The following two poems are ones I've enjoyed for a while. They are not related to anything in particular going on in my life right now, but I felt like sharing.
She said:
Suitcases
Piled high in a corner of a second-hand store
in Toronto: of course,
it's an immigrant country. Sometimes
all you can take is what you can carry
when you run: a photo, some clothes,
and the useless dead-weight
of your mother tongue.
One was repaired
with electrician's tape—a trade
was all a man needed. A girl,
well, a girl could get married. Indeed
each case opened like an invitation:
the shell-pink lining, the knicker—
like pockets you hook back
with a finger to look
for the little linked keys.
I remember how each held a wraith
of stale air, and how the assistant seemed
taken aback by my accent;
by then, though, I was headed for home,
bored, and already pregnant.
Kathleen Jamie
He said:
Pregnant you sit, and pale,
How you have changed, poor girl.
Plucking at your dress, you sit
And you want to go on weeping, weeping. . .
What makes you women spoil us
And, falling, give us your lips,
Then run beyond the platforms,
Outstripped by speeding trains? . .
How hard you tried to keep up
With the blurring carriage windows. . .
Trains rattle by, express and mail,
Trains to Khabarovsk and elsewhere. . .
From Moscow all the way
To Ashkabad, like numb idols,
Women stand as if turned to stone,
Their bellies proffered to the moon.
And swinging into the light,
In the unpeopled life of the night—
How well the moon, with her
Big belly, understands them.
Andrey Voznesensky
