Amir Or

Reflection

These are reflections
that became frozen forever.
This is the mirror room of memory:

A child in the darkness plays hide and seek with shadows
sinks into the secret places of the stairs
turns into shadow.

A child in the darkness

separates from his image, dreams his face inwards.

In a mirror of darkness he reveals light—
and sees.

Camera Obscura

Darkness doesn’t distinguish between things
doesn’t recognize you
except by your voice wandering among the echoes;
by the sour smell of your fear, by your desire
to rip your image out of the darkness
to rip a shadow for yourself out of the shadows.

Darkness is a womb without walls—
there’s only myself inside myself.
in the dark locked room a child learns
to listen, touch, be
pulse and skin.
I Look Through the Monkeys’ Eyes

I look through the monkeys’ eyes
as they play with my skull in the treetops.
I’m lifted with the eagle as he flies
because my entrails are in his;
in the belly of the earth
I crawl with worms
who ate my eyes out of their sockets;
I am green, I grow in the grass
that my rotting flesh makes rich.

O my body
how you have grown!

I Look Through the Monkeys’ Eyes

I look through the monkeys’ eyes
as they play with my skull in the treetops.
I’m lifted with the eagle as he flies
because my entrails are in his;
in the belly of the earth
I crawl with worms
who ate my eyes out of their sockets;
I am green, I grow in the grass
that my rotting flesh makes rich.

O my body

how you have grown!

Translated from the Hebrew by Helena Berg and Peter Cole.

Israel




Sungrye Han

Pair of Snakes

Mutual queues are being eaten
As the sun goes down
It is the moment when the head moves backwards
And slowly they eat each other by the tails
Behind the impulse left deep by instinct
Unconscious latch unlocked
How hypnotized they were from each other
They proceed at the same rate
And the pace increases as they become shorter
They swallow symbols, notions of satiety
The pair of snakes gets shorter and shorter
Gradually towards the end
They suck each other’s scarlet blood
They complete in a large circle
In pairs they take each other’s bodies for eternity
A red sun
It rushes into the sea right now.

The Planet Conceiving a Few Lies

Is the devil a man who deceive someone
With a little bit of truth that a great untruth combined?
A word that is born a moment ago is lighter than a dandelion
A word that is buried waits her own resurrection on the wind path
A word that is missing threw herself a long ago

The spring has come like investigating something, but it is not the real one.
A noon that sun is blazing like midsummer
Full bloom of roses take season’s false pulse
As they conceive a smell of death
In the heart of the planet,
Swirling frenzied blood that is gang-raped, comes across straits
The womb of the planet
We don’t need any sonogram
A chunk labeled as an embryo
And a boundary of water
From fish, amphibian, reptile to mammal
That evolutionary seal
That false package of gene
Today, a gunfire bursts somewhere on the planet again
I can hear the heartbeat of the planet
An Embryo born today remembers the sound

Dream is the Word of My Own Error

Dream is the word of my own error
As flowers blooming
In the backyard of an fallen dynasty
Seem clearer in their wretchedness,
The place I have never been
Is always full of primitive colors
It's a total natural colors cinemascope
From the memory of a kaleidoscope

The reason why the baobab put her root
On her heads with her branches
Is that she dreams all day and all night
It's because they reach their cells of dream
Towards the air
No, it's not
It's their fault that they only dream of the sky
Without taking her roots into the ground
The dream of seeping souls in a language

Though I only lost his shadow
His whole life always unfolds in my dreams
Every night I read his autobiography
Which waves like a panorama

I see the sea
I look at the sky and look at the universe
I see a fugitive from this life
Through the door named a dream

As a little pain comes in and pushes the big pain away,
As a dirty bacteria comes in and prevents a big sickness,
Dream is a vaccination
It's a theater showing a preview of life

The Angle of a Blind Spot

The faded sunlight shines through the leaves
Underneath the tree, the leaves turn into a navy blue canvas
A hazy curtain hung
At the evening when red and black are blended
The hour of the devil, neither day nor night
Spiders are coming down low
A bird flies low
Lives falling down from the air

Under the influence of that power,
The heaven comes to the earth
The boundary between the earth and the sky is erased
Now is the time to forget what we said during the day
At the end of the earth's axis
Where the blood of day and night is blended
A dream that hasn't cooled down is being buried
The sunset drags its feet carefully
Not to spill over the blood in a basket
A person also flows holding up their lives in critical condition

I came to see a walking tree of mirage
Created by the yearning for the sunshine, but...
A tree that has its own feet
A tree that has its root on its body
To move along to get nutrients
Suddenly, a cluster of trees looks like a group of people
A death spot
Appearing on the skin immediately after death
I wonder if the spot has buried lives in it
A moment
When things look dimly
At the evening neither day nor night,
The angle of a blind spot
That cannot distinguish this world or afterlife


Translated from the Korean by Jaehyung Park

South Korea


Maria Mistrioti

Here We Sail In...

‘’Here we sail in …’’ –Odyssey I, ver. 142
I tried
not to depict only the memories
But every time
I knew almost from the beginning
the result

***

I am writing to you
with rather simple words
and I would like to talk to you
about those
who travel through enigmas
through smokes of very bitter seas
who respond in the nights
to the crying of the mermaid
and search for the other side of things

***

I talk to you
about those
who have no more return
about those
who we can no more hope for
You know
even if you ask me why I am crying

***

Some day
they will talk about us
The cyclamens the ones you picked up
to decorate my black dress
The springs
that you painted in their mirrors
our internal pictures
Some day
they will talk about us
all those who make the pain to shine
while they bleed
from the weight of snow


Translated from the Greek by the poet

Greece