EDIP CANSEVER, WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS, & DAVID RUBADIRI
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WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst 
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

__________ 

TPB's notes: found notes, more or less:
The Second Coming was written in 1919 in the aftermathof the first World War.
The above version of the poem is as it was published in the edition 'Michael Robartes and the Dancer' dated 1920 (there are numerous other versions of the poem)…and has a page break between lines17 and 18 making the stanza division unclear. Earlier drafts have thirty centuries instead of twenty as well as references to the French and Irish Revolutions as well as the Germany and Russia. Several of the lines in the version above differ from those found in subsequent versions. In listing it as one of the hundred most anthologized poems in the English language, the text given by Harmon (1998) has changes including: line 13 (": somewhere in sands of the desert"), line 17 ("Reel" instead of "Wind"), and no break between the second and third stanza.

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DAVID RUBADIRI
An Africa Thunderstorm

From the west
Clouds come hurrying with the wind
Turning sharply
Here and there
Like a plague of locusts
Whirling,
Tossing up things on its tail
Like a madman chasing nothing.

Pregnant clouds
Ride stately on its back,
Gathering to perch on hills
Like sinister dark wings;
The wind whistles by
And trees bend to let it pass.

In the village
Screams of delighted children,
Toss and turn
In the din of the whirling wind,
Women,
Babies clinging on their backs
Dart about
In and out
Madly;
The wind whistles by
Whilst trees bend to let it pass.

Clothes wave like tattered flags
Flying off
To expose dangling breasts
As jagged blinding flashes
Rumble, tremble and crack
Amidst the smell of fired smoke
And the pelting march of the storm.

__________ 

TPB's notes: from 'A Selection Of African Poetry' published by Longman, this poem is often cited as 'one of Africa’s most widely anthologised poem'.

__________________

EDIP CANSEVER
That´s What I Call a Table

A man filled with the gladness of living
Put his keys on the table,
Put flowers in a copper bowl there.
He put his eggs and milk on the table.
He put there the light that came in through the window,
Sound of a bicycle, sound of a spinning wheel.
The softness of bread and weather he put there. 
On the table the man put
Things that happened in his mind.
What he wanted to do in life,
He put that there.
Those he loved, those he didn´t love,
The man put them on the table too.
Three times three make nine:
The man put nine on the table.
He was next to the window next to the sky;
He reached out and placed on the table endlessness.
So many days he had wanted to drink a beer!
He put on the table the pouring of that beer.
He placed there his sleep and his wakefulness;
His hunger and his fullness he put there.

Now that´s what I call a table!
It didn´t complain at all about the load.
It wobbled once or twice, then stood firm.
The man kept piling things on.

IN THE TURKISH:

EDIP CANSEVER
Masa Da Masaymış Ha

Adam yaşama sevinci içinde
Masaya anahtarlarını koydu
Bakır kâseye çiçekleri koydu
Sütünü yumurtasını koydu
Pencereden gelen ışığı koydu
Bisiklet sesini çıkrık sesini
Ekmeğin havanın yumuşaklığını koydu
Adam masaya
Aklında olup bitenleri koydu
Ne yapmak istiyordu hayatta
İşte onu koydu
Kimi seviyordu kimi sevmiyordu
Adam masaya onları da koydu
Üç kere üç dokuz ederdi
Adam koydu masaya dokuzu
Pencere yanındaydı gökyüzü yanında
Uzandı masaya sonsuzu koydu
Bir bira içmek istiyordu kaç gündür
Masaya biranın dökülüşünü koydu
Uykusunu koydu uyanıklığını koydu
Tokluğunu açlığını koydu

Masa da masaymış ha
Bana mısın demedi bu kadar yüke
Bir iki sallandı durdu
Adam ha babam koyuyordu.

(transl: mr and ms tillinghast)

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TPB's notes: recent news says this poem has just been censored by the Turkish government. We don't understand why. Or they say it is because the poet mentioned 'beer'. Lucky those poets with nations to censor their poems! Turkey has just made a very good poem intriguing.

 Background:

In 2013, Turkish Publishers Association President Metin Celal Zeynioğlu sent out a message to the poetry world that the repressive practices of the reign of the Ottoman sultan Abdülhamit are about to be repeated. Why? Poems selected to be read by schools across Turkey were censored for having anti or non 'Islamic' elements. The poem TABLE by the Turkish poet, Edip Cansever, was cut in two for including the offensive word of 'beer'. TPB shares it here. It is a wonderful poem.

NIKKI GIOVANNI & IVAN BLATNY & ALLEN GINSBERG 
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there's semblance here...



NIKKI GIOVANNI
Being and Nothingness
(to quote a philosopher)

i haven’t done anything
meaningful in so long
it’s almost meaningful
to do nothing

i suppose i could fall in love
or at least in line
since i’m so discontented
but that takes effort
and i don’t want to exert anything
neither my energy nor my emotions

i’ve always prided myself
on being a child of the sixties
and we are all finished
so that makes being
nothing

_______  

TPB's notes: n/a
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IVAN BLATNY
Rodina (Family)

I feel at home with you, when watering the cacti,
the rubber plant, the ivy and the rest.
I must be going then, your putting right my neck-tie,
the breakfast's over now and you can have a rest.
And when the evening comes, I'm back to our harbour,
the world's a picture now, you are the golden frame,
with our dogs and cats, the mantel-piece of marble,
for years and years from now it will be quite the same.

_________  

TPB's notes: n/a ____________________

ALLEN GINSBERG
An Eastern Ballad

I speak of love that comes to mind:
The moon is faithful, although blind;
She moves in thought she cannot speak.
Perfect care has made her bleak.

I never dreamed the sea so deep,
The earth so dark; so long my sleep,
I have become another child.
I wake to see the world go wild. 

_________  

TPB's notes: n/a

YUSEF KOMUNYAKAA, CLAUDE MCKAY, & ETHERIDGE KNIGHT      

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Poems from the  Americans

YUSEF KOMUNYAKAA
Blue Dementia

In the days when a man
would hold a swarm of words
inside his belly, nestled
against his spleen, singing.

In the days of night riders
when life tongued a reed
till blues & sorrow song
called out of the deep night:
Another man done gone.
Another man done gone.

In the days when one could lose oneself
all up inside love that way,
& then moan on the bone
till the gods cried out in someone’s sleep.

Today,
already I’ve seen three dark-skinned men
discussing the weather with demons
& angels, gazing up at the clouds
& squinting down into iron grates
along the fast streets of luminous encounters.

I double-check my reflection in plate glass
& wonder, Am I passing another
Lucky Thompson or Marion Brown
cornered by a blue dementia,
another dark-skinned man
who woke up dreaming one morning
& then walked out of himself
dreaming? Did this one dare
to step on a crack in the sidewalk,
to turn a midnight corner & never come back
whole, or did he try to stare down a look
that shoved a blade into his heart?
I mean, I also know something
about night riders & catgut. Yeah,
honey, I know something about talking with ghosts.

_________ 

TPB's notes: n/a

_____________________

ETHERIDGE KNIGHT
The Idea of Ancestry

1
Taped to the wall of my cell are 47 pictures: 47 black
faces: my father, mother, grandmothers (1 dead), grand-
fathers (both dead), brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts,
cousins (1st and 2nd), nieces, and nephews. They stare
across the space at me sprawling on my bunk. I know
their dark eyes, they know mine. I know their style,
they know mine. I am all of them, they are all of me;
they are farmers, I am a thief, I am me, they are thee.

I have at one time or another been in love with my mother,
1 grandmother, 2 sisters, 2 aunts (1 went to the asylum),
and 5 cousins. I am now in love with a 7-yr-old niece
(she sends me letters in large block print, and
her picture is the only one that smiles at me).

I have the same name as 1 grandfather, 3 cousins, 3 nephews, and 1 uncle. The uncle disappeared when he was 15, just took off and caught a freight (they say). He's discussed each year when the family has a reunion, he causes uneasiness in the clan, he is an empty space. My father's mother, who is 93 and who keeps the Family Bible with everbody's birth dates (and death dates) in it, always mentions him. There is no
place in her Bible for "whereabouts unknown."

2
Each fall the graves of my grandfathers call me, the brown
hills and red gullies of mississippi send out their electric
messages, galvanizing my genes. Last yr/like a salmon quitting the cold ocean-leaping and bucking up his birth stream/I hitchhiked my way from LA with 16 caps in my pocket and a monkey on my back. And I almost kicked it with the kinfolks.
I walked barefooted in my grandmother's backyard/I smelled the old land and the woods/I sipped cornwhiskey from fruit jars with the men/
I flirted with the women/
I had a ball till the caps ran out
and my habit came down. That night I looked at my grandmother and split/
my guts were screaming for junk/but I was almost contented/
I had almost caught up with me.
(The next day in Memphis I cracked a croaker's crib for a fix.)

This yr there is a gray stone wall damming my stream, and when the falling leaves stir my genes, I pace my cell or flop on my bunk and stare at 47 black faces across the space. I am all of them, they are all of me, I am me, they are thee, and I have no children
to float in the space between.

"From The Essential Etheridge Knight by Etheridge Knight © 1986. All rights are controlled by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, PA 15261. Used by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press."

___________ 

TPB's notes: see youtube of etheridge knight reading his above poem: youtubedotcomslash: watch?v=FbUOIByUfmg
(we made the link above a spell-it-out since ** no longer allows removal of youtube image preview. our aesthetic here is to present words only. without same old social media image aids. that way a poem stands on its own. after all, words are choke full of images. /TTA) 

here's what he has to say about his poem:  

The Idea of Ancestry: "It has to do with identity—being one with other people. That poem came when I was in prison also. I had just gone through a thing of being in the hole for days. The first two or three days in the hole, you sing songs, recite Shakespeare, masturbate, and think about the streets. After about ten days in there, you stop singing songs and start remembering your early life. You deal with those kinds of thing when you go into prison. When you first go there, they take away your name—the name given you at birth. If you’re black, you don’t accept that name anyway. You know somewhere names means more than that. It’s the whole thing of identity. You’re not called Etheridge Knight, but 35652. When they bring your mail, they say 35652. The letter could be from your mother. If anybody knows your name, she does. But they yell 35652. It’s the question of identity. To keep your sanity, you have to place yourself in the context of the world somehow. I had just been in the hole some thirty or forty days and that poem came." -EK
source: http://www.nathanielturner.com/etheridgeknightspeaks.htm

_____________________

CLAUDE MCKAY
America

Although she feeds me bread of bitterness,
And sinks into my throat her tiger's tooth,
Stealing my breath of life, I will confess
I love this cultured hell that tests my youth!
Her vigor flows like tides into my blood,
Giving me strength erect against her hate.
Her bigness sweeps my being like a flood.
Yet as a rebel fronts a king in state,
I stand within her walls with not a shred
Of terror, malice, not a word of jeer.
Darkly I gaze into the days ahead,
And see her might and granite wonders there,
Beneath the touch of Time's unerring hand,
Like priceless treasures sinking in the sand.

_______ 

TPB's notes: "Claude McKay (born Festus Claudius McKay) (September 15, 1889 – May 22, 1948) was a Jamaican-American writer and poet, who was a seminal figure in the Harlem Renaissance. He wrote four novels: Home to Harlem (1928), a best-seller that won the Harmon Gold Award for Literature, Banjo (1929), Banana Bottom (1933), and in 1941 a manuscript called Amiable With Big Teeth: A Novel of the Love Affair Between the Communists and the Poor Black Sheep of Harlem that has not yet been published." -WIKI
misc, etc: it is sad that despite all that was hoped for when americans elected their obama to say no at least to the bush years, more americans are not so much patriotic (nay, the contrary since the republican elect are bent on ambushing their own country to prove their stance, etc) as nationalistic where fear and ignorance of other nations reigns. perhaps this has to do with obama himself, at least to some extent? his drone wars sore plague to many around the globe. 

mckay calls it 'cultured'. but we disagree a wee bit. america is feral. there's goodwill in there too. hence why it is so interesting.

Four Short Poems by Ashraf Fayadh 
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EQUAL OPPORTUNITIES
A son and a daughter.
The mother prefers the son to the daughter.
The son will stand by his mother through the vicissitudes of life.
The daughter will produce another son to stand by her side.

AN APHORISM
To be in love is not to be a bird in the hand of the one you love,
better for them than ten in the bush.
A bird in the bush is better than ten in the hand,
from the birds’ point of view.

CONCLUSION
Sometimes love is like a meal to someone who’s been fasting
at other times it’s like a new pair of sports shoes given
to a disabled child.
Love, in general, is a deal that brings much loss
to all parties.

LOGIC
The old door applauds the wind by clapping
for the dance it has performed, accompanied by the trees.
The old door doesn’t have hands
and the trees haven’t been to dancing school.
And the wind is an invisible creature,
even when it’s dancing with the trees.

____________

TPB's note: These four poems, taken from Ashraf Fayadh’s Instructions Within (2008), were translated by Jonathan Wright: