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The birds have vanished into the sky,

and now the last cloud drains away.

We sit together, the mountain and me,

until only the mountain remains.

Lucille Clifton, stones and bones, in Poets Against the War, Edited by Sam Hamill with Sally Anderson and others, Thunder's Mouth Press/Nation Books, New York, NY, 2003, p. 50

Just as I wonder

whether it’s going to die,

the orchid blossoms

and I can’t explain why it

moves my heart, why such pleasure

comes from one small bud

on a long spindly stem, one

blood red gold flower

opening at mid-summer,

tiny, perfect in its hour.

Even to a white—

haired craggy poet, it’s

purely erotic,

pistil and stamen, pollen,

dew of the world, a spoonful

of earth, and water.

Erotic because there’s death

at the heart of birth,

drama in those old sunrise

prisms in wet cedar boughs,

deepest mystery

in washing evening dishes

or teasing my wife,

who grows, yes, more beautiful

because one of us will die.

Photo by Soumen Maity

* * * *

𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗚𝗶𝗳𝘁 𝗼𝗳 𝗧𝗼𝗻𝗴𝘂𝗲𝘀

Everything I steal, I give away. Once, in pines almost as tall as these, same crescent moon sliding gently by, I sat curled on my knees, smoking with a friend, sipping tea, swapping Coyote tales and lies.

He said something to me about words, that each is a name, and that every name is God's. I who have no god sat in the vast emptiness silent as I could be. A way that can be named

is not the way. Each word reflects the Spirit which can't be named. Each word a gift, its value in exact proportion to the spirit in which it is given. Thus spoken, these words I give

by way of Lao Tzu's old Chinese, stolen by a humble thief twenty-five centuries later. The Word is only evidence of the real: in the Hopi tongue, there is no whale; and, in American English, no Fourth World.

Sam Hamill 

En el instante en que me pregunto

si la orquídea va a morir

ella florece

y no puedo explicar la emoción

en mi corazón, ni por qué tanto placer

proviene de ese pequeño capullo

en el extremo de un delgado tallo,

de esa pequeña flor

sanguínea roja dorada

abriéndose en el apogeo del verano

pequeña, perfecta en su plenitud.

Incluso para un poeta

de cabellos blancos y rostro curtido,

ella es en su pureza, erótica,

pistilo y estambre, polen,

rocío del mundo, una cucharada

de tierra y de agua.

Ella es erótica

porque en el corazón del nacimiento

la muerte afirma su existencia,

y el efecto dramático de los viejos prismas luminosos

del alba, allí en las húmedas ramas del cedro,

profundísimo misterio

mientras lavo la vajilla al atardecer

o bromeo con mi esposa,

quien a cada momento se vuelve más bella

simplemente porque uno de nosotros ha de morir.

- Sam Hamill,  Ojos abiertos y otros poemas, publicado por la Colección El Cuervo del Departamento de Literatura de la Universidad de Carabobo, 2006, con traducción de Esteban Moore.

- Adrian Piper, ‘Everything #2.8’’ (2007)

Zazen on Ching-t’ing Mountain The birds have vanished down the sky. Now the last cloud drains away. We sit together, the mountain and me, until only the mountain remains.

-Li Po (China, 701-762)

[translated by Sam Hamill]

Li Po, “Zazen on Ching-t’ing Mountain,” translated by Sam Hamill, from Yellow River: Three Hundred Poems from the Chinese. Copyright 2000 by Sam Hamill. Reprinted with the permission of BOA Editions, Ltd.