"Wandering Around an Albuquerque Airport Terminal" by Naomi Shihab Nye

After learning my flight was detained 4 hours,
I heard the announcement:
If anyone in the vicinity of gate 4-A understands any Arabic,
Please come to the gate immediately.

Well - one pauses these days. Gate 4-A was my own gate. I went there.
An older woman in full traditional ( Read more... )

  "The City"
Constantine P. Cavafy

You said: “I’ll go to another country, go to another shore,
find another city better than this one.
Whatever I try to do is fated to turn out wrong
and my heart lies buried like something dead.
How long can I let my mind moulder in this place?
Wherever I turn, wherever I look,
I see the black ruins of my life, here,
where ( Read more... )

"The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart"

Jack Gilbert

How astonishing it is that language can almost mean,
and frightening that it does not quite. Love, we say,
God, we say, Rome and Michiko, we write, and the words
get it all wrong. We say bread and it means according
to which nation. French has no word for home,
and we have no word for strict pleasure. A ( Read more... )

Now you hear what the house has to say.
Pipes clanking, water running in the dark,
the mortgaged walls shifting in discomfort,
and voices mounting in an endless drone
of small complaints like the sounds of a family
that year by year you've learned how to ignore.

But now you must listen to the things you own,
all that you've worked for these past ( Read more... )

"Immigrant Blues"

Li-Young Lee

People have been trying to kill me since I was born,
a man tells his son, trying to explain
the wisdom of learning a second tongue.

It’s an old story from the previous century
about my father and me.

The same old story from yesterday morning
about me and my son.

It’s called “Survival Strategies
and the Melancholy of Racial ( Read more... )

Someone is doing a "post your favorite poem" meme, so I thought I'd join in ( Read more... )

"I don’t know much about death and the sorriest lesson I’ve learned ( Read more... )

"Murmurings In A Field Hospital ( Read more... )

Don't bear me ill will, speech, that I borrow weighty words,
then labor heavily so that they may seem light.
- "Under One Small Star" by Wislawa Szymborska

a country you carry in your pocket ( Read more... )

WHAT LIPS MY LIPS HAVE KISSED, AND WHERE, AND WHY (SONNET XLIII ( Read more... )