Chinese literature

. Song of River City by Su Shi (Song Dynasty)

Ten years, dead and living dim and draw apart.

I don’t try to remember,
But forgetting is hard.
Lonely grave a thousand miles off,
Cold thoughts, where can I talk them out?

Even if we met, you wouldn’t’t know me,

Dust on my face,
Hair like frost.

In a dream last night suddenly I was home.

By the window of the little room,
You were combing your hair and making up.

You turned and looked, not speaking,

Only lines of tears coursing down.

Year after year will it break my heart?

The moonlit grave,
The stubby pines.

AUTHORS BACKGROUND:
The poem was written around 1075, when the poet Su Shi dreamed about his wife. He married his
wife Wang Fu in 1054 at her fifteen. Unfortunately his wife died in 1065, 11 years after they get
married. The next year he took her body back to his homeland Sichuan and buried it in the family
graveyard, planting some pines around the tomb. He loved his wife so much and composed this poem
to express his feelings
JAPANESE LITERATURE

Japan by Billy Collins

Today I pass the time reading

a favorite haiku,
saying the few words over and over.
It feels like eating
the same small, perfect grape
again and again.
I walk through the house reciting it
and leave its letters falling
through the air of every room.
I stand by the big silence of the piano and say it.
I say it in front of a painting of the sea.
I tap out its rhythm on an empty shelf.
I listen to myself saying it,
then I say it without listening,
then I hear it without saying it.
And when the dog looks up at me,
I kneel down on the floor
and whisper it into each of his long white ears.
It's the one about the one-ton temple bell
with the moth sleeping on its surface,
and every time I say it, I feel the excruciating
pressure of the moth
on the surface of the iron bell.
When I say it at the window,
the bell is the world
and I am the moth resting there.
When I say it at the mirror,
I am the heavy bell
and the moth is life with its papery wings.
And later, when I say it to you in the dark,
you are the bell,
and I am the tongue of the bell, ringing you,
and the moth has flown
from its line
and moves like a hinge in the air above our bed.

AUTHORS BACKGROUND :
William James Collins, known as Billy Collins, (born March 22, 1941) is an
American poet, appointed as Poet Laureate of the United States from 2001 to
2003. In 2016, Collins retired from his position as a Distinguished Professor
at Lehman College of the City University of New York after teaching there
almost 50 years.

I like the last part the best, It will waste away to nothing, nothing but stars
in the sky, and I will have a few nights to myself, a little time to rest my
jittery pen.

MIDDLE EAST LITERATURE

I Said Unto You - Poem by Ali Ahmad Said Esber

I listened to the seas

reading to me their verses
I listened to the bells
slumbering inside the oyster shells.
I said unto you:
I sang my songs
at Satan's wedding
and the feast of the fable.
I said unto you:
I beheld,
in the rain of history
and the glow of the distance
a fairy and a dwelling.
Because I sail in my eyes,
I said unto you, I beheld
everything
in the first step of the distance.

AUTHORS BACKGROUND;

Syrian-Lebanese poet, literary critic, translator, and editor, a highly influential figure in Arabic poetry
and literature today. Adonis combines in his work a deep knowledge classical Arabic poetry and
revolutionary, modernist expression. Like a number of Middle Eastern writers, Adonis has explored the
pain of exile - "I write in a language that exiles me," he once said.
Indonesian Literature
A Story - Poem by Li-Young Lee
Sad is the man who is asked for a story
and can't come up with one.

His five-year-old son waits in his lap.

Not the same story, Baba. A new one.
The man rubs his chin, scratches his ear.

In a room full of books in a world

of stories, he can recall
not one, and soon, he thinks, the boy
will give up on his father.

Already the man lives far ahead, he sees

the day this boy will go. Don't go!
Hear the alligator story! The angel story once more!
You love the spider story. You laugh at the spider.
Let me tell it!

But the boy is packing his shirts,

he is looking for his keys. Are you a god,
the man screams, that I sit mute before you?
Am I a god that I should never disappoint?

But the boy is here. Please, Baba, a story?

It is an emotional rather than logical equation,
an earthly rather than heavenly one,
which posits that a boy's supplications
and a father's love add up to silence.
Li-Young Lee

AUTHORS BACKGORUND :

Li-Young Lee (born August 19, 1957) is an American poet. He was born in
Jakarta, Indonesia, to Chinese parents. His maternal great-grandfather was
Yuan Shikai, China's first Republican President, who attempted to make
himself emperor.

In the poem A Story by Li-Young Lee, the complex relationship between a father and son
is portrayed. We are introduced to this complexity at the beginning of the poem through
the author’s use of devices such as point-of-view when the author uses italics to signify a
conversation, and the use of metaphor, when the father compares his son to a god.

Vietnamese literature
After Our War - Poem by John Balaban

After our war, the dismembered bits

- all those pierced eyes, ear slivers, jaw splinters,
gouged lips, odd tibias, skin flaps, and toes -
came squinting, wobbling, jabbering back.
The genitals, of course, were the most bizarre,
inching along roads like glowworms and slugs.
The living wanted them back but good as new.
The dead, of course, had no use for them.
And the ghosts, the tens of thousands of abandoned souls
who had appeared like swamp fog in the city streets,
on the evening altars, and on doorsills of cratered homes,
also had no use for the scraps and bits
because, in their opinion, they looked good without them.
Since all things naturally return to their source,
these snags and tatters arrived, with immigrant uncertainty,
in the United States. It was almost home.
So, now, one can sometimes see a friend or a famous man talking
with an extra pair of lips glued and yammering on his cheek,
and this is why handshakes are often unpleasant,
why it is better, sometimes, not to look another in the eye,
why, at your daughter's breast thickens a hard keloidal scar.
After the war, with such Cheshire cats grinning in our trees,
will the ancient tales still tell us new truths?
Will the myriad world surrender new metaphor?
After our war, how will love speak?
John Balaban

AUTHORS BACKGROUND
Poet and translator John Balaban earned his BA from Penn State and an MA in English
from Harvard. He is the author of 12 books of poetry and prose, including the
chapbook Like Family (2009) and the full-length collectionsPath, Crooked
Path (2006), named an Editors’ Choice by Booklist and Best Book of Poetry by Library
Journal; Locusts at the Edge of Summer: New and Selected Poems (1997), which won
a William Carlos Williams Award and was nominated for a National Book
Award; Words for My Daughter (1991), a National Poetry Series Selection; Blue
Mountain (1982); and After Our War(1974), named a Lamont Selection and also
nominated for a National Book Award.

“After Our War” is a twenty-five-line poem in free verse. John Balaban uses
the first-person plural point of view, thereby including and implicating the
reader in the horror of the Vietnam War. Although the poem appears to be one
stanza, internal divisions marked by structure, sense, and tense divide the
poem into three eight-line sections, followed by a one-line concluding
question
MALAYSIAN LITERATURE
The Magic Of Love - Poem by Daya Nandan
That tender look with that loving face,
Brings me to that magical place,
Beyond the heavens and stars above,
To that magical feeling that men call love,

Love is a puzzle with no special clue,

But through the mist we know ours is true,
Strong enough to withstand the wall of despair,
Healing my gaping wounds that no medicine can repair,

When our eyes lock and my heart races,

When you love me more than other faces,
When your heart liberates all that sadness,
We will both know a sparkling sort of happiness,

That magic that makes living life worth,

That magic that brings heaven on earth,
When you are scared and i become your knight,
Holding you close through the darkest night,

A simple touch gets my heart exploding,

Like ignited fireworks getting our world rocking,
The way you get my heart beating faster than a bullet train,
The way you make me forget all my sorrow and pain,

Love is the most ancient language of hearts,

Even cardiologists fail to know how it starts,
That heat and passion as mighty as the sun,
Strong enough to burn a bullet from a blazing gun,

That love shield that no emotion can defeat,

That love radar that makes me feel you in every heartbeat,
That feeling when the stars are getting closer and the sky is closing in,
Like an athlete running to a finish line just so he can win,

It’s that magic you give me to endure any form of pain,

It’s that strength you evoke enough to break any chain,
Life is a dance floor, love is the rhythm, you are the music,
When i dance and sing in ecstasy then, begins gods magic.

AUTHORS BACKGROUND :
Daya Nandan was born in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia on the 2nd of July in 1992. He graduated from
Taman Maluri high school in Kuala Lumpur in 2009 where he served as the President for both the Red
Crescent and the English Language Society. He received his medical degree from the University of
Padjajaran in Bandung, Indonesia in February 2016. He has been writing poetry since 2005 and has
many of his works published in school magazines.

This is an awesome poem. Love is the most ancient language of hearts, , That heat and passion as
mighty as the sun. Strong enough to burn a bullet from a blazing gun.. imagination and wonderful
expressions of the experiences of love.
Cambodia Literature
Cambodia - Poem by Lee Crowell
I dream of Cambodia
of white tusked elephants
plodding through your plains
of tigers and panthers lurking regal in green leaved brush
among blazing colored birds
exotic as can be conceived
I dream of coned shaped towers atop Angkor Wat
greatest temple in the world
home for all Khmer
the refuge of the people

Cambodia, Cambodia
let me taste from the bowl of your sweetest rice
and relish the fruits of your land
I dream of a walk under your monsoon sky
and I drink the soul of your rains
while the Cambodian tears gently pelt
the numbers to the ground

and I dream of the many numbers

of those who were cut down
of those who were denied their lives
of the expressions of confusion
and the need to understand
the unfolding
the inexplicable Cambodian tragedy

I dream of Cambodia
of life beyond 'brother number one'
the quarter of your brothers and sisters discarded
I am on my knees
and I feel the warmth of trust
renewed in your land
home of the great Khmer

AUTHORS BACKGROUND:

Cambodia is deeply touching, When I read this poem, I could feel the pain of the people.And
also see the beauty of the land.Very well done.I never been in Cambodia but by reading your
poem i feel the smell of land and view of forset and the beauty of the nature, well done
Thai Literature

Galeo DS
His Great Love To Both of You
God’s Great Love To Both of You
Form: rhyme

Dad and Mom, you’re truly blessed,

By your marital love, God was pleased
Heaven came down to bring you a gift
A lovely baby, so adorable, so sweet.

Your new born babe’s first tiny cries,

Tell your strong love-bond sealed thrice
Baby’s charming smiles and sparkling eyes
Tell the beauty and wonder of a family life.

Dad and Mom, you’re truly blessed

Welcoming precious babe, let’s celebrate
As your angel raises 2 little hands, 2 little feet
Wants your warm hugs, a cuddle so sweet.

Congratulations to you for your newborn baby

I pray, this lil fellow grows in God’s Love Almighty
To reciprocate your unconditional care and love
To have a bright future and always to cheer you up.
African Literature
East Africa
Africa Poems: 6 / 100 « prev. poem next poem »
An Africa Thunderstorm - Poem by David Rubadiri
From the west
Clouds come hurrying with the wind
Turning sharply
Here and there
Like a plague of locusts
Whirling,
Tossing up things on its tail
Like a madman chasing nothing.

Pregnant clouds
Ride stately on its back,
Gathering to perch on hills
Like sinister dark wings;
The wind whistles by
And trees bend to let it pass.

In the village
Screams of delighted children,
Toss and turn
In the din of the whirling wind,
Women,
Babies clinging on their backs
Dart about
In and out
Madly;
The wind whistles by
Whilst trees bend to let it pass.

Clothes wave like tattered flags

Flying off
To expose dangling breasts
As jagged blinding flashes
Rumble, tremble and crack
Amidst the smell of fired smoke
And the pelting march of the storm.
An Africa Thunderstorm
David Rubadiri
Ghana
BY
THE GREATEST FALL
The fall was greatest
And the stable water did not depict it.

Beneath the undying touch

My body started to vibrate.

Movie live on set!

Man caged alone and alone in a room.
Scenes of stars I wanted to be
Caressing I did not envisage.

My thigh
Oh!
My thighs
Smooth and smooth it went down my pants.

My body curls in Snake-like song;

I started to sing
Songs and songs,
Rhythms I need not know,
Grooving I need not practise.

Oh bitter sweet feeling

Freezing my body I see.

I did not like it at first

But now I'm fetching from all sea bed.

Come back
My potent Virgin
Come back
Come back
For my eyes wish to see from mother's call!

by Kweku Anamoa Taylor

French literature
A sunset=
I love the evenings, passionless and fair, I love the evens,
Whether old manor-fronts their ray with golden fulgence leavens,
In numerous leafage bosomed close;
Whether the mist in reefs of fire extend its reaches sheer,
Or a hundred sunbeams splinter in an azure atmosphere
On cloudy archipelagos.

The sun at bay with splendid thrusts still keeps the sullen fold;
And momently at distance sets, as a cupola of gold,
The thatched roof of a cot a-glance;
Or on the blurred horizon joins his battle with the haze;
Or pools the blooming fields about with inter-isolate blaze,
Great moveless meres of radiance.

Then mark you how there hangs athwart the firmament's swept track,
Yonder a mighty crocodile with vast irradiant back,
A triple row of pointed teeth?
Under its burnished belly slips a ray of eventide,
The flickerings of a hundred glowing clouds in tenebrous side
With scales of golden mail ensheathe.

Then mounts a palace, then the air vibrates--the vision flees.

Confounded to its base, the fearful cloudy edifice
Ruins immense in mounded wrack;
Afar the fragments strew the sky, and each envermeiled cone
Hangeth, peak downward, overhead, like mountains overthrown
When the earthquake heaves its hugy back.

These vapors, with their leaden, golden, iron, bronzèd glows,

Where the hurricane, the waterspout, thunder, and hell repose,
Muttering hoarse dreams of destined harms,--
'Tis God who hangs their multitude amid the skiey deep,
As a warrior that suspendeth from the roof-tree of his keep
His dreadful and resounding arms!

. : Victor Marie Hugo

German literature

Sorry - Poem by Erica German

Autoplay next video
sometimes sorry isnt good enough
sometimes you have to be tough
sometimes sorry is too hard to say
sorry is a card you always have to play

sometimes sorry is the wrong word

sometimes sorry is the only cure

sometimes the word sorry isnt always true

sometimes sorry is only for you
sometimes sorry is too big
sometimes sorry is a fib

sometimes sorry will make you cry

sometimes sorry will be your last goodbye

sometimes sorry is forgot

sometimes i say sorry a lot
sometimes sorry is a gift
sometimes sorry makes a lift

sometimes sorry is the only way

to fix a bad day
Erica German
Nigeria literature

I love my country Nigeria

A country so imperial and essential,
with feasible human and natural blessings
like the population of bacteria.
I'm proud to be a Nigerian.
We can cultivate
this good land together,
till we're the world's finest brand.
I believe my land called Nigeria
don't bring any 'wahala'.

by Ehimika Ehimigbai
South Africa
I write to re-discover lost territory in me
I write to re-discover lost territory in me
To uncover the power
Flowing
Stirring
Boiling
Beneath my shell
I write for my well-being
I write to cleanse my inner space
To quiet the traffic in my head
I write so I can actually sleep when I fall into bed
I write to remember the reasons I am here
To see the lessons
In the choices I’ve made
I write to offer the best of myself
My truth
My creativity
The music in me

I write to express my love

My meaning
To navigate into the unknown

I write to be honest With myself

And with you
Which if I say out loud
I am sometimes unable to do
I write in answer to a longing
That lives with me each day
A yearning for balance
For equilibrium
For re-union
I write to feel my way along the path
I write to free the language of my heart

Malika Ndhlovu
English Literature
Do not go gentle into that good night
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,

Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright

Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,

And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight

Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on that sad height,

Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Dylan Thomas
Greek literature

Love Was, Love Is, Love Will Be, Love Eternally - Poem by Peter Stavropoulos (Best Love Poems

Love was.....

When 'if' lay between you and I

And 'never' seemed forever
I fell to earth in surrender
And you became the centre of my eye

Love is.....

When I pass by you accidentally

I grab a sense of your smile
When between us is distance measured by the mile
I grab a sense of our love immeasurably

Love will be.....

When I can no longer see to see

When I can no longer hear to hear
I know you will be near
Simply just you and me

Love eternally.....

When God granted us our wish finally

He put in us a throbbing heart
When it stops from this earth we will depart
But our Love will live eternally
Italian literature
Italian Music In Dakota

THROUGH the soft evening air enwrinding all,

Rocks, woods, fort, cannon, pacing sentries, endless wilds,
In dulcet streams, in flutes' and cornets' notes,
Electric, pensive, turbulent artificial,
(Yet strangely fitting even here, meanings unknown before,
Subtler than ever, more harmony, as if born here, related here,
Not to the city's fresco'd rooms, not to the audience of the opera
house,
Sounds, echoes, wandering strains, as really here at home,
Sonnambula's innocent love, trios with Norma's anguish,
And thy ecstatic chorus Poliuto;) 10
Ray'd in the limpid yellow slanting sundown,
Music, Italian music in Dakota.

While Nature, sovereign of this gnarl'd realm,

Lurking in hidden barbaric grim recesses,
Acknowledging rapport however far remov'd,
(As some old root or soil of earth its last-born flower or fruit,)
Listens well pleas'd.

by Walt Whitman
Canadian Literature

At The Un-National Monument Along The Canadian Border

This is the field where the battle did not happen,

where the unknown soldier did not die.
This is the field where grass joined hands,
where no monument stands,
and the only heroic thing is the sky.

Birds fly here without any sound,

unfolding their wings across the open.
No people killed – or were killed – on this ground
hallowed by neglect and an air so tame
that people celebrate it by forgetting its name.

by William Staffor
Mexican Literature

Death The Mexican Revolutionary

Wines of the great châteaux

Have been uncorked for you;
Come, take this terrace chair:
Examine the menu.
The view from here is such
As cannot find a match,
For even as you dine
You’re so placed as to watch
Starvation in our streets
That gives your canapé
A more exquisite taste
By contrast, like the play
Of shadow and of light.
The misery of the poor
Appears, as on TV,
Set off by the allure
And glamour of the ads.
We recommend the quail,
Which you’d do well to eat
Before your powers fail,
For I inaugurate
A brand-new social order
Six cold, decisive feet
South of the border.

by Anthony Evan Hec

Australian Literature
l Mahdi To The Australian Troops
And wherefore have they come, this warlike band,
That o'er the ocean many a weary day
Have tossed; and now beside Suakim's Bay,
With faces stern and resolute, do stand,
Waking the desert's echoes with the drum --
Men of Australia, wherefore have ye come?
To keep the Puppet Khedive on the throne,
To strike a blow for tyranny and wrong,
To crush the weak and aid the oppressing strong!
Regardless of the hapless Fellah's moan,
To force the payment of the Hebrew loan,
Squeezing the tax like blood from out the stone?

And fair Australia, freest of the free,

Is up in arms against the freeman's fight;
And with her mother joined to crush the right --
Has left her threatened treasures o'er the sea,
Has left her land of liberty and law
To flesh her maiden sword in this unholy war.

Enough! God never blessed such enterprise --

England's degenerate Generals yet shall rue
Brave Gordon sacrificed, when soon they view
The children of a thousand deserts rise
To drive them forth like sand before the gale --
God and the Prophet! Freedom will prevail.

by Banjo Paterson
The Younger Son by Robert William Service
When the wattle-blooms are drooping in the sombre she-oak glade,

And the breathless land is lying in a swoon,

He leaves his work a moment, leaning lightly on his spade, And he hears the bell-bird chime the
Austral noon.
The parrakeets are silent in the gum-tree by the creek;

The ferny grove is sunshine-steeped and still;

But the dew will gem the myrtle in the twilight ere he seek

His little lonely cabin on the hill.