STARTING FROM PAUMANOK
Walt Whitman

Dead poets, philosophs, priests,
Martyrs, artists, inventors, governments long since,
Language-shapers on other shores,
Nations once powerful, now reduced, withdrawn, or 
   desolate,
I dare not proceed till I respectfully credit what you have 
   left
wafted hither,
I have perused it, own it is admirable, (moving awhile 
   among it,)
Think nothing can ever be greater, nothing can ever 
   deserve more
than it deserves,
Regarding it all intently a long while, then dismissing it,
I stand in my place with my own day here. 
   [Keep reading...]

SELF-RELIANCE
Ralph Waldo Emerson

There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried...

For nonconformity the world whips you with its displeasure. And therefore a man must know how to estimate a sour face. The by-standers look askance on him in the public street or in the friend’s parlour. If this aversation had its origin in contempt and resistance like his own, he might well go home with a sad countenance; but the sour faces of the multitude, like their sweet faces, have no deep cause, but are put on and off as the wind blows and a newspaper directs. [Keep reading...]

THE TEMPEST
William Shakespeare

If by your art, my dearest father, you have
Put the wild waters in this roar, allay them.
The sky, it seems, would pour down stinking pitch,
But that the sea, mounting to the welkin's cheek,
Dashes the fire out. O, I have suffered
With those that I saw suffer: a brave vessel,
Who had, no doubt, some noble creature in her,
Dash'd all to pieces. O, the cry did knock
Against my very heart. Poor souls, they perish'd.
Had I been any god of power, I would
Have sunk the sea within the earth or ere
It should the good ship so have swallow'd and
The fraughting souls within her. [Keep reading...]

IN THE NAME OF THE FATHER
Salvatore Poeta

I confess that at times I have sensed your presence
from behind the iris of eternity,
as you contemplate gleefully, implacably, like a muted Pan
the sacred union between shadow and light,
and not in starched hands that lift
a eucharist into the air;
rather in the faint wisp of winged DNA,
hanging in the air,
as a bird in silent flight,
before settling delicately on a stream ablaze in auroral light;
and not in the words of prophets sent by you,
false or otherwise... [Keep reading...]

IN PINE-SILVER RELIEF
(from the unpublished novel Ptarmigan, or Still Lifes & Embers)
Joseph Robertson

To advance from house of light to house of light with only the bare rhythm of the vast untouched illusion of weather guiding is a prayer, a deep ascetic meditation on the entitlement of every life to live in a house of light...

and the breathing of a first new brushstroke of vibrance in the open air, that breathing is the only meaning... [Keep reading...]

 

SI HOY ESTUVIERA YO CONMIGO MISMO
Carlos Trujillo

UN ABANICO DE AGUA
Cristina Sánchez-Conejero

Érase una vez un par
de ojos negros azabache
perfectamente perfilados
en una cara contorneada
por una larga melena lisa
del color brillante
de una noche sin estrellas.
Érase la belleza misma
confabulada con la inteligencia
de un cuerpo modelo
y unos labios de miel,
y una naturalidad misteriosa... [Siga leyendo]

Más literatura en español: www.Casavaria.com/esp/