Poem

So what, if you've written a poem?!
Somebody says it's lovely,
Someone else says it's awful.
Someone coughs,
Someone groans.
The sun has no idea
About the lovely poem.
Nor does the cat
Nor the mouse.
And the house is still made of stone,
The table- of wood.
But the water
which I drink from a glass
Is suddenly sweet,
And green as grass.
I lift it high
Higher than my hair
And fall three times
To my knees then and there,
And kiss the table
and kiss the house!
and search every cranny
for that little mouse.

--- By Reyzl Zhychlinska
Translated by A.Z. Foreman

The Negro Speaks of Rivers

I've known rivers:
I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the
flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln
went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy
bosom turn all golden in the sunset.

I've known rivers:
Ancient, dusky rivers.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

--- Langston Hughes

I am Goya

I am Goya
of the bare field, by the enemy’s beak gouged
till the craters of my eyes gape
I am grief

I am the tongue
of war, the embers of cities
on the snows of the year 1941
I am hunger

I am the gullet
of a woman hanged whose body like a bell
tolled over a blank square
I am Goya

O grapes of wrath!
I have hurled westward
the ashes of the uninvited guest!
and hammered stars into the unforgetting sky – like nails
I am Goya

---Andrey Voznesensky
(translated from the Russian by Stanley Kunitz)