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Richard Foerster

. . . so koukla, all is death + darkness

in this ravishing bright day.
—James Merrill
Pivot, fulcrum, the moment like Anubis’s feather : and the heart—
heavy planet sinks toward another inevitable dark. Ironic

that I should invest myself in darkness like a sacramental robe,
here, beneath this nave of ancient oaks at 5:14 a.m.,

a celebrant of solstice light. But what can come
of ceremony? No escaping “the situation of our time,”

the bullets, the bunkers of despair a hemisphere away,
the despot’s crimes. And yet again I wait for a rising wind

to louver the broad green limbs and open blue portals
as if to summon me through and up into those airy absences

I once believed in—certainty, patience, hope. A rustle in the leaves
portends its own ravishing afterlife. Of this, too, I am aware.
from the journal THE MAINE REVIEW 
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Color screenshot of the audience responding at the Urdu-language poetry feativael
300,000 People Celebrate Urdu Poetry

 "Urdu has remained the key language of romantic expression in the songs and cinema that saturate Indian life. Generations, in India as well as across the wider subcontinent and in the diaspora, have grown up humming songs from Bollywood musicals that draw heavily on Urdu poetry. Knowingly or unknowingly, Urdu has been their language of angst, heartbreak and celebration."

via THE NEW YORK TIMES
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Cover image of Amelia Rosselli's L'Opera Poetica
What Sparks Poetry:
Deborah Woodard on Amelia Rosselli's "The Dragonfly"


"What I hope comes through in my and Roberta Antognini’s translation of this passage is the obsessive insistence with which Rosselli demands we search for and find Ortensia, and how equally insistently the text embodies a desire that is somehow delicate, hermetic and insatiable by turns. Rosselli takes the onanistic, gratingly abrupt though brilliant original and gives it a brand new lyrical body along with a new subjectivity to inhabit that body."
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