Short Poems

When I am grown to man's estate
I shall be very proud and great,
And tell the other girls and boys
Not to meddle with my toys.

Little Miss Muffet
Sat at a buffet
Willing the time away.
When there came a big cider
And sat down beside her . . .
They carried Miss Muffet away

Long, too long America,
Traveling roads all even and peaceful you learn'd from joys and prosperity only,
But now, ah now, to learn from crises of anguish, advancing, grappling with direst fate and recoiling not,
And now to conceive and show to the world what your children en-masse really are,
(For who except myself has yet conceiv'd what your children en-masse really are?)

Losing too is still ours; and even forgetting
still has a shape in the kingdom of transformation.
When something's let go of, it circles; and though we are
rarely the center
of the circle, it draws around us its unbroken, marvelous
curve.

Si he nacido de mi padre
Y mi padre de mi abuelo,
Y mi abuelo de su taita,
Que también era hijo y nieto.

BRUTE beast, at last you have it! Now we know
Truth's not a phrase, justice an idle show.
Your life ran red with murder, green with lust.
Blood has washed blood clean, and in the final dust
Your carrion will be purified. Yet, see,
Though your body perish, for your soul shall be
An immortality of infamy!

Below the pines I ask the boy
He says his master had gone to find herbs
He's somewhere on this mountain
But the clouds are too thick to know where

Like the beautiful bodies of those who died before growing old,
sadly shut away in sumptuous mausoleum,
roses by the head, jasmine at the feet -
so appear the longings that have passed
without being satisfied, not one of the granted
a single night of pleasure, or one of its radiant mornings.

Long conversations
beside blooming irises –
joys of life on the road

Set are the Pleiades; the Moon is down
And midnight dark on high.
The hours, the hours, drift by,
And here I lie,
Alone