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ARTS AND CULTURE

Enemy volcanoes

  • 25 May 2010

Translation, half or complete English, by comparison, seems reticent Or in our logic, only half-cooked For when we describe a damning situation As hot fire and deep water they are content enough to admit To deep waters; similarly, a sea change is only partly what a sea And mulbery field change means if it really means Anything. Hence a sea of people is what A mountain and sea of people could be reduced to Although someone in the 1940s did the reductionist trick Of turning a remark by someone born in 551 BC into this Like-English brevity: Not know death, how know life? Most of the times when shadows are caught in one Wind is lost in another which might have been otherwise arrested And if one is equipped with a glib tongue The other retaliates with that and something else: an oily mouth While the historically short one understates The tall one exaggerates, matching urgency With wind wind fire fire

Volcanoes Volcanoes are real They are enemies They revel in being Hated and in resenting

Some volcanoes are dead bigtime Be careful: Don't go near them The dead volcanoes are not dead, not just dead, not yet They spit

Others are still alive, jealous of each Other, happily unhappy, ready to kill Always ready to burst, the quiet ones only Quiet till the use-by date screwed in their hearts

The dead volcanoes never die The live ones hardly live Their beauty is their eruption Its with its own death/life

Putting volcanoes in this anthology I have a sense they are erupting again Each taking their time These poets, this me

Oil One of the keywords that remains relevant to this day, out of their seven even though one was fictively described as oleaginous as if it were a bad thing and another one ends up leaving the premises having enough of it walls throughout the world are still covered daily if the collector is not powerful enough to gather it all. this doesn't sound like poetry nor is it meant to be but given his meals are well-oiled his words often appear so, too. off lebanon, a beached shuttle crab in oil is gazing at the world out of its beady eyes whose balls are the only thing unspoiled by the world's need for well-oiled meals. it is said that when hardened paintings done in oils are as hard as steel. the writer once gave one a touch and found the truth to be true. good oil is untranslatable, not even directly nor is add oil. most of the times, though, translators are not necessary people get by heroically, with oil. the sea is now one meter taller because of the overturned desire. still,

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