Cloud Poetry

Selected poems of Edith Wharton, the first female writer to win the Pulitzer Prize.

Short stories from Jorge Luis Borges’ “The Widow Ching - Pirate”

Dealing with themes of decadence and eroticism, Les fleurs du mal, Charles Baudelaire’s volume of poems first published in 1857, was enormously influential in the symbolist and modernist literature movements. Read in French and English.

Kenkō was born in 1283 to a Kyoto family of hereditary Shinto priests. His times demanded adaptability to an often inconsistent and multi-layered world, and he was a man well suited to his times.

Short stories from We Others

A selection of poems by the French poet Louis Aragon: Avec André Breton, Paul Éluard, Philippe Soupault, il fut l’un des animateurs du dadaïsme parisien et du surréalisme.

La chanson bien douce

Paul Verlaine

Écoutez la chanson bien douce

Qui ne pleure que pour vous plaire.

Elle est discrète, elle est légère:

Un frisson d’eau sur de la mousse.

La voix vous fut connue (et chère?),

Mais à présent elle est voilée

Comme une veuve désolée,

Pourtant comme elle encore fière,

Et dans les longs plis de son voile

Qui palpite aux brises d'automne,

Cache et montre au cœur qui s'étonne

La vérité comme une étoile.

Elle dit, la voix reconnue,

Que la bonté c'est notre vie,

Que de la haine et de I' envie

Rien ne reste, la mort venue.

Accueillez la voix qui persiste

Dans son naïf épithalame.

Allez, rien n'est meilleur à I' âme

Que de faire une âme moins triste.

Elle est en peine et de passage,

L'âme qui souffre sans colère

Et comme sa morale est claire …

Écoutez la chanson bien sage.

Xi’an of Eight Rivers. China is made of earth, of sun-dried mud.

In this part of China everything is made from the earth:

the houses, the walls around cities, and villages,

the tombs scattered over the countryside.

Even the people.

There are hills below that appear to be piles of mud

set out to dry in the sun, naked,

without a single tree or bush.

They crowd around the landscape

like the coils of bulging intestines

tossed on the ground outside butchers' shops,

slowly unraveling.

Sometimes we fly so low that we almost touch them.

And then I notice that the wind has brushed

some kind of pattern into the earth: a mysterious alphabet

written in the mud,

struggling to communicate something precise.

But there is not a single animal

or human being in the yellow desert below.

Not a single village.

Suddenly we are landing: Xian,

the geographic center of China,

where Chinese civilization was born,

in the cradle of the Yellow River.

In front of the terminal,

three children are playing with a lump of earth:

they are bundled up in jackets

and brightly printed cotton trousers.

I join them in their game

until a young woman comes out of the terminal

to call me in for dinner.

One of the children grabs me by my overcoat,

to keep me from leaving.

So do the other two, clinging to me,

asking me not to go.

The young woman comes out again,

and yells at them to stop.

They let go, disappointed.

One of them calls to me as I turn away:

Come back soon!

We eat quickly and then prepare to take off for Lanchow.

My three new friends wave goodbye to me. The littlest one

gives me a present: a pebble,

a precious gift.

In this part of China there are no stones.

You have to go to Karelia to find stone,

very far north; or to the Caucasus;

or to southern Siberia, along the slopes of the Pamir,

slanting toward the steppes of Central Asia.

I put the pebble in my pocket,

to take back home, to show what a precious gift

I was given by a little Chinese girl: a pebble

from the cradle of Chinese civilization.

A civilization made of earth,

a civilization without bones,

without a skeleton for support.

A civilization of assembled customs,

which suddenly unravel,

dissolving into thousands of separate gestures,

thousands of calligraphic icons,

thousands of smells, colors, flavors,

thousands of different shades. And then just as suddenly

they solidify again into tradition, memory, habit.

It is this absence of stone, of solid, durable material,

which makes China such an exquisite thing.

Everything is reflected:

an unimaginable number of movements,

of patterns, thoughts, images,

of which we see the copies in immense numbers,

but never the originals.

The originals were destroyed long ago.

Here are the four elements out of which China is made:

Earth, Wood, Porcelain, Silk.

The most durable of these is Silk.

I should add a fifth element: Poetry,

which is the most durable of all.

“Funny, the way we come to understand a place by wanting to escape it”

Latin creates a sense of sacred space and time to help focus on the sense of God’s otherness.