Evil Poems
Abhangs (A Short Collection)
by Sant Tukaram
1
I was sleeping when Namdeo and Vitthal Stepped into my dream.
'Your job is to make poems. Stop wasting time,' Namdeo said.
Vitthal gave me the measure and gently aroused me from a dream inside a dream.
Namdeo vowed to write one billion poems.
'Tuka, all the unwritten ones are your responsibility.'
2
To repeat Your name is to string pearls together.
The pleasure in your manifested form is always new.
......
The Ode Of Ántara (Alternate Translation)
by Antarah (Ant Ibn Shaddad
HOW many singers before me! Are there yet songs unsung?
Dost thou, my sad soul, remember where was her dwelling place?
Tents in Jiwá, the fair wadi, speak ye to me of her.
Fair house of 'Abla my true love, blessing and joy to thee!
Doubting I paused in the pastures, seeking her camel-tracks,
......
Lot's Wife
by Wislawa Szymborska
They say I looked back out of curiosity.
But I could have had other reasons.
I looked back mourning my silver bowl.
Carelessly, while tying my sandal strap.
So I wouldn't have to keep staring at the righteous nape
of my husband Lot's neck.
From the sudden conviction that if I dropped dead
he wouldn't so much as hesitate.
From the disobedience of the meek.
Checking for pursuers.
......
The Bees And Flies
by Rudyard Kipling
A Farmer of the Augustan Age
Perused in Virgil's golden page
The story of the secret won
From Proteus by Cyrene's son--
How the dank sea-god showed the swain
Means to restore his hives again.
More briefly, how a slaughtered bull
Breeds honey by the bellyful.
The egregious rustic put to death
......
A Considerable Speck
by Robert Frost
(Microscopic)
A speck that would have been beneath my sight
On any but a paper sheet so white
Set off across what I had written there.
And I had idly poised my pen in air
To stop it with a period of ink
When something strange about it made me think,
This was no dust speck by my breathing blown,
But unmistakably a living mite
......
Transcendence
by Igor Vykhovanets
Get the Hell Out
Annunaki —
Get the hell out!
Like all the vile crowd about.
Stick your Hell’s lies
Right where it fries.
We are the people, strong and proud.
This Earth belongs to us alone,
......
Train to Hell
by Igor Vykhovanets
Train to Hell
With Dante at the ticket stand,
The train to Hell is nearly boarding.
The Ninth Circle — high demand,
A traitor grabs his seat, self-lording.
The station roars: its name is "Home",
The crowd is tense, the timing brittle.
Departures roll in clouds of chrome,
......
When the devil became a part of me
by Mario Odekerken
It wasn't thunder,wasn't flame,
no voice that spoke a cursed name.
Just silence thick,a breath held tight
--
a shadow folded into light.
You laughed, and still, the room grew cold,
a smile too sharp,a gaze too bold.
The mirror blinked,then looked away
--
......
Diabolical Thoughts
by Mario Odekerken
They come without knocking,
sliding in like oil across water-
slick,quiet, certain.
A whisper with teeth,
they chew the edges of reason
and spit them back like bones.
Behind every smile,
a blueprint for destruction.
Not of cities,
......
Cogs in the Mechanism of Evil
by Igor Vykhovanets
Winter
"Love is the chief means of escape from the loneliness which afflicts most men and women throughout the greater part of their lives."
— Bertrand Russell
To escape: the void within devours the soul,
In pleasures, in wealth, in love cold and constrained.
For love, fleeting warmth, cannot make one whole,
It stirs frozen blood, but leaves hearts chained.
......
