Just Americans.


    "Who Shapes the Carven Word

Who shapes the carven word, the lean, true line,
And builds with syllable and chiselled phrase,
To rear a sheltering temple and a shrine
To house a dream through brief and meagre days

Must know that time wears words away like stone
And blurs the sharpness of the clean, straight thought;
A ghost will wander out and leave alone
And tenantless the temple that he wrought.

This will be ruins for another day,
Of lichen-bitten stone and empty tower,
A tumbled shrine whose god has moved away...
Yet later-comers, in some moon-hushed hour,
May find a strange light haunting still the shade,
And footprints that no mortal feet had made."

--David Morton, Anthology of Magazine Verse 1925


"It is written that Iblis's muezzin will be music." --Lyda Morehouse, Messiah Node (2003)


'...Shagreen--not virgin soil!
In the blue light a trawl
Of plum. It's the fourth day
And no countable year at all.'

--Marina Tsvetaeva, The Ratcatcher (tr Angela Livingstone, 1999)


'even when the hands have stopped moving
there's life in the eyes'

--Ghalib, Ghazal xxxvi (tr Merwin)