Samuel Johnson

The use of traveling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.

 

A City Winter, Frank O’Hara

1 I understand the boredom of the clerks fatigue shifting like dunes within their eyes a frightful nausea gumming up the works that once was thought aggression in disguise.

 

Versailles, Šalamun Tomaž

The borders of the countries on the earth’s crust
hold less than the frostwork on my window. The tree
gets dressed. Breaks. You whisper and splash with ice.

 

Black Regions, Udovič Jože (1912-62)

A region where the air
still smells
of burnt sacrifices.

 

In a Torched Village, Kocbek Edvard (1904-1981)

I lean on a wall
still hot
from the long fire,

 

Bosnian Elegy, Debeljak Aleš

for Miljenko Jergovič

Sing, young poet, touch my inflamed skin, tanned by lengthy treks
through trackless hills to the world’s end. Don’t give up now,
though the gunners’ feverish lenses stare at damp stains on the facades
of libraries and palaces that constantly call memories of a cruel century to mind.

 

D.H.Lawrence

When we get out of the glass bottle of our ego and when we escape like the squirrels in the cage of our personality and get into the forest again, we shall shiver with cold and fright. But things will happen to us so that we don’t know ourselves. Cool, unlying life will rush in.

 

Kyoshi

Walking around

an early spring garden–

going nowhere.

 

Winter: A Dirge, Robert Burns

The wintry west extends his blast,
And hail and rain does blaw;
Or the stormy north sends driving forth
The blinding sleet and snaw:
While, tumbling brown, the burn comes down,
And roars frae bank to brae;
And bird and beast in covert rest,
And pass the heartless day.

 

My Last Farewell to Stirling, Robert Burns

Nae lark in transport mounts the sky Or leaves wi’ early plaintive cry, But I will bid a last good-bye, My last farewell to Stirling O.