Louis Templeman was awarded First Place in poetry in the 2010 Prison Writing Contest.
Villanelle to Pio Speak to me. Tell me that I am not alone.
In my voice only have I searched for truth.
Am I not still breathing. Awake. Flesh and bone.
Speak to me. Though you find me deaf as a stone,
help me to find the lonely, bloody son of Ruth,
who speaks to hearing ears that they are not alone.
Do you find me tragic, scarred, but now atoned;
atoned, yet now so old and of such little use.
But am I not breathing, living flesh and bone.
Take me to the victim sealed behind a stone.
I ran from him. The voiceless. The accused.
Speak to me. Sing, or else I stand alone.
I tried to kill myself with pills, so white they shone,
longing for words final as the hangmans noose.
Instead words, breathing, made flesh a heart of stone.
You, Pio, of one breath with beauty, renown
Voice of fire speaking goodness, breathing truth,
Will you speak to me, the naked and alone.
Breathe into me, breathing flesh upon dry bones.
Guernica is an award winning magazine of art and ideas.It has teamed up with PEN previously in its its World Voices Festival of International Literature. It features an online selection of poetry that is both aesthetically and politically relevant.
[Like a nation’s bulk that has started]
by Osip Mandelstam, translated from the Russian by Alistair Noon, February 2011
Like a nation’s bulk that has started
to make the earth sweat,
the dust-encrusted armada
of the herd, with its many strata,
sails straight into my head:
its heifers’ tender sides,
its tearaway bullocks, the ships
of the buffalo looming into sight,
and the bulls behind them,
stamping up like bishops.
12 June 1931
Osip Mandelstam was born in 1891 and grew up in St. Petersburg. He traveled in the Caucasus, was exiled to the city of Voronezh, and was deported to a labor camp in the Soviet Far East, where he died in 1938. He published two books of poetry, Stone and Tristia, in his lifetime, while other work has appeared posthumously as The Moscow and Voronezh Notebooks: Poems 1930-1937.
Alistair Noon’s full-length collection of translations of Osip Mandelstam is forthcoming from Leafe Press (UK) in 2011. He has also published translations of Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman and of the German poets Monika Rinck and August Stramm, as well as several chapbooks of his own poetry. He lives in Berlin.
Roger Sedarat was a participant in the Pen World Voices Festival of International Literature 2010.
Roger Sedarat is an Iranian-American poet. He is the author of two poetry collections: Dear Regime: Letters to the Islamic Republic, which was published by the Ohio University Press and won the Press's Hollis Summers' Poetry Prize [1] , and Ghazal Games (Ohio University Press). In his poetry, he frequently crosses the post-modern American tradition with the classical Persian tradition, reproducing his hybrid identity in his verse. His poetry and literary translations have appeared in such journals as New England Review, Drunken Boat, Atlanta Review, and World Literature Today. A poem of his, "High Q"was included in an anthology published by the State University of New York Press [2] He is also the author of, Pupils of the Gorgeous Wheel: A Lacanian View of Landscape in Modern New England Poetry (Cambria). Under the name of "Haji," Roger writes and performs political poetry that challenges oppressive regimes as well as the construct of "Poetry" in the 21st century. |
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Agha D—
When I meet the literary historian of a nation,
he’s writing a book in his underwear,
cutting and pasting the faces of poets
into ruler-drawn boxes.
As he holds each black and white face before me,
he slices his throat with his index finger,
showing one regime in the old country
suffices as metaphor for another,
substitutions for fear the written word
with all its ambiguities
might lead others to question
positions of power.
Take this poem, for example, designed to frame
the missing men
who surreptitiously appear under the wand
of the critic’s finger,
which also arrives as warning to me,
another poet in a chain of being
bound to struggle for his voice
across the censor’s literal sword.
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