By Jean Follain ( French Minimalist poet) Translated by Heather McHugh
Insects and fish move from the shade to the light the fruit hangs still on the tree brushed by the fine wing of a flamboyant bird then a dull one. The blind man hardly thinks of his missing eyes in the garden of wine-red flowers. Suddenly the sun in the drawing room lights a large painting that shows rioters surging wildly into sight.
A delicate and layered poem, “The Beautiful Day” uses serene imagery and subtle shifts in tone to reflect on how easily tranquility can be shadowed by unseen violence or remembered suffering. It unfolds with a deep awareness of contrast—between serenity and disturbance, the visible and the hidden, nature and human turmoil. It’s a meditation on the fragility of peace and the haunting presence of what lies beyond the beautiful moment.
By moving from a garden’s quiet details to a painting of rioters lit up indoors, the poem subtly asks us about what we see, what we miss, and how sudden revelations (of violence, of reality) change the character of a peaceful day. It’s a poem about beauty and disturbance, perception and ignorance, outer calm and inner turmoil.
Heather McHugh in her introduction says the following about the poem:
“And in “The Beautiful Day,” the aristocratic idleness of the garden (appearing for all the world—*brushed,” posed—like the subject of a more romantic art) is disturbed by the image of the insurgent mob in a living-room painting. Which is more alive, more real? We feel we know. We know we feel. Still, the man in the garden is blind. The seer is present in these poems not as the fashionably poetic first person but rather as the subverted designer of the seen. We, the readers, have a place here too. Is it we who lull, senseless, in the garden of the decorative, blind to the blood in the living room? The poem s both subject and object here.”
Source : D’Apres Tout: Poems by Jean Follain. Image created using AI)
Halina Poświatowska (Polish Lyric poet) Translated by Maya Peretz
if you die I won’t put on a lilac dress won’t buy colored wreaths with whispering wind in the ribbons none of that none
the hearse will come — will comethe hearse will go — will go I’ll stand at the window — I’ll look wave my hand flutter my handkerchief bid farewell alone in that window
and in summer in crazy May I will lie down on the grass warm grass and with my hands will touch your hair and with my lips will touch a bee’s pelt prickly and beautiful like your smile like dusk
later it will be silver — golden perhaps golden and only red for that dusk that wind which whispers love into grasses stubbornly whispers love will not allow me to rise and go so simply to my cursed deserted house
(From : Indeed I love… : Selected Poems of Halina Poświatowska)
Poświatowska is famous for her lyrical poetry, and for her intellectual, passionate yet unsentimental poetry on the themes of death, love, existence, famous historical personages, especially women, as well as her mordant treatment of life, living, being, bees, cats and the sensual qualities of loving, grieving and desiring. (Wiki). Sadly, she died at the age of 32.
This poem is a quietly devastating meditation on grief, love, memory, and the raw, unresolved emotions that accompany loss. In a style that is both intimate and elusive, she rewrites the rituals of mourning into something more personal, elemental, and sensual.
The tone is restrained and almost dispassionate at first — “if you die / I won’t put on a lilac dress” — rejecting traditional mourning practices and ceremonial grief. But under the surface, this emotional flatness conceals a profound depth of love and vulnerability. The voice is solitary, meditative, and deeply personal — as if the speaker is speaking not to us, but directly to the beloved (possibly already lost).
The poem is built in two parts: the first coolly dismisses outward mourning rituals; the second opens into a lyrical outpouring of natural imagery that becomes the speaker’s private language of grief. Rather than the expected flowers and ribbons — “colored wreaths / with whispering wind in the ribbons” — she offers a stark image of detachment: standing alone at the window, waving a handkerchief. But then, in the second half, she transforms grief into a tactile communion with nature:
“I will lie down on the grass / warm grass / and with my hands will touch your hair / and with my lips will touch a bee’s pelt”
Here, Poświatowska fuses the sensory world — grass, bees, hair, wind — with the emotional and metaphysical. The bee’s pelt, “prickly and beautiful,” becomes a metaphor for the beloved’s smile, for the sting and sweetness of memory. The dusk, golden and red, echoes the complexity of letting go — a moment suspended between light and darkness.The final lines resist closure. Even the wind becomes an accomplice, “whispers love into grasses / stubbornly whispers love.” This persistent whisper of love paralyzes the speaker — she cannot “rise and go / so simply.”
Like John Donne, Poświatowska offers a deeply sensual and metaphysical approach to mourning, where nature becomes both witness and medium of love and grief. KEEP IN MIND is a tender rebellion against formal rituals, and a haunting portrait of loss — not as an ending, but as a transformation of love into something eternal, diffused into the elements.
Table by EDIP CANSEVER (Turkish Poet) translated by Julia Clare Tillinghast and Richard Tillinghast
A man filled with the gladness of living Put his keys on the table, Put flowers in a copper bowl there. He put his eggs and milk on the table. He put there the light that came in through the window, Sound of a bicycle, sound of a spinning wheel. The softness of weather and bread he put there. On the table the man put Things that happened in his mind. What he wanted to do in life, He put that there. Those he loved, those he didn’t love, The man put them on the table too. Three times three make nine: The man put nine on the table. He was next to the window next to the sky; He reached out and placed on the table endlessness. So many days he had wanted to drink a beer! He put on the table the pouring of that beer. He placed there his sleep and his wakefulness; His hunger and his fullness he put there. Now that’s what I call a table! It didn’t complain at all about the load. It wobbled once or twice, then stood firm. The man kept piling things on.
From Dirty August: Poems by Edip Cansever, translated by Julia Clare Tillinghast and Richard Tillinghast Jersey City, NJ: Talisman House, 2009
This fascinating poem is a poetic listing — a catalogue of the self. The act of putting things on the table becomes a ritual of unburdening, of both confession and celebration. It starts with piling up of essentials that brought joy to the poet’s life. The table soon becomes a microcosm of a life — joys, regrets, hunger, memory, love, rejection, longing — all coexist. I believe everyone has such a table.
Edip Cansever’s poem “Table” is a deeply evocative and symbolic celebration of life, memory, and the human experience — all unfolding on a simple, unassuming piece of furniture: a table. With deceptive simplicity and a meditative rhythm, Cansever turns a household object into a repository of emotion, desire, thought, and even the metaphysical.
The poem uses free verse, lending it a conversational tone, almost like a stream of consciousness. The repetitive phrase “he put” creates a rhythm and builds a cumulative effect — each object placed on the table adding to the complexity of the speaker’s inner and outer worlds. The tone is reflective, sometimes playful, but increasingly profound as abstract ideas begin to mingle with physical things. There’s a quiet reverence toward the ordinary, transforming the mundane into something sacred.
Cansever begins with concrete, everyday items:“Put his keys on the table, / Put flowers in a copper bowl there.” As the poem progresses, he layers sensory perceptions (“light,” “sound”), then moves into the intangible:“Things that happened in his mind… / What he wanted to do in life.” Eventually, the poet arrives at the cosmic — placing “endlessness” itself on the table. This evolution from the simple to the sublime echoes human consciousness and our natural tendency to attach meaning to the ordinary.
Edip Cansever’s “Table” is a meditative marvel — a still life that moves. The poem does not preach or dramatize but simply places before us the quiet abundance of living. In its simplicity lies its profundity. The final image — of the table, firm despite its load — becomes a poetic monument to human resilience, memory, and the art of noticing. This is a poem that doesn’t ask to be analysed so much as inhabited, much like the table itself — inviting us to place our own “pouring of beer,” our “softness of bread,” and our “endlessness” on it, and see how it holds.
THE POEM I CAN’T YET NAME By Nguyen Phan Que Mai (Vietnamese Poet) Translated by Bruce Weigl (American Poet)
My hands lift high a bowl of rice, the seeds harvested in the field where my grandmother was laid to rest. Each rice seed tastes sweet as the sound of lullaby from the grandmother I never knew. I imagine her soft face as they laid her down into the earth, her clothes battered, her skin stuck to her bones; in the Great Hunger of 1945*, my village was starved for graves to bury all the dead. Nobody could find my grandmother’s grave, so my father tasted bitter rice for sixty-five years.
After sixty-five years of searching, spirits of my ancestors led my father and me to my grandmother’s grave. I heard my father call “Mum,” for the first time; the rice field behind his back trembled.
My feet clung to the mud. I listened in the burning incense how my grandmother’s soul spread, joining the earth, taking root in the field, where she quietly sang lullabies, calling the rice plants to blossom.
Lifting the bowl of rice in my hands, I count every seed, each one glistening with the sweat of my ancestors, their backs bent in the rice fields, the fragrance of my grandmother’s lullaby alive on each one.
* The Vietnamese Famine of 1945 occurred in northern Vietnam from October 1944 to May 1945, during the Japanese occupation of French Indochina in World War II. Between 400,000 and 2 million people are estimated to have starved to death during this time.
Born into the Vietnam War in 1973, Nguyen Phan Que Mai grew up witnessing the war’s devastation and its aftermath. She worked as a street vendor and rice farmer before winning a scholarship to attend university in Australia. Upon her return to Vietnam, Que Mai contributed to the sustainable development of her homeland via her work with local and international organizations including UN agencies. She is the author of eight books of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction in Vietnamese.
Her poems are fiercely loyal to the sentiments they gracefully express, which is what we mean when we talk about honesty in poetry. Ms. Nguyen is never hesitant to take on grand ideas, and never hesitant to rely on a sometimes raw and direct talk in order to expose the phenomena of our lives. She is a poet of a Vietnamese version of romanticism, in which she finds her subjects among the so-called ordinary lives of so-called ordinary people, and she celebrates not the accomplishments of kings or emperors, but of regular Vietnamese citizens, like the grandma in the poem, who have struggled to stay alive, feed their families, and find their way back home after long, war-inflicted years of exile and despair. Hers is a poetry that instructs us on how to live more fully in the world, and reaffirms the power of clear-headed and direct poetry to transform even our darkest hours into deeply abiding lessons on the complexities of
Nguyen Phan Que Mai’s “The Poem I Can’t Yet Name” is a tender and elegiac tribute to ancestry, memory, survival, and the sacredness of daily life. Rooted in personal and national history, this poem weaves together the trauma of war and famine with the resilience of generational love — especially the enduring presence of a grandmother the poet never met.
The tone is gentle, reverent, and quietly grieving, but never sentimental. It moves with the steady rhythm of ritual — of lifting rice, burning incense, bowing to memory. There is deep emotion in the poet’s voice, but it is controlled, restrained — shaped by respect and cultural humility. Rice is central to the poem — not just as food, but as symbol. Each grain is rich with meaning: “Each rice seed tastes sweet as the sound of lullaby / from the grandmother I never knew.” Here, rice becomes a carrier of memory and maternal affection. It replaces the lost lullabies with nourishment. It is the body of the land and the body of the grandmother, feeding generations forward.
In the final lines, the speaker reflects: “each one glistening with the sweat of my ancestors… the fragrance of my grandmother’s lullaby alive on each one.” This elevates rice to a sacred, spiritual substance — a form of continuity, presence, and song. The act of eating rice becomes an act of remembrance and reverence.
As mentioned earlier the poem references a real and devastating historical event — the Vietnamese famine of 1945, in which over a million people died. The line: “my village / was starved for graves to bury all the dead.” is harrowing in its simplicity. The horror is not dramatized — it’s told with quiet devastation, making it all the more powerful. This sets the foundation for a deeply personal loss: the grandmother’s grave was lost amid mass death, and the father grew up without closure, tasting “bitter rice for sixty-five years.”
The poem builds toward the discovery of the grandmother’s resting place: “spirits of my ancestors led my father and me / to my grandmother’s grave.” There’s a spiritual dimension here — not mystical in a fantastical way, but deeply rooted in Vietnamese ancestral belief and rural sensibility. The land holds memory. Spirits guide the living. “I heard my father call ‘Mum,’ for the first time.” This is a moment of catharsis — the release of a son’s lifelong silence, the restoration of a broken link in the family chain. That the “rice field behind his back trembled” suggests that the earth itself acknowledges the reunion.
The poem is free verse, flowing like a stream of memory and reverence. Its images are earthy and tactile. There’s a fusion of body, earth, and spirit throughout the poem. The grandmother’s soul does not simply rest — it “joins the earth, takes root in the field”, singing lullabies to the rice itself.
This poem is as much about personal healing as it is about cultural survival — how memory, food, and ritual preserve identity and dignity even in the aftermath of unimaginable suffering.
To conclude, “The Poem I Can’t Yet Name” is a deeply moving elegy that speaks in whispers — but those whispers carry generations of grief, resilience, and reverence. Nguyen Phan Que Mai writes with a clarity and calmness that makes the emotional weight even more powerful. With rice as its central metaphor, the poem connects body, land, spirit, and memory into one sacred act of remembrance.
It is not just a poem about mourning — it is a poem about belonging, and how the dead continue to nourish the living.
Ref: The Secret of Hoa Sen by Nguyen Phan Que Mai. Translated by Bruce Weigl
Despondency breaks off its course. Anguish breaks off its course. The vulture breaks off its flight.
The eager light streams out, even the ghosts take a draught.
And our paintings see daylight, our red beasts of the ice-age studios.
Everything begins to look around. We walk in the sun in hundreds.
Each man is a half-open door leading to a room for everyone.
The endless ground under us.
The water is shining among the trees.
The lake is a window into the earth.
Tomas Tranströmer’s The Half-Finished Heaven is a luminous and redemptive poem that captures the sudden breaking of despair by glimpses of hope and illumination. The Swedish Nobel laureate, known for his sparse but emotionally rich language, distills a vast emotional and spiritual shift into just a few carefully chosen images and lines.
The poem opens in darkness — with “despondency,” “anguish,” and even a “vulture” — symbols of death, hopelessness, and sorrow. But this heaviness is disrupted. The phrase “breaks off its course” suggests that suffering, though powerful, is not endless. There is an abrupt, almost miraculous intervention: “The eager light streams out.” It’s not passive light but eager — hungry to redeem, to touch, to restore.
From that turning point, the world awakens. Even “ghosts,” symbols of lingering sorrow or memory, are revived — “take a draught” — as if nourished by the new light. Tranströmer then introduces metaphors of art: “our paintings see daylight,” and “red beasts of the ice-age studios.” These suggest that even what was buried deep within human history or psyche — our primal instincts, ancient creations — are returning to view, revitalized.
The lines “Each man is a half-open door / leading to a room for everyone” are especially powerful. They evoke the possibility of connection, empathy, and community. We are not complete or perfect (“half-open”), but we are entryways to something larger, something hospitable. This idea makes the title The Half-Finished Heaven feel apt — the world is incomplete but leaning toward beauty and redemption.
The closing lines bring in elements of nature: “The water is shining among the trees,” and “The lake is a window into the earth.” These observations feel sacred — as though the earth itself is opening up to understanding.Overall, The Half-Finished Heaven is a quietly stunning meditation on the
On a winter evening in 2002, I was attending a meeting for a social cause at my friend Shahul Hameed’s house. When the meeting was about to be over, he brought a tray of fruits as snacks. Among them, I saw something incongruous- a plateful of sliced pieces of what looked like tomatoes. No one touched the apparent ‘Tomatoes’ while we eagerly savoured the other fruits. Noticing our inhibition, Shahul told us that they were not tomatoes but sweet persimmons (It is called Kaki fruit in India). I tasted a piece and was struck by its smooth texture, its sticky sweetness, syrupy taste and indescribably delicious fruity flavor. I was literally tasting a new experience. Shahul said he too once bought it by mistake thinking it as tomatoes but was bowled over by its taste. There onwards, I have become an addict of this fruit, waiting for the season to savour the pleasurable persimmons. But the fruit has a split personality. The unripe ones , though sweet, carries a bit of astringent taste. The skin of a ripe and glossy one is so taut that one tough touch can tear its delicate skin and spill the jelly pulp.
I was reminded of my above experience as I read this beautiful and powerfully painful poem by a Chinese Poet called Li-Young Lee. It also roused my own maudlin mango memories.
PERSIMMONS
In sixth grade Mrs. Walker slapped the back of my head and made me stand in the corner for not knowing the difference between persimmon and precision. How to choose
persimmons. This is precision. Ripe ones are soft and brown-spotted. Sniff the bottoms. The sweet one will be fragrant. How to eat: put the knife away, lay down the newspaper. Peel the skin tenderly, not to tear the meat. Chew on the skin, suck it, and swallow. Now, eat the meat of the fruit, so sweet all of it, to the heart.
Donna undresses, her stomach is white. In the yard, dewy and shivering with crickets, we lie naked, face-up, face-down, I teach her Chinese. Crickets: chiu chiu. Dew: I’ve forgotten. Naked: I’ve forgotten. Ni, wo: you me. I part her legs, remember to tell her she is beautiful as the moon.
Other words that got me into trouble were fight and fright, wren and yarn. Fight was what I did when I was frightened, fright was what I felt when I was fighting. Wrens are small, plain birds, yarn is what one knits with. Wrens are soft as yarn. My mother made birds out of yarn. I loved to watch her tie the stuff; a bird, a rabbit, a wee man.
Mrs. Walker brought a persimmon to class and cut it up so everyone could taste a Chinese apple. Knowing it wasn’t ripe or sweet, I didn’t eat but watched the other faces.
My mother said every persimmon has a sun inside, something golden, glowing, warm as my face.
Once, in the cellar, I found two wrapped in newspaper forgotten and not yet ripe. I took them and set them both on my bedroom windowsill, where each morning a cardinal sang. The sun, the sun.
Finally understanding he was going blind, my father would stay up all one night waiting for a song, a ghost. I gave him the persimmons, swelled, heavy as sadness, and sweet as love.
This year, in the muddy lighting of my parents’ cellar, I rummage, looking for something I lost. My father sits on the tired, wooden stairs, black cane between his knees, hand over hand, gripping the handle.
He’s so happy that I’ve come home. I ask how his eyes are, a stupid question. All gone, he answers.
Under some blankets, I find three scrolls. I sit beside him and untie three paintings by my father: Hibiscus leaf and a white flower. Two cats preening. Two persimmons, so full they want to drop from the cloth.
He raises both hands to touch the cloth, asks, Which is this?
This is persimmons, Father.
Oh, the feel of the wolf tail on the silk, the strength, the tense precision in the wrist. I painted them hundreds of times eyes closed. These I painted blind. Some things never leave a person: scent of the hair of one you love, the texture of persimmons, in your palm, the ripe weight.
Li-Young Lee
There are several elements that figure importantly in this poem. Persimmon stand for painful memories of cultural barriers imposed by language and custom, and for a present-day loving connection to an elderly, blind father. The poet begins with a schoolboy incident in which he was punished for not knowing the difference between “persimmon” and “precision” and makes a play on other words which sound similar and “that got (him) into trouble.” He takes revenge later, when the teacher brings to class a persimmon that only the narrator knows is unripe, as he “watched the . . . faces” without participating. We now understands that the sixth grader’s misperception due to pronunciation finds the right revenge when the boy can handle the difference in meaning between these two words quite nimbly: “How to choose / persimmons. This is precision.”
Persimmons also remind him of an adult sensual relationship with Donna and of his attempts to teach her Chinese words which he himself can no longer remember. The speaker first suggests, perhaps shamefacedly, his detachment from his parents and their culture by embodying the source of his distraction in the figure of Donna, a white girl (or woman) with whom he lies naked in the grass. The speaker’s vacillating attempts to teach Donna Chinese and his own forgetting of some words due to non-use hint at the fading power of his parents’ culture and its values in USA. Ripe persimmons continue to gain positive associations as the speaker next recalls his mother’s observation that “every persimmon has a sun / inside, something golden, glowing, / warm as my face.” The second part of the poem describes the role persimmons have played in his father’s life and in their relationship. To comfort his father, gone blind, the narrator gives him two sweet, ripe persimmons, so full and redolent with flavor that it will surely stimulate the senses remaining. The fruit links him with his father when he says ”forgotten” persimmons, “swelled, heavy as sadness, / and sweet as love.”
Later, in the “muddy lighting” of his parents’ cellar, with his father sitting on the stairs, the poet searches for something meaningful from his past: “I rummage, looking / for something I lost.” He finds three rolled-up paintings by his now blind father. As the father reaches to touch a rendering of “Two persimmons, so full they want to drop from the cloth,” he remembers “the strength, the tense / precision in the wrist” required to paint them. For both the poet and reader the search has ended. The poet has recovered two qualities embodied in and demonstrated by his parents that he has found so lacking in American culture: the rich, full warmth of his parents’ love, figured in persimmons, and their precise, caring ways, represented by their respective crafts. The poem ends with the father’s remark that “some things never leave a person”. Indeed this precisely crafted poem reaches into the murky depths of memory to salvage the captivating characteristics of one’s parents and one’s culture. It is a sensitive and supreme example of how a fruitful emotional association such as with persimmon can transform and enrich our life
Ref : Rose (New Poets of America): Li-Young Lee (Author) Gerald Stern (Foreword)
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