Perhaps that one that took the most,
The swiftest borrower, wildest spender,
May count, as we do not, the cost—
And grow to us more true and tender.

Happy are we if in his eyes
We see no shadow of forgetting.
Nay—if our star sinks in those skies
We shall not wholly see its setting.

Then let us laugh as do the brooks
That such immortal youth is ours,
If memory keeps for them our looks
As fresh as are the spring-time flowers.

Oh, grieve not, Ladies, if at night
Ye wake to feel the cold December!
Rather recall the early light
And in your loved one’s arms, remember.”

January 

By her who in this month is born,
No gems save Garnets should be worn;
They will insure her constancy,
True friendship and fidelity.  

February  

The February born will find
Sincerity and peace of mine;
Freedom from passion and from care,
If they the Pearl (also green ame-
thyst) will wear.  

March  

Who in this world of ours their eyes
In March first open shall be wise;
In days of peril firm and brave,
And wear a Bloodstone to their grave.  

April  

She who from April dates her years, 
Diamonds should wear, lest bitter tears
For vain repentance flow; this stone,
Emblem of innocence is known.  

May

Who first beholds the light of day
In Spring’s sweet flowery month of May
And wears an Emerald all her life,
Shall be a loved and happy wife.   

June

Who comes with Summer to this earth
And owes to June her day of birth,
With ring of Agate on her hand,
Can health, wealth, and long life command.  

July

The flowing Ruby should adorn
Those who in warm July are born,
Then will they be exempt and free
From love’s doubt and anxiety.  

August

Wear a Sardonyx or for thee
No conjugal felicity.  
The August-born without this stone
‘Tis said must live unloved and lone.  

September

A maiden born when Autumn leaves
Are rustling in September’s breeze,
A Sapphire on her brow should bind,
‘Twill cure diseases of the mind.  

October

October’s child is born for woe,
And life’s vicissitudes must know;
But lay an Opal on her breast,
And hope will lull those woes to rest.  

November

Who first comes to this world below
With drear November’s fog and snow
Should prize the Topaz’ amber hue–
Emblem of friends and lovers true.  

December

If cold December gave you birth,
The month of snow and ice and mirth,
Place on your hand a Turquoise blue,
Success will bless whate’er you do.

Sweating between his fingers, the agricultural man
sweating in his thorax the musician
sweating in his lungs the miner
sweating in his nausea the existential man
sweating in his refugee camp the Palestinian
driven out by the Jew who has forgotten Auschwitz
sweating in his ghetto the blackman
sweating in his carapace the animal-man
sweating when he escapes the innocent man
sweating in their duodena the children
battling the pigs on the garbage dump
sweating the woman whose urgent sex
brings me my brief joy
sweating the poor man whose house starves between the thighs
sweating the deadman, the marginal man
who wants his bones enamelled in gold
sweating the poor who died from the too, too rich
sweating the bronze man who suffers them all
sweating I who sing them!”

“What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare-

No time to stand beneath the boughs
And stare as long as sheep or cows.

No time to see, when woods we pass,
Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass.

No time to see, in broad daylight,
Streams full of stars, like skies at night.

No time to turn at Beauty’s glance,
And watch her feet, how they can dance.

No time to wait till her mouth can
Enrich that smile her eyes began.

A poor life this if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.”

“This is an elegy to all the things that we become before we’re done becoming women
One, elegy to the freshman girlfriend whose optimism was buttermilk at the breakfast table turned sour by a boy for whom my face wasn’t pretty in the way he preferred
Baked my body into buffet, a pie he could cut open and sample
Take a slice of what he liked
Eyes like flies, all the maggoted compliments I swallowed because somewhere this must be a delicacy
And somewhere I must be really lucky
Though not Christian enough to pray for
Not even trophy enough to pay for
I spent half of college trying to get this boy to love me
Wrote dozens of poems
Well “that girl” she’s been dead for years now
She’s been dead for years now but y’all keep asking me to conjure up a ghost

Two, ode to the slut who doesn’t fuck but still a slut for not letting him hit
Remember there are always two ways of looking at a condom in a wrapper, open your pussy and you won’t find freedom
Close your legs and you won’t find purity
Purity is just contraception
Freedom is knowing your hip is a hinge, use your body at your own discretion and seek your own pleasure
What lies between your thighs is a man’s Genesis so how dare he spit upon scripture
To all the girls who’ve been propped open, pried open, and jada posed
I’m sorry there was no funeral for the going out of your smile and the coming in of strangers
Hoes, boppers, and skanks
What’s in a name but a whole lot of rape culture
What’s a slut anyway, but a pimp in sheep’s clothing

Three, ode to the bitch who’s not a bitch, just doesn’t always feel like shaking hands after the show
I tried taming the Leo
Cut all of my hair off to get rid of my ego but still it comes roaring in like a red dragon
She be my protection, a pitbull in a skirt, please I’m a bullmastiff on the scent of a kill
I’m still learning how to heal

Four, ode to the surgeon
To the knife we wield deathly in our right hand
And to the sutras we made of our own mouths
Where nothing else could close the wounds
My first love, I had to cut him out first at 19 and then again at 21 and then again at 22
The field doc like a field doctor without supplies on the battlefield, I had to improvise
I marched through my own heart, arms with nothing but a bible, my knees and came out the other side
My hands were killers but my shirt clean, my Coach white
Sometimes love is surgery but it is always a sacrifice

Five, ode to the martyr also the mother, who were once daughters of God and therefore saints
How many times, girls, how many times have we tried to save someone with our love
Been bread, butter, and breath
Done done our best to give birth and give good head
I mean wisdom, knowledge

Six, ode to the impossible
I’m still a red head in my heart
Believe that I am prettier than 8 out of 10 girls in the room
I’ve traveled to 20 or more countries and love what I do but still wake up every morning wondering if I’m doing enough
Sometimes I am tired
More tired than a bag of old diamonds
All these words and no answers
But everyday I ask myself if today were the last today, would I be okay with the life I’ve lived and then I forgive myself till there’s no more sand left in Egypt
I remember the mountains in my last name and the victory in the middle
Say it over and over as a reminder, Alysia Nicole, the unforgotten victory, the victory of the truth
It took me 7 years to go from that girl to this woman
7 years but ain’t God good and ain’t I great”

(trans. by Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk)

"Living is no laughing matter:
	you must live with great seriousness
		like a squirrel, for example—
   I mean without looking for something beyond and above living,
		I mean living must be your whole life.
Living is no laughing matter:
	you must take it seriously,
	so much so and to such a degree
   that, for example, your hands tied behind your back,
                                            your back to the wall,
   or else in a laboratory
	in your white coat and safety glasses,
	you can die for people—
   even for people whose faces you’ve never seen,
   even though you know living
	is the most real, the most beautiful thing.
I mean, you must take living so seriously
   that even at seventy, for example, you’ll plant olive trees—
   and not for your children, either,
   but because although you fear death you don’t believe it,
   because living, I mean, weighs heavier.

II

Let’s say we’re seriously ill, need surgery—
which is to say we might not get up
			from the white table.
Even though it’s impossible not to feel sad
			about going a little too soon,
we’ll still laugh at the jokes being told,
we’ll look out the window to see if it’s raining,
or still wait anxiously
		for the latest newscast. . . 
Let’s say we’re at the front—
	for something worth fighting for, say.
There, in the first offensive, on that very day,
	we might fall on our face, dead.
We’ll know this with a curious anger,
        but we’ll still worry ourselves to death
        about the outcome of the war, which could last years.
Let’s say we’re in prison
and close to fifty,
and we have eighteen more years, say,
                        before the iron doors will open.
We’ll still live with the outside,
with its people and animals, struggle and wind—
                                I  mean with the outside beyond the walls.
I mean, however and wherever we are,
        we must live as if we will never die.

III

This earth will grow cold,
a star among stars
               and one of the smallest,
a gilded mote on blue velvet—
	  I mean this, our great earth.
This earth will grow cold one day,
not like a block of ice
or a dead cloud even 
but like an empty walnut it will roll along
	  in pitch-black space . . . 
You must grieve for this right now
—you have to feel this sorrow now—
for the world must be loved this much
                               if you’re going to say 'I lived'. . ."

“I’ve been scared and battered
My hopes the wind done scattered.
Snow has friz me, sun has baked me.
     Looks like between ’em
     They done tried to make me
Stop laughin,’ stop lovin,’ stop livin’—
     But I don’t care!
     I’m still here!”

“Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
‘Life is but an empty dream!’
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem.

Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
‘Dust thou art, to dust returnest,’
Was not spoken of the soul.

Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,
Is our destined end or way;
But to act, that each to-morrow
Find us farther than to-day.

Art is long, and Time is fleeting,
And our hearts, though stout and brave,
Still, like muffled drums, are beating
Funeral marches to the grave.

In the world’s broad field of battle,
In the bivouac of Life,
Be not like dumb, driven cattle!
Be a hero in the strife!

Trust no Future, howe’er pleasant!
Let the dead Past bury its dead!
Act,— act in the living present!
Heart within, and God o’erhead!

Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time;

Footprints, that perhaps another,
Sailing o’er life’s solemn main,
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
Seeing, shall take heart again.

Let us, then, be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labor and to wait.”

“Relentless press of little things;
Eternal haste to do them all;
The prior claim upon our days
Relinquished to the trivial.

Our obligations never paid
But endless and imperative.
O life, why must you always leave
So little time to live?”

“I had thought so little, really, of her,
inside me, all that time, not breathing—
intelligent, maybe curious,
her eyes closed. When the vagina opened,
slowly, from within, from the top, my eyes
rounded in shock and awe, it was like being
entered for the first time, but entered
from the inside, the child coming in
from the other world. Enormous, stately,
she was pressed through the channel, she turned, and rose,
they held her up by a very small ankle,
she dangled indigo and scarlet, and spread
her arms out in this world. Each thing
I did, then, I did for the first
time, touched the flesh of our flesh,
brought the tiny mouth to my breast,
she drew the avalanche of milk
down off the mountain, I felt as if
I was nothing, no one, I was everything to her, I was hers.”

“She was so small I would scan the crib a half-second
to find her, face-down in a corner, limp
as something gently flung down, or fallen
from some sky an inch above the mattress. I would
tuck her arm along her side
and slowly turn her over. She would tumble
over part by part, like a load
of damp laundry, in the dryer, Id slip
a hand in, under her neck,
slide the other under her back,
and evenly lift her up. Her little bottom
sat in my palm, her chest contained
the puckered, moire sacs, and her neck—
I was afraid of her neck, once I almost
thought I heard it quietly snap,
I looked at her and she swivelled her slate
eyes and looked at me. It was in
my care, the creature of her spine, like the first
chordate, as if the history
of the vertebrate had been placed in my hands.
Every time I checked, she was still
with us—someday, there would be a human
race. I could not see it in her eyes,
but when I fed her, gathered her
like a loose bouquet to my side and offered
the breast, greyish-white, and struck with
minuscule scars like creeks in sunlight, I
felt she was serious, I believed she was willing to stay.”

“I believe that Life is a Movie,
And the films that each of us make
Are full of humor and drama,
And the hearts we gladden or break.

I believe in the World’s Big Picture
It’s the human things that count,
And over the ever-changing screen
It is Love that is Paramount.”

“They were dressed in distressed denim,
legs crossed and notebooks open.
I wished I didn’t have to explain
how difficult the course would be,
but I soldiered through the syllabus
assigning seventy chapters on sighing,
thirty-three articles concerning slings,
forty-nine on arrows,
countless miserable passes
they would be obliged to internalize
to get to, and appreciate, the happy ones.
To a hand raised in the back
I explained why joy—post-pubescent joy—
was reserved for more advanced classes.
To avoid any further confusion
I laid out the irrelevance of carnal thrills
and blisses originating in ignorance—
acknowledging the latter represents
the layperson’s misconstruction of happiness.
Next I dwelt conscientiously on how
familiar the lectures would begin to sound,
on the study groups that would dissolve
in tears, lamentation, or dispirited gazing at walls.
I was just getting down to the nuts
and bolts of quizzes on terms
they’d be using the rest of their lives,
plus oral presentations on the three Ds
(depression, despair, and ‘ddiction)
that would prepare them for therapy,
when it became a necessary for me to pretend
I didn’t notice as one by one they slunk
with downcast eyes out the double doors.
I tried not to show how relieved …
in truth the word is tickled …
no, how absolutely giddy I felt
to be facing only three scattered rows,
then one, then just a few knee-jiggling
pen-tappers, then finally the one student
who probably hadn’t heard a word
the whole time, dreaming out the window
or picking at the fabric on her knee,
when at last she glanced up, looked
around, and gathered her things.

‘Be seeing you,’ I said, perhaps too cheerily
since it only hastened her departure;
but I felt so lighthearted
I could scarcely keep my feet on the floor.
I wanted to strip down and dance
around that immovable podium
so dark and so heavy, piled high
with what I could never pass on
without bearing it again, all of it
all over again, myself.”

Hamlet's Soliloquy - William Shakespeare

"To be, or not to be: that is the question—
Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And, by opposing end them? To die—to sleep—
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to!—‘tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish’d. To die—to sleep—
To sleep!—perchance to dream!—ay, there’s the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause. There’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin!  Who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death
(That undiscovered country from whose bourn
No traveller returns) puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have,
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action."

“My life has been the poem I would have writ,
But I could not both live and utter it.”

“Those who can’t find anything to live for,
always invent something to die for.

Then they want the rest of us to
die for it, too.”