In your Cairo, Tamer, the generals fear another revolt. They are planning to abandon the city and are building a new capital in the middle of the desert to house all the government's thirty ministries and their staff. Everything in the new capital will be the tallest or largest in the Middle East and Africa. It will have a new airport, a monorail, hundreds of colleges, hospitals and schools, forty-thousand hotel rooms, a theme park four times the size of Disneyland, sensors for pollution, sensors for speed, and huge solar-energy farms. The plans do not include low-income housing, but certainly thousands of facial-recognition cameras to track and arrest potential troublemakers. The project will occupy six million acres of desert land. It will siphon water that had been slotted for other towns.
Where sands stretch far away, Adam stands, thronged by guards, adoring his towers;
his slaves milk his lean cows, feed on hard bread and brackish water.
We are pledged to create an extraordinary week of virtual poetry workshops and events for you in the safety of your home. Workshop Faculty: David Baker, Laure-Anne Bosselaar, Traci Brimhall, Eduardo C. Corral, Vievee Francis, Kevin Prufer, Martha Rhodes & Tim Seibles, and more! Apply today!
"Today, even though the Letters to a Young Poet have been in print for nearly a century and translated into English more than half a dozen times, we have the chance to see them afresh, in a genuinely new way, with the discovery and publication of the other half of the story: the letters that the 'Young Poet,' Franz Xaver Kappus, wrote to Rilke."
Poetry Daily stands with the Black community. We oppose racism, oppression, and police brutality. We will continue to amplify diverse voices in the poetry world. Black Lives Matter.
“'The Meteor' starts in the far past, with a blackout: 'tutto annerò.' Annerò—that’s the past remote, a tense that doesn't exist in English. It indicates a past so far past that the present can’t touch it. But Pascoli means to infiltrate, undermine it—which is part of what compels me about the poem. It’s what compels me about translation, too: this vibrant failure of equivalence that brings the past into the present and present into the past."
