Gamesmanship

To Nintendo
Ishle Yi Park

Before you, life was unbearable -
a flat screen and ping pong ball.
But oh, you sleek grey box,
you already wrapped present!

We sat in front of you, awed
as if you were the first red sunrise.

We burned a horseshoe
of permanent round circles into the rug
with our asses — a communion
of Afghani, Puerto Rican, Korean kids

trying to unpeel the secrets of a mustached
plumber who swallowed mushrooms,
zapped dumb-eyed turtles, warped
to other zones through green maintenance pipes.

We slept to your lullabies, the digitized
soundtrack of our childhood.

Online archives - the National Library of Scotland

We were browsing the web, looking for some early English and Scottish poetry, when we stumbled on the National Library of Scotland's Digital Library. If you're the least bit interested in the literature, history and culture of Scotland, this is a must-visit site. Two of our favorite exhibits: The Murthly Hours and Pencils of Light (the albums of the Edinburgh Calotype Club, which was the world's first photographic society). The Murthly Hours are especially enjoyable for the marginal images of animals (fantastic and real) and birds at play and rest. (A blue hare recurs throughout the pages, along with a variety of dragons.)

White

White Towels
Richard Jones

I have been studying the difference
between solitude and loneliness,
telling the story of my life
to the clean white towels taken warm from the dryer.
I carry them through the house
as though they were my children
asleep in my arms.

From The Blessing: New and Selected Poems © Copper Canyon Press.

(Painting by Kasimir Malevich, 1918.)

Night

From Federico García Lorca's Poema de la Saeta - in Spanish and English:

Noche

Cirio, candil,
farol y luciérnaga.

La constelación
de la saeta.

Ventantinas de oro
tiemblan
y en la aurora se mecen
cruces superpuestas.

Cirio, candil,
farol y luciérnaga.

Night

Candle, oil lamp,
lamppost and firefly.

The constellation
of the saeta.

Little golden windows
tremble,
at at dawn superimposed
crosses sway about.

Candle, oil lamp,
lamppost and firefly

(From Poem of the Deep Song, translated by Carlos Bauer, City Lights Publishers, 1987.)

Other places:

Read about the saeta on the Flamenco World site - and listen, too.

(Photo of houses and moon by Juan Ignacio Gilligan, from Cielo Sur.)

Late summer

Out in the garden
the bugs have stopped their chirping
on this rainy night -
but from the wall comes the sound
of a single cricket

- Kyogoku Tamekane

Has dawn come so soon?
The grass I trampled before
is white with dew
when I return through the fields
after a night with the moon.

- Emperor Fushimi


From Waiting for the Wind - Thirty-Six Poets of Japan's Late Medieval Age, translated by Stephen D. Carter (Columbia University Press, 1989).

Hilary Tham

We remember Hilary Tham - poet, painter, encourager - with one of her own poems:

Mrs. Wei on Governments

Malaysian Government is like the American
price system: take it or leave it.
It's easy enough to leave a dress hanging

on the rack, but a country is not something
you can get up and walk away from. Your Congress
resembles our marketplace: haggling and shouting

until everyone is a little satisfied.
Can we visit a shop where I can talk
the price down? I want to buy a victory,

I need a good fight.

- Hilary Tham

(From Bad Names for Women.)

In memory of Hilary Tham Goldberg, 1947-2005.

For more, visit Hilary Tham's website. (Be sure to read her poetry workshops page.)

Seamus Heaney

Personal Helicon
for Michael Longley

As a child, they could not keep me from wells
And old pumps with buckets and windlasses.
I loved the dark drop, the trapped sky, the smells
Of waterweed, fungus and dank moss.

One, in a brickyard, with a rotted board top.
I savoured the rich crash when a bucket
Plummeted down at the end of a rope.
So deep you saw no reflection in it.

A shallow one under a dry stone ditch
Fructified like any aquarium.
When you dragged out long roots from the soft mulch
A white face hovered over the bottom.

Others had echoes, gave back your own call
With a clean new music in it. And one
Was scaresome, for there, out of ferns and tall
Foxgloves, a rat slapped across my reflection.

Now, to pry into roots, to finger slime,
To stare, big-eyed Narcissus, into some spring
Is beneath all adult dignity. I rhyme
To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.

Click here to listen to Heaney reading this poem.