My Scrapbook

Why is it that the final poem of the book you're working on, the one that ties the entire volume together, always proves to be the most difficult to revise?

A gull in Oban, August 2024.

Lines That Didn't Make The Cut

Across the span, as counterpoint, a flock
of pigeons lifted into flight. “We get,”
he said, “a bullet each. If you do not die,
you do not die.” Nothing I regret
hurts more than this: I watched the cloudless sky
refuse to darken; I did not watch their guns
refuse to kill, or the rising of all those suns.

Lines That Didn't Make The Cut

Desire feeds on what it finds, blurring
the borders of our narrative. The ones
who want to hide our past from us
have woven through that book you're here to translate
a warning: “Precautions are superfluous.
They will be back. It is already late.”

Dog Yoga

Archie, two moods

We must not fear repetition in poetry,
because sweet speech is pleasant in the repetition.

—Nasir Khusraw, translated by Alice C. Hunsberger

"It is [an] irony of oppression that the solution chosen to eliminate an enemy often guarantees that enemy's enduring fame. [N]o one knows the names of [Nasir Khusraw's] oppressors, but his poems...speak across centuries...to anyone who has [known] war, oppression or terror."

—Alice Hunberger, Nasir Khusraw: The Ruby of Badakhshan

from “Reading Matsuo Bashō,” by Gemma Gorga (translated by Sharon Dolin):

I wonder: how many syllables must I remove
to make a perfect haiku from my life?

From “Joyeux Noël” by Gemma Gorga (translated by Sharon Dolin):

While you try ordering yourself in the midst of the disorder
of my hands, the afternoon melts like a clump of snow.