To You

(Circle Limit III Tessellation by M. C. Escher, 1898-1972,
Dutch artist)

It’s even possible to express love in surreal terms.

Kenneth Koch wrote poetry filled with much irony and sarcasm, some so absurd and humorous that one critic called him the “funniest serious poet we have.”

TO YOU

I love you as a sheriff searches for a walnut
That will solve a murder case unsolved for years
Because the murderer left it in the snow beside a window
Through which he saw her head, connecting with
Her shoulders by a neck, and laid a red
Roof in her heart. For this we live a thousand years;
For this we love, and we live because we love, we are not
Inside a bottle, thank goodness! I love you as a
Kid searches for a goat; I am crazier than shirttails
In the wind, when you’re near, a wind that blows from
The big blue sea, so shiny so deep and so unlike us;
I think I am bicycling across an Africa of green and white fields
Always, to be near you, even in my heart
When I’m awake, which swims, and also I believe that you
Are trustworthy as the sidewalk which leads me to
The place where I again think of you, a new
Harmony of thoughts! I love you as the sunlight leads the prow
Of a ship which sails
From Hartford to Miami, and I love you
Best at dawn, when even before I am awake the sun
Receives me in the questions which you always pose.

~ Kenneth Koch (1925-2002), American poet, playwright, and writer of short stories, renowned for teaching children and the elderly how to appreciate and write poetry

Absence

Each Friday we provide the link to the blogger who is hosting a celebration of poetry around the blogosphere. There you can find the links to the many other blogs that are posting poems (new and old), discussions of poems, and reviews of poetry books. It’s also a great way to explore the internet.

Enjoy the festivities!

The host this week is Anastasia Suen.

You can visit her here at Picture Book of the Day.


(Moorish tiles at the Alhambra in Andalusia, Spain; this
pattern in a tessellation of tiles is said to have inspired
the Dutch artist M. C. Escher)

Today’s poem is found in Poems of Arab Andalusia, an anthology of verses translated by Cola Franzen from the Spanish versions of poems from tenth- to thirteenth-century southern Spain.

The poems had been originally put together by the Andalusian scholar Ibn Sa’īd al-Maghribī in 1243. He collected poems “whose idea is more subtle than the West Wind, and whose language is more beautiful than a fair face.” The poets included African, Jewish, and Berber authors, all writing in Arabic.

The translation into Spanish was done by Emilio García Gómez, who discovered the Arabic manuscript in 1928 in Cairo, Egypt.

ABSENCE

Every night I scan
the heavens with my eyes
seeking the star
that you are contemplating.

I question travelers
from the four corners of the earth
hoping to meet one
who has breathed your fragrance.

When the wind blows
I make sure it blows in my face:
the breeze might bring me
news of you.

I wander over roads
without aim, without purpose.
Perhaps a song
will sound your name.

Secretly I study
every face I see
hoping against hope
to glimpse a trace of your beauty.

~ Abū Bakr al-Turtūshī (1059-1127), poet from Eastern Andalusia