Category: Poetry
Where Songs Begin
From my volume of Mesoamerican verse, Flower, Song, Dance: Aztec and Mayan Poetry (Lamar University Press 2013). This poem is the first in a collection of Nahuatl songs known as the “Cantares Mexicanos” or Songs of Mexico written down by indigenous scholars in the 16th century. The original title of…
The Labyrinth (Jorge Luis Borges)
Rhyme LII (Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer)
Rhyme LII Giant waves that braying break upon remote, deserted beaches, wrapped in your sheets of foam, take me with you! Hurricane blasts that rip away from the towering woods their withered leaves, dragged along in your blind whirlwind, take me with you! Tempest clouds that the sunbeam breaks and…
In the Wilds There Is a Dead Doe
Ode 1.5 (Horace)
XLII (Catullus)
A Prayer to Aphrodite (Sappho)
A Prayer to Aphrodite On your dappled throne, Aphrodite—deathless, ruse-devising daughter of Zeus: O Lady, never crush my spirit with pain and needless sorrow, I beg you. Rather come—if ever some moment, years past, hearing from afar my despairing voice, you listened, left your father’s great golden halls, and came…
The Fall of Bagdad
Lyrics from Philosophical Zombie
Where Songs Begin

From my volume of Mesoamerican verse, Flower, Song, Dance: Aztec and Mayan Poetry (Lamar University Press 2013). This poem is the first in a collection of Nahuatl songs known as the “Cantares Mexicanos” or Songs of Mexico written down by indigenous scholars in the 16th century. The original title of…
The Labyrinth (Jorge Luis Borges)
Rhyme LII (Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer)

Rhyme LII Giant waves that braying break upon remote, deserted beaches, wrapped in your sheets of foam, take me with you! Hurricane blasts that rip away from the towering woods their withered leaves, dragged along in your blind whirlwind, take me with you! Tempest clouds that the sunbeam breaks and…
In the Wilds There Is a Dead Doe
Ode 1.5 (Horace)
XLII (Catullus)
A Prayer to Aphrodite (Sappho)

A Prayer to Aphrodite On your dappled throne, Aphrodite—deathless, ruse-devising daughter of Zeus: O Lady, never crush my spirit with pain and needless sorrow, I beg you. Rather come—if ever some moment, years past, hearing from afar my despairing voice, you listened, left your father’s great golden halls, and came…