Nothing Cuts Like Love

Love
by Radmila Lazić

I sharpened knives
All night.
To welcome you
In the brilliance of their blades,
And among them,
My love sparkles
For your eyes only.

Radmila Lazic, born in 1949, is one of the best living Serbian poets. She is the author of six collections of poetry, for which she received several literary prizes. She has published numerous essays on literature and is the editor of an anthology of women's poetry and another of anti-war letters, and the founder and editor of the journal Profemina. Wake for the Living is the first translation of her poetry into English.
 

The Nails 
by W.S. Merwin

I gave you sorrow to hang on your wall

Like a calendar in one color.

I wear a torn place on my sleeve.

It isn't as simple as that.

 

Between no place of mine and no place of yours

You'd have thought I'd know the way by now

Just from thinking it over.

Oh I know

I've no excuse to be stuck here turning

Like a mirror on a string,

Except it's hardly credible how

It all keeps changing.

Loss has a wider choice of directions

Than the other thing.

 

As if I had a system

I shuffle among the lies

Turning them over, if only

I could be sure what I'd lost.

I uncover my footprints, I

Poke them till the eyes open.

They don't recall what it looked like.

When was I using it last?

Was it like a ring or a light

Or the autumn pond

Which chokes and glitters but

Grows colder?

It could be all in the mind.  Anyway

Nothing seems to bring it back to me.

 

And I've been to see

Your hands as trees borne away on a flood,

The same film over and over,

And an old one at that, shattering its account

To the last of the digits, and nothing

And the blank end.

 

The lightning has shown me the scars of the future.

 

I've had a long look at someone

Alone like a key in a lock

Without what it takes to turn.

 

It isn't as simple as that.

 

Winter will think back to your lit harvest

For which there is no help, and the seed

Of eloquence will open its wings

When you are gone.

But at this moment

When the nails are kissing the fingers good-bye

And my only

Chance is bleeding from me,

When my one chance is bleeding,

For speaking either truth or comfort

I have no more tongue than a wound.

 

 

W. S. Merwin, The Second Four Books of Poems: The Moving Target The Lice The Carriers of Ladders Writings to an Unfinished Accompaniment (Copper Canyon Press, 1993)

Destruction Without Remorse

“I must create a system, or be enslaved by another man's. I will not reason and compare: my business is to create.”
  ~ William Blake, Jerusalem

THE POISON TREE

I was angry with my friend:
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe;
I told it not, my wrath did grow.
And I water'd it in fears,
Night & morning with my tears;
And I sunned it with my smiles
And with soft deceitful wiles.

And it grew both day and night,
Till it bore an apple bright;
And my foe beheld it shine,
And he knew that it was mine,

And into my garden stole
When the night had veil'd the pole:
In the morning glad I see
My foe outstretch'd beneath the tree.
~ William Blake

"Men are admitted into heaven not because they have curbed and governed their passions or have no passions, but because they have cultivated their understandings. The treasures of heaven are not negations of passion, but realities of intellect, from which all the passions emanate uncurbed in their eternal glory."
~ William Blake

The Smile

There is a smile of love,
And there is a smile of deceit,
And there is a smile of smiles
In which these two smiles meet.

And there is a frown of hate,
And there is a frown of disdain,
And there is a frown of frowns
Which you strive to forget in vain,

For it sticks in the heart's deep core
And it sticks in the deep backbone--
And no smile that ever was smil'd,
But only one smile alone,

That betwixt the cradle and grave
It only once smil'd can be;
And, when it once is smil'd,
There's an end to all misery.
~ William Blake

"Those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained; and the restrainer or reason usurps its place & governs the unwilling.
And being restrain'd it by degrees becomes passive till it is only the shadow of desire."
~ William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

The Genius of the Crowd

there is enough treachery, hatred violence absurdity in the average
human being to supply any given army on any given day

and the best at murder are those who preach against it
and the best at hate are those who preach love
and the best at war finally are those who preach peace

those who preach god, need god
those who preach peace do not have peace
those who preach peace do not have love

beware the preachers
beware the knowers
beware those who are always reading books
beware those who either detest poverty
or are proud of it
beware those quick to praise
for they need praise in return
beware those who are quick to censor
they are afraid of what they do not know
beware those who seek constant crowds for
they are nothing alone
beware the average man the average woman
beware their love, their love is average
seeks average

but there is genius in their hatred
there is enough genius in their hatred to kill you
to kill anybody
not wanting solitude
not understanding solitude
they will attempt to destroy anything
that differs from their own
not being able to create art
they will not understand art
they will consider their failure as creators
only as a failure of the world
not being able to love fully
they will believe your love incomplete
and then they will hate you
and their hatred will be perfect

like a shining diamond
like a knife
like a mountain
like a tiger
like hemlock

their finest art

~ Uncle Buk

Fire and Ice

Fire and Ice

Some say the world will end in fire,

Some say in ice.

From what I’ve tasted of desire

I hold with those who favor fire.

But if it had to perish twice,

I think I know enough of hate

To say that for destruction ice

Is also great

And would suffice.

~ Robert Frost