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Abstract: Nine poems by six authors, published in various volumes of Dialogue. Notes: The following poems are combined here in one posting, for ease of filing. See also a poem by Sheila Banani. See also list of dialogue articles or image scans. |
Poetry from dialogue magazine
by Gretchen Sousa, L. B. Chase, Ahmad Shamlu, and Susan Pershing
published in dialogue1986-1988
By Sheyda
Dialogue 1986, Vol. 1, No. 1, p. 9
| Tragedy is not when the sky falls when the day is done and there is no love when the sun won’t set I look at children and I weep They are just children and there is too much in this universe not to weep My tears are flames I am going, I am going I am in the cathedral I am at dusk I am spilling at dawn I am burnt now and beauty comes And it is molten and it is soft and it is His The universe is intimate beyond truth |
By Sheyda
Dialogue 1986, Vol. 1, No. 3, p. 15
| (for Vahid) These Indo-European people, all together, weaving myths. In the Caucuses on a plain, east of the Caspian on the shore, moving back and forth, forth and back to the drum of the seasons, to cowbells and the bleating of sheep. Who are these people talking to each other, making their sounds only together, who? One day in their cities, huge cities with so many swirling figures, with axles, electrons. One day as you look are they gone? The Indo-Europeans. The cities rise in collective conquest, pointing might at the sky, and everything is silent but the wind and all those buildings and the rain. A hubcap singly clabbers like a dying top. You look up from a window. You look up, you see me, but you can not. I vanish. I am gone like the others, or am present with them (We are together, I mean). You are afraid. All these people who don’t know one another, appearing and disappearing together. We have broken our sounds in splinters. You look up. It is raining. You look up, it is not. The buildings look up, they never disappear, pointing their massive fingers to the sun. I look up. A womb is opening with the day. I look up. Blue dirt is filling up the last crack of yellow in our grave. The blue dirt makes the tiny thuds of twilight, the plinks of history, the dark blue sounds of the soul, the tinkling of anklebells on cowherds. A people conceived in a lump of blueness. And there are peoples on the edge of darkness, other people, other sounds. Everywhere there are peoples and we are disappearing, all of us, together, and I am you are afraid. Flotsam, meaning, petals, slivers, sand, sounds, in a turbid rapids rushing toward the mouth: We have but words to bargain for our bones. |
By L.B. Chase
Dialogue 1986, Vol. 1, No. 3, p. 27
| I get my shoe shined in a train station, watch the sets of lights pass through each other: helmeted fluorescence slanting sunrays rocketing tobacco lights and the sound not to mention voices but the sound of many shoes’ fabrics, steps more unique than sifting snowflakes, if I close my eyes it could be the ticking of ten-thousand watches; I listen to feet sweeping around the faces grouping and parting with genetic efficiency and my niece’s questions about older people: being alone together, when they kiss, she asks: when their eyes close what are they thinking about? why do they close their eyes? The newspaper leaves its greatest trace on my fingers, the printer’s ink must be very cheap, she says. In the train station I give an occasional nod a look, indicate this or that to my other relations. I feel like a polishing cloth, though given a choice I would rather be a train, but there is no difference: I pick up the questions I drop off the answers; my brother’s daughter is listening for steps that will come for her from that forest of cranking legs, “given a change of scene,” she says: “I would rather be a constellation, watch the starships passing through.” |
By Aḥmad Shamlu
Translated by Naim Nabili and Frank Lewis
Dialogue 1987, Vol. 1, No 4, p. 42
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Beyond the borders of your body, I love you. Give me the mirrors and the yearning moths, the light and the wine. Give me the tall sky and the hanging bow of the bridge, the birds and the rainbow. Play that last melody in the same mode once again. *** Beyond the borders of my body I love you. In that far-off distance where the ability of limbs comes to an end and the flame and the fervor of heartbeats and desires completely subsides and all meaning abandons the shell of words just as a soul does the body at the end of a journey leaving it to the onslaught of the vultures of end. *** Beyond the limits of love I love you Beyond veils and color Beyond the limits of our bodies promise to meet me. |
By Susan Pershing
Dialogue 1987, Vol. 1, No 4, p. 43
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I suddenly tear myself away from the horde of Christmas shoppers and bolt into the street like some angry, hassled mare and I can hear your footsteps coming after me and I feel frightened, terrified that you'll catch me and equally terrified that you won't. You begin to yell, “Hey, what's the matter with you?!” And I keep lunging forward, a chameleon of emotion. I want to stop in front of the dancing animals, all prances and smiles, and begin my harangue on how you never take me seriously but my feet thrust onward as if they had a mind of their own. What matters are my long, striding legs and the cool, refreshing snow upon my face. |
By Gretchen Sousa
Dialogue 1987, Vol. 2, No. 1, p. 35
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Thin as a distant kite in a gathering sky, my father is dying though his heart beats on as if it had all day, as if no one had mentioned the fact. His eyes are wide with the knowledge because already he has lost his moorings which dangle and trail about him like fragile arms and hands that have no body to caress. His eyes drown in the unfamiliar landscape of the present, unable to decipher what has gone before or what will come, as isolated in the present moment as a fish on the end of a spear. Having loosed all we use to bind us to the earth: the ears, the eyes, the grasping hands, he cracks his jokes like gleeful knuckles forgetting to complain. My father tiptoes now as if he had no right to put his foot down. When we go through the hall at night I take his arm, a sparrow’s folded wing; he walks solemnly as down an aisle for giving me away. It’s you I must give away, Dad, whose hold, so tenuous— a silken thread that, with a small tug snaps and you, with outstretched arms soar out of sight. |
By Gretchen Sousa
Dialogue 1987, Vol. 2, No. 1, p. 35
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Some say the sickness is in things, progeny of machines: cars, television sets, computer games; the botany of ersatz lives that die and never relax into dust. Or the poisonous excrement of concrete plants backed up in ocean and earth that seeps into graves, bones and blood. The lost sanctity of winding roads, straightened and paved. The sybaritic age, salt sowing, glissading from change to change. Januarys have never been so fragile. Some mornings I awaken with dread, the thud of tires in my stomach as if I had driven too fast in my dream and run over a child. Those irreparable things we do in the day that deepen our nights. One day I understand why some people cup their lives in their hands and blow them out, unable to bear the shadows cast on the stairs they climb. |
By Bruce Wells
Dialogue 1988, Vol. 2, Nos. 2 & 3, p. 33
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Will every artist see!
For to every eye revealed Is perfect artistry In a thousand silver slivers Piercing a mountain canvas At evening sunburst. A fashioner! Forgiver! Deliverer! — of rain That touches children’s tongues, You soothe dry eyes And sting uplifted palms. Praise! The maze will thrive And joy will tumble down The steep inclines And roar across the valleys. And the mountain gold Will yield to tender green again. |
By Sheyda
Dialogue 1988, Vol. 2, Nos. 2 & 3, p. 41
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O Descartes! Pineapple equals God with its palm tree crown and spiny diamond robe. Split open, little beadlets arc out sparkling and juice drenches your hands. It glistens there on the cutting board like wet fire on the ocean just before sunset. You are Zeus: swallow the pale nectar. The little strands untie like honeysuckle on your tongue. Pomegranates with their corpuscle lodes pouring rubies from their vines, Papaya and its sexual seeds its seductive orange and red as you open it, Jackfruit like mango pumpkins dripping from your chin on the porch of a hut just as water will when the monsoons come, Cherries heavy with scarlet intoxication in a skyblue bowl on the wheat sands slowly warming to the dawn on the Baie des Anges. O Descartes! your math has no proofs like this for God. |
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