[My touch is on the highest mast.]
It cries at four in the morning
For a lantern to be lit
On the rim of the world.

    — Charles Simic, from “The Body”

May 9 - Charles Simic

Bio: Charles Simic was born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. He is known for his work as a poet, editor, translator, and essayist. He was selected to be the fifteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. In his poems, Simic draws on his experiences of growing up in wartorn Eastern Europe and of travelling to France and the United States in his teenage years — his poems explore the themes of displacement and estrangement. His poetry is often described as ‘surreal’ or ‘nightmarish’. [1] 

Anecdotes:

• Simic has published over sixty books, including twenty collections of poetry. [3]
• New York is Simic’s favourite city. He described the city as looking like “painted sets in a sideshow at a carnival where the bearded lady, sword-swallowers, snake charmers, and magicians make their appearances.” [2]
• Even though he did not learn English until he was fifteen [3], Simic always wrote in English because he wanted his friends and the girls he was in love with to understand what he was writing. [2]

Final sentences:

The heavens did their part
By casting no shadow along the boardwalk
Or the row of vacant cottages,
Among them a small church
With a dozen gray tombstones huddled close
As if they, too, had the shivers.

from “Late September”

[The books are whispering.]
I hear nothing, but she does.

from “In the Library”

[The night suddenly upon us, a starless night.
You lighting a candle, carrying it naked
Into our bedroom and blowing it out quickly.]
The dark pines and grasses strangely still.

from “Clouds Gathering”

[My touch is on the highest mast.]
It cries at four in the morning
For a lantern to be lit
On the rim of the world.

from “The Body”

Although boiled and shedding his legs on the way, with his remaining strength he had dragged himself somewhere to begin a homeless wandering, and we never saw him again.

    — Bruno Schulz, from Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass 

[So of the song of the Shadow there remain only a few scraps of legend, carried like driftwood from isle to isle over the long years.] But in the Deed of Ged nothing is told of that voyage nor of Ged’s meeting with the shadow, before ever he sailed the Dragons’ Run unscathed, or brought back the Ring of Erreth-Akbe from the Tombs of Atuan to Havnor, or came at last to Roke once more, as Archmage of all the islands of the world.

    — Ursula K. Le Guin, from A Wizard of Earthsea

Go with God.

    — Irene Gut Opdyke, from In My Hands

[It had no flavour, but it was there: given by the slow dance of the spoon and the hand which held it.] And it was love.

    — Philip Kazan, from Appetite