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Decide that you like college life. In your dorm you meet many nice people. Some are smarter than you. And some, you notice, are dumber than you. You will continue, unfortunately, to view the world in exactly these terms for the rest of your life.

Lorrie Moore


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🦋 These Precious Evenings

Here is a poem by a Mexican poet named José Cárdenas Peña, "Los contados días".

This wandering groping
like I'm walking into ruins:
this turning my face to the wind
without expecting a response from the wind;
instinctive phrasing, to live and to hope
without contact:
this clamour to God,
this doubt and this love, this blasphemy;

this dread of being lonely,
of the death that is not death;
it hurts me, hurts like a wound,
like my own native land,
like an angel's wing --
like my crime, like her bleak silence...

And when at last I scream Here! Here I am!,
so cleaves in two my naked, naked heart.
I really like the rhythm of the poem in Spanish and am trying to get a similar rhythmic thing going in the translation.

(I posted the original of this poem in the comments to a LanguageHat entry about free verse and memorization.)

posted evening of Friday, October 22nd, 2010
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