"Sleeping on a Night of Autumn Rain" by Bai Juyi

It's cold this night in autumn's third month,
Peacefully within, a lone old man.
He lies down late, the lamp already gone out,
And beautifully sleeps amid the sound of rain.
The ash inside the vessel still warm from the fire,
Its fragrance increases the warmth of quilt and covers.
When dawn comes, clear and cold, he does not rise,
The red frosted leaves cover the steps.

"Another September" by Thomas Kinsella

Dreams fled away, this country bedroom, raw
With the touch of the dawn, wrapped in a minor peace,
Hears through an open window the garden draw
Long pitch black breaths, lay bare its apple trees,
Ripe pear trees, brambles, windfall-sweetened soil,
Exhale rough sweetness against the starry slates.
Nearer the river sleeps St. John’s, all toil
Locked fast inside a dream with iron gates.

Domestic Autumn, like an animal
Long used to handling by those countrymen,
Rubs her kind hide against the bedroom wall
Sensing a fragrant child come back again
—Not this half-tolerated consciousness,
Its own cold season never done,
But that unspeaking daughter, growing less
Familiar where we fell asleep as one.

Wakeful moth-wings blunder near a chair,
Toss their light shell at the glass, and go
To inhabit the living starlight. Stranded hair
Stirs on the still linen. It is as though
The black breathing that billows her sleep, her name,
Drugged under judgement, waned and—bearing daggers
And balances—down the lampless darkness they came,
Moving like women: Justice, Truth, such figures. 

Peter Brown Hon

"Tattoo" by Muhammad al-Maghut

 

Now, in the third hour of the twentieth century,
when only asphalt separates the corpses
from the shoes of pedestrians,
I’ll lie down in the middle of the street
like an old Bedouin, and won’t get up
unless the prison bars and files on the world’s suspects
are gathered
before me to chew on, like a camel at a crossroad;
unless the sticks of policemen and demonstrators
drop from their hands
and become again blooming branches
in the forest.
I laugh,
cry and write in the dark
until my pen is indistinguishable from my fingers.
Whenever I hear a knock on the door, or see a curtain move
I cover my papers with my hand
like a prostitute in a raid.
Whoever gave me this fear,
this blood apprehensive as a mountain panther’s?