After Love

Sarah Teasdale

There is no magic any more,
We meet as other people do,
You work no miracle for me
Nor I for you.

You were the wind and I the sea—
There is no splendor any more,
I have grown listless as the pool
Beside the shore.

But though the pool is safe from storm
And from the tide has found surcease,
It grows more bitter than the sea,
For all its peace.

Divergences

Gottfried Benn
translated from the German by Michael Hofmann


One says: please no inner life,
manners by all means, but nothing affective,
that's no compensation
for the insufferable
difficulties of outward-directed expression—
those cerebralized
city-Styxes

when my little prince
pokes his chubby little legs through the bars of his cot
it melts my heart, it was like that with Otto Ernst,
and it's no different now

the contraries are not easy to reconcile
but when you survey the provinces
the inner life
has it by a neck.

The Poor

Roberto Sosa
translated from the Spanish by Spencer Reece

The poor are many
and so—
impossible to forget.

No doubt,
as day breaks,
they see the buildings
where they wish
they could live with their children.

They
can steady a coffin
of a constellation on their shoulders.
They can wreck
the air like furious birds,
blocking out the sun.

But not knowing these gifts,
they enter and exit through mirrors of blood,
walking and dying slowly.

And so,
one cannot forget them.

Strange Sea

Edith Södergran
translated from the Swedish by Averill Curdy

Implausible fish bloom in the depths,
mercurial flowers light up the coast;
I know red and yellow, the other colors, —

but the sea, det granna granna havet, that's the most dangerous
to look at.
What name is there for the color that arouses
this thirst, which says,
the saga can happen, even to you—