translated by Lyn Coffin, with Leda Pugh The earth opened wide. Rain, a doctor, dripped remedies. All night, moving down the mountainsides were molten seas. You, my fevered country, now must spend your last moments caught in delirium’s coil— peacefully, tenderly, you ask at the end: Where’s the boil? 2 My soul, your wind died…
translated by Clare Cavanagh When he described the park, the path, sick fires glowed in his cooling eyes, his voice grew stronger and his hands tried to be what they once were, when deft squirrels trustingly took sugar from them. Now I’m here. And everything is as he’d remembered: the yellow forsythia, the poplars’ shady…
I was worn out, lost, and sixteen in China at 6 p.m., everyone suddenly in a purchasing frenzy, when he stopped me with a smile that just turned me upside down: gold caps on one side, gaps on the other. I could tell he was more human than most people, or more kind. He was…
As the work of Rosanna Warren reminds us, to be a poet is to be a writer of poems. The forces of abstraction that threaten always to turn real individual artworks into mere manifestations of moods or (worse) theories or (worst of all) institutions—these forces go limp before poems so brilliantly made. The sculptures are…
Strange arachnid, distant cousin of deer ticks and potato bugs, those armored pellets that live between bark and wood, stone and dirt. Unlike them you wash up hapless on beaches more a bowl than a shoe. You come in squads after mating in the waters of your birth, dragging the useless scabbard of your tail….
Broken tulip, 17th-century Holland The plain white petal between her finger and thumb belled into a sail pregnant with nothing it could bear, then split, dark seamed, its length. A whole fleet foundered in the field around her: bands of white tulips, red and yellow, diluted to shadow beneath a setting moon splinted against the…
But as we rose from the café table in Trastevere who could not help but notice that it was as beautiful a day as could be imagined in Rome: an early October afternoon in mid-July. There’s little you can’t say against Rome, from the infernal roar to the eternal siestas. There are portents: the coppery-skinned…
Zacharis Award Ploughshares is pleased to present Thomas Sayers Ellis with the sixteenth annual John C. Zacharis First Book Award for his collection of poems, The Maverick Room (Graywolf, 2005). The $1,500 award, which is named after Emerson College’s former president, honors the best debut book by a Ploughshares writer, alternating annually between poetry and…
In the darkness I can see every line of your face. As if you are in my womb. Your fingers feel for its entrance and I am your mother, imagining what you will look like when you are born. When I climb after you into the freshly laundered white duvet, and look at your face…
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