سپنا آگے جاتا کیس / How could my dream journey forth? (Translation)

سپنا آگے جاتا کیس / How could my dream journey forth? (Translation)
by warisanwaar

چھوٹا سا اک گاؤں تھا جس میں
دیئے تھے کم اور بہت اندھیرا
بہت شجر تھے تھوڑے گھر تھے
جن کو تھا دوری نے گھیرا
اتنی بڑی تنہائی تھی جس میں
جاگتا رہتا تھا دل میرا
بہت قدیم فراق تھا جس میں
ایک مقرر حد سے آگے
سوچ نہ سکتا تھا دل میرا
ایسی صورت میں پھر دل کو
دھیان آتا کس خواب میں تیرا
راز جو حد سے باہر میں تھا
اپنا آپ دکھاتا کیسے
سپنے کی بھی حد تھی آخر
سپنا آگے جاتا کیسے
There is a quaint town, where
Were lesser lamps and darkness,
Many trees and houses some,
Covered by vast distances.

Lullabies

Lullabies
by Michael R. Burch

These are lullabies I have written over the years, as poems. Some of my poems have been set to music and thus have become actual songs and lullabies.

For a Ukrainian Child, with Butterflies
by Michael R. Burch

Where does the butterfly go ...
when lightning rails ...
when thunder howls ...
when hailstones scream ...
when winter scowls ...
when nights compound dark frosts with snow ...
where does the butterfly go?

Love Poems

Love Poems
by Michael R. Burch

These are love poems by Michael R. Burch. Some are poems about love in desert places where Bedouins have learned to do without. The poems include everything from heroic couplets, sonnets and villanelles, to free verse and haiku. 

Sonnet: Once (a confirmed bachelor recants)
by Michael R. Burch

for Beth

Once when her kisses were fire incarnate
and left in their imprint bright lipstick, and flame,
when her breath rose and fell over smoldering dunes,
leaving me listlessly sighing her name ...

Ono no Komachi translations

Ono no Komachi translations
by Michael R. Burch

Ono no Komachi translations

These are my modern English translations of the ancient Japanese poems of Ono no Komachi, who wrote tanka (also known as waka) and was renowned for the beauty of her verse as well as for her physical beauty. Komachi is best known today for her pensive, melancholic and erotic love poems. Her bio follows the poems.

If fields of autumn flowers
can shed their blossoms, shameless,
why can’t I also frolic here —
as fearless, wild and blameless?
—Ono no Komachi, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Two Songs From a Play

I

I saw a staring virgin stand
Where holy Dionysus died,
And tear the heart out of his side.
And lay the heart upon her hand
And bear that beating heart away;
Of Magnus Annus at the spring,
As though God's death were but a play.

Another Troy must rise and set,
Another lineage feed the crow,
Another Argo's painted prow
Drive to a flashier bauble yet.
The Roman Empire stood appalled:
It dropped the reins of peace and war
When that fierce virgin and her Star


Two Words

'God' is composed of letters three,
But if you put an 'l'
Before the last it seems to me
A synonym for Hell.
For all of envy, greed and hate
The human heart can hold
Respond unto the devil's bait
Of Gold.

When God created Gold to be
For our adorning fit,
I little think he dreamed that we
Would come to worship it.
But when you ruefully have scanned
The chronicles of Time,
You'll find that lucre lends a hand


Translation From the Gull Language

'Twas grav'd on the Stone of Destiny,
In letters four, and letters three;
And ne'er did the King of the Gulls go by
But those awful letters scar'd his eye;
For he knew that a Prophet Voice had said
"As long as those words by man were read,
The ancient race of the Gulls should ne'er
One hour of peace or plenty share."
But years and years successive flew
And the letters still more legible grew, --
At top, a T, an H, an E,
And underneath, D. E. B. T.


Some thought them Hebrew, -- such as Jews,


Trouvee

Oh, why should a hen
have been run over
on West 4th Street
in the middle of summer?

She was a white hen
--red-and-white now, of course.
How did she get there?
Where was she going?

Her wing feathers spread
flat, flat in the tar,
all dirtied, and thin
as tissue paper.

A pigeon, yes,
or an English sparrow,
might meet such a fate,
but not that poor fowl.

Just now I went back
to look again.
I hadn't dreamed it:
there is a hen


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