Make Strong Old Dreams Lest Our World Lose Heart ... by Pound

Make strong old dreams lest this our world lose heart

For man is a skin full of wine
But his soul is a hole full of God
And the song of all time blows through him
As winds through a knot-holed board.

Though man be a skin full of wine
Yet his heart is a little child
That croucheth low beneath the wind
When the God-storm battereth wild.


- Ezra Pound (1885-1972)
from A Lume Spento (1908)

Body, Remember ... by Cavafy

Body, remember not only how much you were loved,
not only the beds you lay on,
but also those desires that glowed openly
in the eyes that looked at you,
trembled for you in the voices--
only some chance obstacle frustrated them.
Now that it's finally in the past,
it seems almost as if you gave yourself
to those desires too--how they glowed,
remember, in the eyes that looked at you,
remember, body, how they trembled for you
in those voices.


- Constantine P. Cavafy (1863-1933)

translated by Edmund Keeley & Philip Sherrard

The Eye ... by Creeley

Moon
and clouds, will
we drift

higher
than that we
look at,

moon's and
mind's
eye.


- Robert Creeley (1926-2005)
from Selected Poems (1976)

Backwards ... by Creeley

Nowhere before you
any of this.


- Robert Creeley (1926-2005)

from Selected Poems 1976