Craig's List, Hope's Personals

I am real.
And.
I hope you are too.

It rained in the morning.
Hope. Your. Our. There.
Friends, I hope.

I hope you find happiness
losing hope in women.

I hope I can find
someone tonight.



Craigslist Houston listings for 'Hope' including full words only, extracted 22 May 2016. Submitted by Jody T. Morse.

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tr. from Kei Miller's 'Broken is the shape of everything'

Kei Miller

 

Nishit Saran

Half way down the Lodhi Road,
the first day of rain,

those who come here often must
be held by you, and pain,

and memory must, like memory does,
hold them in its skein,

remembering you, like always, with
the summer in your veins.
 

Kashmiri: We want azadi.
Indian: We'll give you development.
Kashmiri: We want azadi.
Indian: We'll give you jobs.
Kashmiri: We want azadi.
Indian: You'll survive without us? How?
Kashmiri: As against now?

We ain't buyin' what's on sale

We ain't goin' to concede 'em
They think we'll stop at bail
We ain't stoppin' till freedom

?????? ???? - Bertolt Brecht

tr. Bertolt Brecht's 'General, Dein Tank ist ein starker Wagen'

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??-?? ??????? ?? ???? ???? ??,
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?????? ????,
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?? ??? ?? ???? ??

Bertolt Brecht

 

I am grass

tr. from Pash's '??? ??? ???'

I am grass,
I will grow back, no matter what you do,

whether you bomb a university,
whether you bulldoze a hostel,
or whether you burn our rooms -

what will you do to me
What can you do to me?
I am grass, I will grow back, on everything.

Go, burn up our towns,
wipe out Sangroor,
turn Ludhiyana to dust,
my green will do its work even then,
after two years, after ten years...
passengers will again ask the conductor -
"What place is this?
Will you drop me off at Barnala,
where there's a forest of green grass."

I am grass,
I will do my work,
I will grow back on everything
that you try to do to me.

(For Umar and Anirban)

???????? ???? ??? ????? - Nazim Hikmet

tr. from Nazim Hikmet's 'Thinking of you'

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    ??? ?? ?? ???? ???? ????? ?????
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Nazim Hikmet

 

For JNU

You can chew the sun here & spit it out,
You can make the mighty eat dust,
It is a university that we're talking about,
Not a king's court where we must.

To the soldier in Siachen

Come back,
the snow is treacherous,
come back,
they are making you fight a treacherous war,
you were not born in snow,
you do not know snow, come back,
I do not want you to fight that war in our name,
I want you to rest, I want you to be able to feel your fingers,
I want the snow in your veins to give way,
for you to be able to breathe, to melt
into a corner, to sleep.

Come back.

Go home.

Go home to Dharwad,
Go home to Madurai, go home to
Vellore, Satara, Mysore, do not stay in the snow,
go home to Ranchi, that war is not for you to fight, that war
is not for us to give to you to fight, let not our name be ice,
let it not heave on your shoulders, do not let us steal your breath,
the people there, the people of the snow do not need us,
they do not need you to fight, come back,
you were not born to snow,
you do not know the treachery of the snow,

go home,
to rest, go home to the sun, to water,
go home to the nights of your village,
go home to the sweltering market-place,
to the noise of family-homes, to the sweat of the Ghats,
to the dust of the plains, go home,

may you never
have to see white ever again like that,
may you never have to see
a colour become death in your very palm.

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???? ??????? ??? ??? ??, ???? ????? ??,
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???? ????-???? ??? ??? ??

????? ??????

 

For Rohith Vemula

They might have rope enough
for his body,

have they rope enough
for star dust?

????? ?? ???? ???? ?????

???? ?? ????? '???' ??
????? ??? '??' ??

For someone who'll read this

500 years from now

How are you?
I am sure a lot has changed

between my time and yours,
but we're not very different,

you have only one thing on me -
hindsight.

I have all these questions for you:
Do cars fly now?

Is Mumbai still standing by the sea?
How do you folks manage without ozone?

Have the aliens come yet?
Who from my century is still remembered?

How long did India and Pakistan last?
When did Kashmir become free?

It must be surprising for you
looking at our time,

our things must seem so strange to you,
our wars so little,

our toilets for 'men' and 'women'
must make you laugh

our cutting down of trees
would be listed in your 'Early Causes'

our poetry in which the moon is still
a thing far away

must make you wonder, both for that moon
and for the poetry.

You must be baffled,
that we couldn't even imagine

the things you now take for granted.
But let that be,

would you do me a favour,
for 'old time's sake'?

Would you go to the Humayun's Tomb
in what used to be Delhi

and just as you're climbing the front staircase,
near the fourth rung, I have cut into

the stone wall to your left -
'Akhil loves Rohit'

Will you go and see it?
Just that, go see it.

When Farida Khanum

sings now,

she does not hide the age
in her voice,

instead
she wraps it in paisleys,
and for a moment
holds it in both of her hands,

before
she drowns it in our sky.

When she sings now,
she knows

that at the end of that note
when her voice breaks
like a wishbone,

he will stay.

Tonight

You're still glued to the bus-stop seat,
I pull you off it, "91 is here."

On Gray's Inn Road,
you again call the houses "so miniature,"
holding them between your finger and thumb.

On the double-decker,
you're still dozing off on the back seat,
asking me to wake you up when we get there.

As we get out, I'm still telling you to
"wrap yourself well, it's always colder
near the river."

As we walk below the Waterloo Bridge
and you turn to look at me, I am still
one-part longing, one-part fear,

wishing, tonight, that you were here.


(thanks to Daniel Titz and Dorian Lebh)

When I die

bury me
only in your eyes.

The Barakhamba Road/Tolstoy Marg Crossing

An odd, white handkerchief tied on his arm,
    he gets onto the metro at Vishwavidyalaya.

With a stuffed back-pack on her shoulder,
    she boards the bus at Shahdara.

In his grey track pants,
    he hails an Ola from Saket,

With her phone in her back-pocket,
    she climbs onto a Haryana Roadways bus.

---

The red glass bangles he'd bought yesterday
    reflect the winter sun; his fingers dance.

She pulls out a crumpled rainbow muffler
    and waves it to her from across the road.

He sees a small tear in the stockings as he
    pulls down the track pants but doesn't care.

At that Crossing she knows from the map, she
    sees a big crowd - and turns her phone to silent.

A Blessing

tr. from Dushyant Kumar's '?? ????????'

May your dreams be big,
may they outgrow 'could have,' 'should have,'
and get to walk on earth,
may they sulk an' go crazy for
the impossible heights of stars,
may they laugh,
smile,
sing, reach Mars,
may your dreams long for the flame,
may they burn their fingers,
may they stand on their own feet
an' do their own jig, may your dreams
be big.

Dushyant Kumar

 

In 1995

I was ten and you were
already battling the stars

of a virus, and in the middle
of grocery shopping,

and street pavements
bursting with lilacs,

you lived so close to
dying, that every morning,

when you woke up, it took
two seconds to ascertain, oneself,

and then, one's own.

With the worst behind you,
you said, how can people write

about letting go, as if
it was 'tragic' that they went,

as if their going could not have been averted,
as if, a scale had weighed in the sky,
 
but already you sounded unconvinced
of your own voice.
 
In that year,
I did not even know what sex is,
 
what veins are, except a book - my
father's - on the benefits of herbs, which,
 
on its last pages, talked of stuff
that nobody told me nothing about,
 
talked of erections, semen, power, & something
perverse about a horrifying illness, and how it takes
 
only the select.
 
You said, in those years
of holding that which you did not
 
know, "Reagan let us die,"
with a kind of resignation that
 
without forgiving, already wraps 'letting go'
in a hope, and slips it in the dimension of myth,
 
before sneaking it behind the books on your shelf.
 
Now when friends visit me, and stay for
a day or two, I thank my stars,
 
and when they leave the room, go to the loo,
or run for a morning appointment,
 
I think of you, making what you could,
of someone always going, of someone
 
gifting togetherness as if wrapped in
paisley, light like feathers, resting on the sill,
 
about to go which way I do not know.




(for Mark Doty)