Long Cosmopolitan Poems

With my Uyghur poetry translations I am trying to build awareness of the plight of Uyghur poets who are being sent to Chinese "reeducation" concentration camps.

Elegy
by Perhat Tursun
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Asylum seekers, will...

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It was September 
Of one thousand 
Nine hundred seven
The end of summer
With apples lying thickly
Under the apple trees
And the smell of Autumn
Covering the grass
Filled with ripe yellow
And orange squash
He was born in a little
Wooden house...

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They came from as far a way as New York and Dallas Texas. The class of 1981 wasn't a large class, it was the very first class of a very very private school. Their school,...

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If death had a fee I would gladly pay
To see my beloved father everyday
How can I forget this good man
Who left us on the 10th of May
Despite that I prayed to the Lord each and...

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futures cavort below the horizon
  an expectant dawn glows, duly announcing the first born arrival
  tomorrow then forward smiles, feeling good
  half planned momentous moment, ordering fate, shaping survival

  surf wave...

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It was an unusual trip that was planned,
stranger still that my Mother-in-law was the reason.
A wonderful woman who was liked by all who knew her,
kind, gentle, hard working, and grateful for the gift 
of reaching...

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This dread disease that has afflicted my home, 
This malady, this plague on my house;
This making convertible the former quaintness and provincialism thereof 
Into something wholly despicable and disgustingly homogeneous,
Yclept "cosmopolitanism," and "worldliness," and "globalization,"...

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Cosmopolitan suburbs take shape
Seem to form alone, not far from the metropolis
Streets bustle, enlist design by men                  ...

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I hear their idle chatter and wish that sound was optional.
A box checked in a menu, a simple click and forget.

The rapid dilation of my pupils brings me back.
Back to hypnotic aisles of temptation and...

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Back in the day
of exclusively straight white male
anal-retentive missionaries,
the Church

Whether monoculturally Catholic
(which may become an oxymoron
one enlightened day)
or Protestant,

But certainly not polytheistically ecstatic,
like a perfect Thanksgiving meal
shared with EarthMother's sacred
deeply co-passionate
mutually resonant
and co-invested
convivial people

Proclaimed religious...

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When I was in grade school
I was, already, 
on my leftbrain dominant path
toward acting the intellectual snob.

This, in large part
my best offense,
my trump card, sadly,
against marginalizing prejudice
of our community's non-farmer economic
and political Elite;

The few kids
whose...

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Home
Cosmopolitan suburbs take shape
Form, not far from the metropolis
Streets bustle, enlist design, become cities 
Drawn down the street, concrete solid
Buildings line up one by one
In the calm one structure at a time evolves
There on the...

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Helen's brick house
was built by her grandpa James
with a specific design in mind:
the front black cross-windows
riminded one of Christ's sorrows;
when the off-white roll shades opened
the neighboors saw Helen wearing a rosette
on her blouse she herself...

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The implosion of a thought is neither a shred or a shard. In fact it is surely a pulsation of a wisdom whirlpool? Really? How rather radical. And amusing to the laughs of the rhombuses...

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God Is

God is not confused
God is not amused
God is not impressed
God does not watch commercials
God is not the target demographic
God does not buy name brand clothes or slave labor labels
God is not stylish
God is not...

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She looks like a Mede,
talks like a Persian
Got Democrat soft bray skin,
but underneath is
hard tusk tongue Republican

Girl Pharaoh-day
loves to zombie talk Friday,
while sleepwalk listening on Monday

Talking pretty contentious,
looking glossy pretentious

Her Primary job 
is to give...

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Oh you know the type—
the orchid woman

a cosmopolitan who cosmo sips
between snips of gist
her charisma a starship —collides
with your star-full eyes
supernova for Casanova
her pouty lips knit a magazine smile
rows of sugar-white pearls
strung shiny straight
behind wet-red...

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See in my poem
      the most common link
       simple elan
        that is not difficult
   ...

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When the bronze-skinned, 
silver tongue surfer
came smoothly yacht cruising
at year’s end
All the island ladies,
at the cabana house welcoming party,
mosh pit fell in ... 
Fell in love 
with the cosmopolitan thought
of permanently leaving
Loose their dinghy life...

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 Impressions of a teenager

I was born today twenty years ago
A healthy child with eyes of a doe
I grew up in a free world
Saw the national flag unfurled

Sang national anthem with devotion
A hand on my...

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Walking through the contemporary gallery of poems as theme,
where images are painted by the soul with words in a frame.
The calming thoughts like woven sound of streams,
the innermost sense in philosophical conduct it seems.
Pictures and...

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With a cosmopolitan tabloid draped upon her lap,
A girls sits at her vanity wearing an underdress unstrapped.

The woman on the page portrays perfection with a pleasing smile,
Upon her curvy contoured shape she draped in an...

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Raging, fierce winds of Mars
marched across Earth’s skyscape,
	in the season of the decline of Man
Fall of the God-chosen specie,
autumn of impending extinction
Twas an apocalyptic mushroom noon
	when the radioactive rains descended
upon the cities of carnage
War-torn topography...

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She sits in a makeup prison of her own choosing,
mirroring her daytime as a domicile prima donna star
Always craving the wrong kind of attention,
refrigerated happiness is a guilty pleasure given
There’s always plenty of cash and...

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The house is boiled cabbage
goose fat, gizzard stew, and beets.
Windows steam and simmer,
you can write your name on the glass
winter or summer.

If you can live among rutabaga
or borscht; if pickled eggs haunt your palate
then this...

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