#averno

5.

It is true that there is not enough beauty in the world.

It is also true that I am not competent to restore it.

Neither is there candor, and here I may be of some use.

I am

at work, though I am silent.

The bland

misery of the world

bounds us on either side, an alley

lined with trees; we are

companions here, not speaking,

each with his own thoughts;

behind the trees, iron

gates of the private houses,

the shuttered rooms

somehow deserted, abandoned,

as though it were the artist’s

duty to create

hope, but out of what? what?

the word itself

false, a device to refute

perception — At the intersection,

ornamental lights of the season.

I was young here. Riding

the subway with my small book

as though to defend myself against

the same world:

you are not alone,

the poem said,

in the dark tunnel.

—Louise Glück, from “October”, in Averno

Adonis, from Selected Poems; “Celebrating Al-Ma'ari: II. Days” (tr. Khaled Mattawa)

Adonis, from Selected Poems; “A Piece of Bahlul’s Sun” (tr. Khaled Mattawa)

Alejandra Pizarnik,tr. by Yvette Siegert, “Extracting the Stone of Madness”, Extracting the Stone of Madness: Poems 1962 - 1972

John Keats, from Ode to a Nightingale

George Sand (Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin) in her letter to Gustave Flaubert dated 27 June 1870, featured in The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert letters

Louise Glück, from Averno; “October”

All night long I hear the call of death, all night long I hear the song of death down by the river, all night long I hear the voice of death calling out to me.

Alejandra Pizarnik,tr. by Yvette Siegert, “The Dream of Death, or the Site of the Poetical Bodies”, Extracting the Stone of Madness: Poems 1962 - 1972

Artworks by kotartist