1 Shade Tree
In any case, joy lives inside this day
as in the heart of the new sun—
and in dining tables, and in guns,
and even in gods, though they remain oblivious.
In the tree’s shade, human hearts return
to embrace the day’s humility.
Freely, in this place,
one stands for a moment
to read the sky,
to sing the clouds’ song,
to pray, simply because it is time to summon pleasure.
I must forget
that which is beyond forgetting.
The sun glares. The trees glare back.
2 Yearning
In the shadow of the June sun, I accept my fate.
I’ve become alienated even from my own desires.
My yearning dashes about
vainly, with no time to look back.
I’ve made the mistake of loving without conviction.
All the while, just this charming exterior—
flattery without the knowledge of who flatters.
Fields and clouds are such simple things.
Soon, around my small grave,
only people, rocks, and sky will remain. And yet—
what immortal soul remembers tomorrow?
I’ve made the mistake of forgetting the gods.
Without life, how on earth can anything happen?
In the obscure early summer sun, my fate casts a shadow.
3 Homecoming
This was an alien land.
Through the side entrance of this miserable planet,
I was drawn to the darkness of its innermost part
by the profound, mysterious shapes of its rooms.
Who am I?
I have no means to return,
and will continue writing these dispatches
as long as I am here.
I have ceased yearning for other planets.
There is more amusement here than in eternity,
and yet someday, as a postscript, I’ll return.
Most likely, I’ll be called back unexpectedly
from this intimate, foreign land —
My own homecoming, and yet I will not be there.
10 Unknown Person
The car spoke.
The pencil spoke.
Chemistry, itself, spoke.
“You have made us,” they said. “You human.”
I wonder, what would Tanuki think of this?
What would the stars think?
What might the gods think
of this overflowing of passion, this foolish arrogance?
We move toward death, all in a line,
beginning with he who has forgotten how to be alone,
until the unknown person, here, is erased.
The wind blows over the earth at dusk and again over an unknown star.
The gods walk the earth at dusk, the earth which belongs to dusk.
Even over the unknown stars, they walk.
What Keeps Us
Poems to Read in Community
Inspired by C. D. Wright’s poem “What Keeps,” we offer Shuntaro Tanikawa’s “62 Sonnets (excerpt),” translated from the Japanese by Martin Rock, as part of a twenty-poem selection from poems we’ve featured in 2024—poems, like bread, that one might pass across the table—to a loved one, or to oneself.
Read editor Lloyd Wallace’s introduction to the collection and statements from our staff readers here. Read poems by selecting below.
Throwback Night, Midway Skating Rink
The sun dipped already, but we sweating, edges ribboned under
summer’s breath.
My Father Walks Out of an English Book and Into an English Field
It was not long after the war—
and just saying after the war places him
Half-Life in Exile
I’m forever living between Aprils.
The air here smells of jacarandas and lime;
Country Song (Memory of Rain)
A bruise is a promised haunting.
“Come, just this once,” I ask, disingenuously. I mean “a thousand times.”
At the Gellert Baths, Budapest
Here in the body museum,
women speaking Hungarian
rinse one another with buckets of water,
As Though It Were a Small Child
I wake up these days, a new mother again, watching,
waiting, to understand what to offer, how to serve, by which I
mean,