Children / Letitia Elizabeth Landon

A word will fill the little heart
With pleasure and with pride;
It is a harsh, a cruel thing,
That such can be denied.

And yet how many weary hours
Those joyous creatures know;
How much of sorrow and restraint
They to their elders owe!

How much they suffer from our faults!
How much from our mistakes!
How often, too, mistaken zeal
An infant's misery makes!

We overrule and overteach,
We curb and we confine,
And put the heart to school too soon,
To learn our narrow line.

No: only taught by love to love,
Seems childhood's natural task;
Affection, gentleness, and hope,
Are all its brief years ask.

For The Young Who Want To / Marge Piercy

Talent is what they say
you have after the novel
is published and favorably
reviewed. Beforehand what
you have is a tedious
delusion, a hobby like knitting.

Work is what you have done
after the play is produced
and the audience claps.
Before that friends keep asking
when you are planning to go
out and get a job.

Genius is what they know you
had after the third volume
of remarkable poems. Earlier
they accuse you of withdrawing,
ask why you don't have a baby,
call you a bum.

The reason people want M.F.A.'s,
take workshops with fancy names
when all you can really
learn is a few techniques,
typing instructions and some-
body else's mannerisms

is that every artist lacks
a license to hang on the wall
like your optician, your vet
proving you may be a clumsy sadist
whose fillings fall into the stew
but you're certified a dentist.

The real writer is one
who really writes. Talent
is an invention like phlogiston
after the fact of fire.
Work is its own cure. You have to
like it better than being loved.

खाली सीपी में समुन्दर / अंजना टंडन

जैसे समन्दर लिखता है बादल
जैसे बादल बनते है हरा
जैसे हरा साथी है तितलियों का
जैसे तितली का माथा चूमता है कोई बच्चा
जैसे बचपन की आँख में है उजला सहज प्रेम,

नीली चादर लपेटे
वृत के आखिरी सिरे पर से अब
लौट जाना चाहती हूँ,

लौट आऊँगी बूढें कदमों से
बचपन को रोपने के लिए
हँडिया की भूख की तृप्ति के लिए
फसलों की सूखी आँख में नमी के लिए
समन्दर के किनारे रेत के घरौंदों के लिए,

बस
मृत्यु की परछाई आने के बाद भी शेष रहूँगी
जितना किसी खाली सीपी में
बचा रहता है समन्दर....।

Liberty / Archibald MacLeish

When liberty is headlong girl
And runs her roads and wends her ways
Liberty will shriek and whirl
Her showery torch to see it blaze.


When liberty is wedded wife
And keeps the barn and counts the byre
Liberty amends her life.
She drowns her torch for fear of fire.

शहर के लोग / प्रभात त्रिपाठी

इस शहर के लोगों को
एक ही कष्ट है यारो!
कि यह शहर
सिरे से भ्रष्ट है यारो!

लोग यह बात
इस तरह कहते हैं
जैसे यहाँ नहीं,
कही और रहते हैं।

I am in Need of Music / Elizabeth Bishop

I am in need of music that would flow
Over my fretful, feeling fingertips,
Over my bitter-tainted, trembling lips,
With melody, deep, clear, and liquid-slow.
Oh, for the healing swaying, old and low,
Of some song sung to rest the tired dead,
A song to fall like water on my head,
And over quivering limbs, dream flushed to glow!

There is a magic made by melody:
A spell of rest, and quiet breath, and cool
Heart, that sinks through fading colors deep
To the subaqueous stillness of the sea,
And floats forever in a moon-green pool,
Held in the arms of rhythm and of sleep.

First Memory / Louise Gluck

Long ago, I was wounded. I lived
to revenge myself
against my father, not
for what he was--
for what I was: from the beginning of time,
in childhood, I thought
that pain meant
I was not loved.
It meant I loved.