Poetry

  • September 2013

       By Samiya Bashir
      White Body Radiation Every day adjustments   before give upbefore make do   start where a clothespin clips a nose and breath is held until – What is a thing of beautyif it isn’t us? And if a body i...

  • September 2013

       By ko ko thett
    Photo by Takeshi+81/Flickr §          Leaves and twigs on the ground Do I have to know the name of that tall tree to free-fall from her canopy? In my language there are 1,500 synonyms for penis, and...

  • September 2013

       By Edward Pasewicz
    Photo by Bill Barber/Flickr Essay on Caution Unmatched is freedom from ties,he says, giving me a dark blue plum.  I have frayed shoelaces and there is shameattached to these shoelaces, great shame. I...

  • September 2013

       By Norge Espinosa Mendoza
    Norge Espinosa Mendoza. Photo by Carolina Vilches In the wee hours of the sinister National Night,when winter is nothing, and nostalgia can barely endure,I return to you, I shield myself in you, I se...

  • July 2013

       By Mark Tredinnick
    Photo: Daniel Boud   This is my devotion, then: to walk sometimes                                             with the dog through the sclerophyll Cathedral of the morning. To let myself Off my lead...

  • July 2013

       By Jacques Roubaud
    Translator’s note: Roubaud wrote the first poem, “À cinq heures du soir” (itself a nod to Lorca’s famous “La cogida y la muerte”), about Warren Motte’s dog Lucy, who shared with her owner a g...

  • July 2013

       By Shakeel Badayuni
    Ghazal Shakeel Badayuni My heart longs to go beyond the obsession of love,and find joy in a new session of love.  Love drowned me in its tidesbut my heart hopes that was a mere dig...

  • May 2013

       By Zvonko Karanović
        Placing Everything on the Line Zvonko Karanović A car stops in the middle of the screena gentleman walks out dressed in black, wearing a hat,  grabs a frightened girl by the armblackmails her to...

  • May 2013

       By Roberto Castillo Udiarte
    Blues Cola de Lagarto   Su frenesí candentede espiral infinitamuere, revive– b...

  • January 2013

       By Lauren Camp
    Photo by Bu Yousef/Flickr At the Market in Baghdad, 1940 Every morning the elder took his sons to pray,then let them swim through the heat of the dijlawhile he and his servant went to marke...

  • January 2013

       By Mark Tredinnick
    Kookaburras in a tree. Photo by Jaraslavd/Flickr I thought it said on the girl’s red purseA kind of sad dance and all dayWondered what was being defined . . .The real love that followsEarly...

  • July 2012

       By Caitriona O'Reilly
    The Suicides They ask: the world gives them a stone,revolving until the greater part of her is in darkness. Out among the night-stations the signals falter,the mechanism of the cell winds down. We can...

  • November 2012

       By Kiki Dimoula
      Romantic Disagreement Of course I amagainst disturbing the moon.For many reasons.Not only is it an unseemly exaggeration—personally I’ve long avoided exaggeratingbecause of exhaustion—but it is also...
  • Dipika Mukherjee
       By Dipika Mukherjee
    Dipika Mukherjee. Photo by Bobo Lin, Shanghai. Dipika Mukherjee wrote the following poem in response to the August 5, 2012, Sikh gurdwara shooting in Wisconsin.     My name is Simra...

  • July 2012

       By Fred Dings
    Illustration by Ciaran Duffy/Flickr   The Blue Whale Our five-year-old daughter bubbles with laughteras she bounces on her bed, pure joy flashingin her eyes like the glint of fingerlings in sunlit wav...

  • May 2012

       By Aicha Bassry
      On the Edges of Autumn I shall close death’s doors.I am the autumn’s last flower.– Edith Södergran   My body is like algaeExhausted by the night’s diving.Gather me up in...

  • May 2012

       By Shizue Ogawa
      Following is a selection of four bilingual audio readings from Shizue Ogawa’s A Soul at Play, a collection of verse reviewed in the May 2012 issue of WLT. Donna Tamaki provides the...

  • May 2012

       By Geoffrey Philp
    Audio versions read by the author Editorial note: Geoffrey Philp’s interview with Erika J. Waters appears in the May 2012 issue of WLT on pages 24–29.     A Prayer for My...
  •    By Li-Young Lee
    July 2006 WLT Father John,I have seven Marys.What am I to do?Ancient when I was born,each sings to me in three colors: Blue,wishing, and following the river.Growing younger while I die faster...
  •    By Paula Meehan
     January 2007 WLT I am fingering a length of yarnfrom the mill at Stornoway.It is green as a summer meadowthough when I untwine it widdershinsI see, spun into the yarn, fibres of blu...
  •    By Gabeba Baderoon
     July 2008 WLT I walk down Heerengracht, where pigeons dip their necks like question marks into the fountain. Then left at Long, while the sun slips   Toward the sea and the moon tak...
  •    By Nii Ayikwei Parkes
     March 2011 WLT Clouds gather under a blue moon, like trouble brewing as strange fruit continues to swing – keeping time – while Columbia turntables refuse to spin the song; is vinyl...
  •    By Pireeni Sundaralingam
     Nov. 2008 WLT It is Paris, Berlin, New York,   it is any one of countless cities, any one                   of endless lands in which we find ourselves,   our careless hurrying thro...

  • November 2010

       By Anamika
    Salt is earth’s sorrow and its taste.Earth’s three-fourths is brackish water,and men’s heart a salt mountain.Weak is salt’s heart,very quickly it melts,it sinks in shamewhen plates are flungdue to sa...

  • November 2010

       By Kazim Ali
    you became real to me fatherwhen I saw you fly over me from beneath the waves a bone-white door against the cloud-white ceilinglooking for me, flapping and furious I watched you in the dark as you sl...
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