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Akhmatova, Anna | Arabian Nights | Arp, Jean Hans | Attar | Atwood, Margaret | Baba Tahir Oryan of Hamadan | Baudelaire, Charles | Behramoglu, Ataol | Blake, William | Brecht, Bertolt | Breton, André | Byron, Gordon George (Lord) | Carroll, Lewis | C'hang Ling, Wan | Chen, Yuan | Clough, Arthur Hugh | Coleridge, Samuel Taylor | Confucius | Cosbuc, George | Cummings, Edward Estlin | Dario, Ruben | De Cleyre, Voltairine | De Vere, Aubrey | Dickinson, Emily | Donne, John | Eluard, Paul | Emerson, Ralph Waldo | Emre, Yunus | Faiz, Faiz Ahmed | Farrokhzad, Forough | Ferdowsi | Gay, John | Gibran, Khalil | Ginsberg, Allen | Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von | Hafiz | Herrick, Robert | Hikmet, Nazim | Homer | Hughes, Langston | Hung, Han | Jamal, Mo | Jones, LeRoi | Keats, John | Kipling, Rudyard | Kushrau, Amir | Lawson, Henry | Lennon, John | Levertov, Denise | Lindsay, Vachel | Mayakovsky, Vladimir | Milligan, Spike | Mistral, Gabriela | Morrisson, Jim | Neruda, Pablo | O'Shaughnessy, Arthur | Parker, Dorothy | Paterson, Andrew Barton "Banjo" | Paz, Octavio | Plath, Sylvia | Poe, Edgar Allen | Pope, Alexander | Rilke, Rainer Maria | Rumi, Djalal-ud-Din | Saales, Akhavan | Scott, F.R. | Sepehri, Sohrab | Shakespeare, William | Shamlu, Ahmad | Shelley, Percy Bysshe | Sheridan, Richard B. | Tennyson, Alfred | Thomas, Dylan | Turold | Veli Kanik, Ohran | Whitman, Walt | Wilde, Oscar | Williams, William Carlos | Wordsworth, William | Yeats, William Butler | Yushij, Nima
Hikmet, Nazim
The blue-eyed giant, the miniature woman and the honeysuckle
He was a blue-eyed giant,
He loved a miniature woman.
The woman's dream was of a miniature house
with a garden where honeysuckle grows
in a riot of colours
that sort of house.
The giant loved like a giant,
and his hands were used to such big things
that the giant could not
make the building,
could not knock on the door
of the garden where the honeysuckle grows
in a riot of colours
at that house.
He was a blue-eyed giant,
He loved a miniature woman,
a mini miniature woman.
The woman was hungry for comfort
and tired of the giant's long strides.
And bye bye off she went to the embraces of a rich dwarf
with a garden where the honeysuckle grows
in a riot of colours
that sort of house.
Now the blue-eyed giant realizes,
a giant isn't even a graveyard for love:
in the garden where the honeysuckle grows
in a riot of colours
that sort of house...
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Today is Sunday
Today is Sunday.
For the first time they took me out into the sun today.
And for the first time in my life I was aghast
that the sky is so far away
and so blue
and so vast
I stood there without a motion.
Then I sat on the ground with respectful devotion
leaning against the white wall.
Who cares about the waves with which I yearn to roll
Or about strife or freedom or my wife right now.
The soil, the sun and me...
I feel joyful and how.
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On Living
I
Living is no laughing matter:
you must live with great seriousness
like a squirrel, for example-
I mean without looking for something beyond and above living,
I mean living must be your whole occupation.
Living is no laughing matter:
you must take it seriously,
so much so and to such a degree
that, for example, your hands tied behind your back,
your back to the wall,
or else in a laboratory
in your white coat and safety glasses,
you can die for people-
even for people whose faces you've never seen,
even though you know living
is the most real, the most beautiful thing.
I mean, you must take living so seriously
that even at seventy, for example, you'll plant olive trees-
and not for your children, either,
but because although you fear death you don't believe it,
because living, I mean, weighs heavier.
II
Let's say you're seriously ill, need surgery -
which is to say we might not get
from the white table.
Even though it's impossible not to feel sad
about going a little too soon,
we'll still laugh at the jokes being told,
we'll look out the window to see it's raining,
or still wait anxiously
for the latest newscast ...
Let's say we're at the front-
for something worth fighting for, say.
There, in the first offensive, on that very day,
we might fall on our face, dead.
We'll know this with a curious anger,
but we'll still worry ourselves to death
about the outcome of the war, which could last years.
Let's say we're in prison
and close to fifty,
and we have eighteen more years, say,
before the iron doors will open.
We'll still live with the outside,
with its people and animals, struggle and wind-
I mean with the outside beyond the walls.
I mean, however and wherever we are,
we must live as if we will never die.
III
This earth will grow cold,
a star among stars
and one of the smallest,
a gilded mote on blue velvet-
I mean this, our great earth.
This earth will grow cold one day,
not like a block of ice
or a dead cloud even
but like an empty walnut it will roll along
in pitch-black space ...
You must grieve for this right now
-you have to feel this sorrow now-
for the world must be loved this much
if you're going to say ``I lived'' ...
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