Irregular Verbs

These are some verbs that are slow like a turtle

I conjugate

You conjugate

He conjugates

And since everyone is afraid with the lack of constitutional rights

I don’t write

You don’t write

He doesn’t write

For if one writes all the thoughts under the veil

I go to jail

You go to jail

He goes to jail

- Venezuelan Poet Aquiles Nazoa

Image by Flickr user Incessant Flux. CC BY-NC-ND 

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Purdah by Sylvia Plath

Text here.

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Perilous wonder

I found an English translation of one of my favorite Bangla poems:

A DAY EIGHT YEARS AGO

-Jibananda Das

It was heard
They took him to the morgue.
Last night in the February dark
When the crescent moon, five days toward full, had set
He'd had the urge to die.

A wife had lain beside him-a child, too.
There had been love, hope, in the moonlight.
Then what ghost did he see? why was his sleep disturbed?
Or maybe he hadn't slept for days. Now, Iying in the morgue, he
sleeps.
He had sought this sleep perhaps.
Like a plague rat, maw smeared with frothy blood, neck slack
In the bosom of some dingy cranny, now he sleeps.
Never again will he wake.

"Never again will you wake
Never again will you know
The unremitting, unrelenting grievous
Pain of waking."
As though some stillness stretched its camel's neck
Through his window
And said these words to him
When the moon had sunk into strange darkness.

But the owl is awake,
And the decrepit, putrefying frog begs a few moments more
Among anticipated warm affections-beckoned by another dawn.
I sense all around me the unforgiving opposition
of my mosquito net, invisible in the swarming dark.
The mosquito stays awake in his blackened monastery, in love with
life's flow.

Flies alight on blood and filth, then fly again to sunlight.
How many times have I watched the play of winged insects on waves
of golden sunshine.

An intimate sky it would seem-some pervasive life force
Controls their hearts.
The grasshopper's constant twitching, caught in the mischievous
child's grasp,
Fights death.
Yet in that foremost darkness after moonset, you, a coil of rope in
hand,
Had gone alone to the aswattha tree,
Knowing that the grasshopper's life, or the doyel bird's, never meets
with
That of man.

The aswattha limb,
Did it not protest? Did not fireflies in cordial throngs
Appear before you?
Did not the blind and palsied owl come and
Say to you: "old lady moon has sunk in the flood, has she?
Marvelous!
Let's now catch a mouse or two!"
Did not the owl screech out that raucous news?

This taste of life-the scent of ripe grain in an autumn afternoon-
You could not tolerate.
In the morgue, is your heart at ease
In the morgue, in that suffocating stillness
Like a flattened rat with blood-smeared lips.

Listen,
However, to this dead man's tale. He lacked
Not love of woman,
Nor did married life's expectations
Go unfulfilled.
From time's churnings emerged a wife
And honey, the mind's honey
She let him know.
Never in this life did he shiver
In the cold of hunger's draining pain.
And so,
In that morgue,
Flat out he lies upon a table.
I know, yet I know,
A woman's heart-love-a child-a home-these are not everything,

Not wealth nor fame nor creature comforts-
There is some other perilous wonder
That frolics
In our very blood.
It exhausts us-
Exhausts, exhausts us.

That exhaustion is not present
In the morgue.
And so
In that morgue
Flat out he lies upon a table.
But every night I look and see, yes,
A blind and palsied owl come sit upon the aswattha branch
Blink her eyes and say: "old lady moon has sunk in the flood, has she?
Marvelous !
Let's now catch a mouse or two!"

Oh profound grandmother, is today still so marvelous?
I too, like you, shall grow old-shall cast old lady moon across the
flood, into the whirlpool.
Then we two together shall empty life's full store.

(Via Ahmad M. Kamal)

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What did you learn in school today?

- a song by Pete Seeger

What did you learn in school today,
Dear little boy of mine?
I learned that Washington never told a lie.
I learned that soldiers never die.
I learned that everybody's free,

And that's what the teacher said to me.

I learned that Government must be strong;
It's always right and never wrong;
Our leaders are the finest men
And we elect them again and again.

I learned that war is not so bad;
I learned about the great ones we have had;
We fought in Germany and in France
And someday I might get my chance.

That's what I learned in school today,
That's what I learned in school.

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IF.....

- Rudyiard Kipling

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or, being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on"

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SNIPPETS TO PONDER

I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

- W. H. Auden

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

- W. H. Auden

We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries
To thee from tortured souls arise.
We sing, but oh the clay is vile
Beneath our feet, and long the mile;
But let the world dream otherwise,
We wear the mask!
We wear the mask that grins and lies.

- Paul Laurence Dunbar

It is VERY IMPORTANT
to take care of your cell phone!
Do you know how?

The best way is to drop it in
a deep pot of chicken fat
and bring to a boil.
Simmer for two hours.
Let cool.

-James Stevenson

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