the sea
and naked I came to you, looking like a woman.
And, like a woman, I sat at your table
and drank a bowl of wine, breathed in the scent of roses.
You found me beautiful, like someone you saw in a dream.
I forgot it all: forgot my childhood and my homeland,
I knew only that your touch kept me captive.
You smiled, held up a mirror, told me to look at myself.
I saw my shoulders were made of dust, crumbling,
I saw my beauty was sick and I wanted then to vanish.
Hold me in your arms, so close that I need nothing.

Violet Twilights

The violet twilights I hold onto from my distant past:
bare maidens frolicking with trotting centaurs,
bright, golden days with cheery glances—
only sunbeams pay true homage to a woman’s body.
No man has yet arrived, has ever been, will ever be:
man is a trick-mirror the Sun’s daughter breaks on cliffs,
man is a lie, a mystery to a pure child,
man is a rotten fruit that proud lips scorn.

Beautiful sisters, climb up on the highest rocks:
we all are shield-maidens, heroines, horsewomen,
all innocent eyes, angelic brows, ruddy faces,
all heavy waves and soaring birds—
we are the least expected, deepest red,
tiger stripes and taut strings, dauntless stars.

The Day Cools

I.
The day cools into evening.
Drink the warmth of my palm;
it swells with Spring’s blood.
Take my hand, my pale arm,
take my slender shoulders’ longing.
How wondrous it must be to feel
a night, a single night like this,
your heavy head against my breast.

II
You dropped your rosy love
in my fair lap—
My burning hands hold tight
this love that will soon wilt.
Oh king with frigid eyes,
let me take this crown you offer,
that bends my head toward my heart.

III.
I saw my man for the first time today—
I trembled, recognizing him at once
Now I feel his heavy pull upon my arm.
Where is my ringing maiden laughter,
girlish freedom, head held high?
Now I feel his tight grip on my body,
hear this reality’s harsh clangor
tear through all my chiffon dreams.

IV.
You looked for a flower
and found a fruit.
You looked for a spring
and found a sea.
You looked for a woman
and found a soul—
I’ve disappointed you.

Evening

I do not want to hear the sad tale
the forest tells.
The whispers that still linger between firs,
the sighs stuck in the leaves,
the shadows gliding among gloomy trunks.
Come out to the road: no one will meet us there.
Night dreams of pale red along embankments.
The road runs slowly, then climbs gently,
takes a long look back at sunset.

Four Poems from Sap Venom or Fruit

Translated from Portuguese by Janet Hendrickson

by Júlia de Carvalho Hansen  

5 JUL 2022 theoffingmag.com

 

Books’ nature is mineral.
Some drink themselves others spread
like water. Others stone, not fruit
stone where your skin sprouts.
An ant crawls over.
There is shaking grass
wind and sun with shade
moss grows, a mosquito
enters your mouth and spitting
you fall into the water that someone
in a city far
away, maybe
without sorrow
turns the page
drinks.

 

Taking root is just like going into orbit.
Sketching the remainder of the water
that takes a seat in ice on the poles
or the moss cover
living in the shade
and that the wind does not pull
up even if the moss moves
slightly
when it rains.

Offering your body to being
a bush and running water
wind I don’t know now
what encompasses
what watches me.

 

I have been handed over
to the darkest
of mute nights.
What can I do?
Here among these thorns?
I walk as low
as ants
but if I’m not a bush
why have I lived,
I, covered with thorns?
A nest was made from the fall
macerated leaves of shade
shelter my body.
It is the earth’s forgetting.
But why, why
did I dress in thorns?
Si soy el temblor, the place
where the thunder says
I is my inflated
chest.

 

I want to see what song teaches you to see.
Plants’ curious ability to light up song
and thus do what they don’t know how to do: sing.