poetry

Poem by an unknown author. According to Abraham Arias-Larreta in Literaturas Aborigenes de America (1976), “The Mayan Uinal was a period of 20 days, each of them with a different name. The Mayan year, or Haab, was composed of 18 Uinales and a final period of 5 days, the Xma Kaba Kin, nameless days.”

I am drawing an image of me that remains embedded in an undissolved dream of mine.

You may take my hands and lock them in your chains You may also blindfold me.

You bereaved me from the light and I marched You robbed me of the bread and I ate. You plundered the land from me and I ploughed.

I am the son of the land and for that I find goodness in this earth anywhere I happen to be: The ants of this land feed me The branches of this land foster me The eagles of this land will shield my open revolt

Yes You may take my hands And lock them in your chains You may also blindfold me But here I will stand tall And here I shall remain until the very end.

(April, 1970)

source: palestineinsight.net From: El Azmar, Fouzi. POEMS FROM AN ISRAELI PRISON. Intro. By Israel Shahak. New York: KNOW Books, 1973.

An owl winks in the shadows
A lizard lifts on tiptoe, breathing hard
Young male sparrow stretches up his neck,
                   big head, watching—

The grasses are working in the sun. Turn it green.
Turn it sweet. That we may eat.
Grow our meat.

Brazil says “sovereign use of Natural Resources”
Thirty thousand kinds of unknown plants.
The living actual people of the jungle
        sold and tortured—
And a robot in a suit who peddles a delusion called “Brazil”
        can speak for them?

        The whales turn and glisten, plunge
                and sound and rise again,
        Hanging over subtly darkening deeps
        Flowing like breathing planets
              in the sparkling whorls of
                     living light—

And Japan quibbles for words on
        what kinds of whales they can kill?
A once-great Buddhist nation
        dribbles methyl mercury
        like gonorrhea
                      in the sea.

Pere David's Deer, the Elaphure,
Lived in the tule marshes of the Yellow River
Two thousand years ago—and lost its home to rice—
The forests of Lo-yang were logged and all the silt &
Sand flowed down, and gone, by 1200 AD—
Wild Geese hatched out in Siberia
        head south over basins of the Yang, the Huang,
        what we call “China”
On flyways they have used a million years.
Ah China, where are the tigers, the wild boars,
                   the monkeys,
                      like the snows of yesteryear
Gone in a mist, a flash, and the dry hard ground
Is parking space for fifty thousand trucks.
IS man most precious of all things?
—then let us love him, and his brothers, all those
Fading living beings—

North America, Turtle Island, taken by invaders
        who wage war around the world.
May ants, may abalone, otters, wolves and elk
Rise! and pull away their giving
        from the robot nations.

Solidarity. The People.
Standing Tree People!
Flying Bird People!
Swimming Sea People!
Four-legged, two-legged people!

How can the head-heavy power-hungry politic scientist
Government     two-world     Capitalist-Imperialist
Third-world     Communist      paper-shuffling male
             non-farmer     jet-set     bureaucrats
Speak for the green of the leaf? Speak for the soil?

(Ah Margaret Mead . . . do you sometimes dream of Samoa?)

The robots argue how to parcel out our Mother Earth
To last a little longer
                    like vultures flapping
Belching, gurgling,
                    near a dying doe.
“In yonder field a slain knight lies—
We'll fly to him and eat his eyes
                    with a down
         derry derry derry down down.”

             An Owl winks in the shadow
             A lizard lifts on tiptoe
                         breathing hard
             The whales turn and glisten
                         plunge and
             Sound, and rise again
             Flowing like breathing planets

             In the sparkling whorls

             Of living light.

                      Stockholm: Summer Solstice 40072

https://poets.org/poem/mother-earth-her-whales

A poet and professor at the Universidade Federal da Bahia, Lívia Natália is the author of five poetry collections: Água Negra (2011), Correntezas e Outros Estudos Marinhos (2015), Água Negra e Outras Águas (2016), Sobejos Do Mar (2017), and Dia Bonito pra Chover (2017). In 2016, her poem “Quadrilha,” which describes the grief of a woman whose lover was killed by the Polícia Militar, was censored throughout the state of Bahia. All copies of the poem—which had been displayed publicly on billboards as part of the Poetry in the Streets project in Ilhéus—were ordered to be destroyed.

Three poems from Naser Rabah, written in Maghaazi Camp, Gaza. Our New Neighbor 1. If we were to plant bullets What would the earth sprout, I...

I WAS in three languages
and I died in all three of them.

So how come you still speak?

María Adela Bonavita (1900–1934) was born in San José, Uruguay and died before her 34th birthday. She published just one collection of poetry in her lifetime, The Conscience of the Suffering Song. One more collection was published after her death. She was plagued by “a nervous illness.” At four years of age, she began attending the odd class in the cultural center “mostly for entertainment,” wrote her brother in the introduction to her second poetry collection, which she'd dictated to him from her deathbed. She worked as a teacher for most of her adult life, setting up a small school in her home where she was beloved by her students. She was also known to create portraits of family members in her spare time, though she’d never received any education on the subject.

This film is one of three shorts I made during a week in Beirut in May 2011. The films were commissioned by Reel Festivals and Creative Scotland and the remit was make a series of short films "inspired by" the festival of poets that Reel Festivals was running in Lebanon. It was an amazing week, it's not every day that you get to meet poets from Lebanon, Palestine, Syria and Scotland. It was a real honour to make a film with Mazen Maarouf, he's an extraordinary man, who is a real artistic collaborator and embraced the filmmaking with true panache. It would be great to go back and make a longer film about his life together.

Regnor Charles Bernard (1915-1981) was a Haitian-born poet, essayist, literary critic, and journalist who taught both in the Congo and in Canada. He published three books of poetry in his lifetime: Le Souvenir (1940), Pêche d’étoiles (1943), and Négre (1945).

Heba Abu Nada, a brilliant Palestinian poet and novelist, was killed by an Israeli airstrike on her home in Khan Younes, Gaza, on October 20, 2023. To honor her memory and the thousands of other Palestinians martyred by the Zionist state as part of their genocidal assault on Gaza, we are co-publishing Huda Fakhreddine’s translation of her poem “Not Just Passing” alongside ArabLit.

The translation featured here uses the same version of the poem used by Alfred M. Tozzer (1877-1954), and draws upon his notes and annotations. A highly respected and influential anthropologist, archaeologist, linguist, and educator who specialized in Mesoamerican studies, Tozzer served as the president of the American Anthropological Society and was a member of the National Academy of Sciences. In 1974, Harvard renamed its Peabody Museum Library the Tozzer Library.

These are the titles of 120 films from Palestinian cinema archives, strung together in an experiment to see if it is possible to know from their names alone what stories Palestinians want to tell. The links for these films are available separately.

Circe Maia is a Uruguayan poet, translator, essayist, and longtime philosophy teacher. She has published over a dozen collections of poetry, as well as several books of prose and translations.

Jesse Lee Kercheval is the author of 14 books of poetry and fiction, and a translator specializing in Uruguayan poetry. Recent books include The Invisible Bridge: Selected Poems of Circe Maia; Fable of an Inconsolable Man by Javier Etchevarren; and América Invertida: An Anthology of Emerging Uruguayan Poets. She is the Zona Gale Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin.

In his life he didn’t cut down a single tree, didn’t slit the throat of a single calf.

Juan Ramón Molina (1875-1908) is a lesser-known poet among his contemporaries, yet he made significant contributions to Honduran poetry and to the Modernist movement in Central America. During his extensive travels he met many of the great poets of his time, and these encounters influenced and informed his own work.

This poem was composed on September 13, 2024, as the first signs of autumn arrive. Free Poems in the Autumn By Heba Al-Agha Translated by Julia Choucair Vizoso How will my poems be free thi…

Eliana Díaz Muñoz’s work has been featured in journals such as Viacuarenta, Casa de Asterión, and the Danish journal Aurora Boreal. She has participated in the Colloquium on Cultural Diversity in the Caribbean, the International Congress of Hispanic Literature, the International Meeting of Women Poets, and other national and international conferences. She is a professor at the Universidad del Atlántico in Colombia.

Maya Abu Al-Hayyat is a Beirut-born, Palestinian novelist and poet living in Jerusalem.

Teach me how to breathe / Without / Taking away air from others

Santiago Argüello (1871-1940) was a well-known Nicaraguan poet, playwright, and political activist, and a contemporary of Rubén Darío, another famous Nicaraguan poet.

A poem by Doha Kahlout: "With half a memory and ruined images, I turn over the past . . ."

Clément Magloire-Saint-Aude (1912-1971) was a surrealist poet who published several volumes, including Dialogue de mes lampes y Tabou (1941), Déchu (1956), and Dimanche (1973). He was also a member of the black nationalist movement Noirisme, and one of the founders of Les Griots, a quarterly scientific and literary journal.

Addie Leak (French editor) is a freelance translator and editor currently living in Amman, Jordan. She holds an MFA in literary translation from The University of Iowa and has published translations from French, Spanish, and Arabic in various literary journals as well as in Souffles-Anfas: A Critical Anthology from the Moroccan Journal of Culture and Politics, edited by Olivia Harrison and Teresa Villa-Ignacio. She also coordinated the creation and publication of Lanterns of Hope: A Poetry Project for Iraqi Youth, a 2016 collaboration between The University of Iowa’s International Writing Program and the US Embassy in Baghdad.

Poem by Bassam Jamil, translated by Nicole Mankinen I am the stranger The shadow beneath the cloud Adrift and looming over my land Only the cloud beckons It has its purpose for me I succumb to its atmosphere Levitate and fall in billowing drifts I am pulled in all directions But my desire, oh

Lila Downs is a Mexican-American artist and
activist.