Ethiopian praise poems
“You lime of the forest, honey among the rocks,/ lemon of the cloister, grape in the savannah./ A hip to be enclosed by one hand;/ a thigh round like a piston…” A selection of six Ethiopian praise poems.
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Ethiopian famine poems
“Destitution is building a house./ Destitution is walling me in…” A selection of oral poems about famine, gathered by Fekade Azeze with the help of local schoolchildren in the highlands of Showa.
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Afar war chants
“a man gave twelve cows for a beautiful woman and seventeen days after the wedding/ I came to the bridegroom, armed with my spear…” Two ancient Afar war chants, as recorded by Georges C Savard.
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Translating Amharic Poems
“I have come to believe that much of qÉ™ne poetry is virtually untranslatable, at least in a way that does not compromise its integrity…” Bahrnegash Bellete on the challenges (and rewards) of translating from Amharic to English.
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Sketches and Canticles of Lent (after Shallon Fadlien)
“We know the triumphant end of that old scenario:/ disembowelled shroud, vacant catacomb…” Three poems to mark Easter Sunday, by John Robert Lee.
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Spotlight: Girls at Dhabas
“We were acting on personal frustrations we faced as women navigating Karachi and Lahore, by simply sharing our stories — a political act in its own right — and saying, this is important too…” The Missing Slate’s Afshan Shafi talks to the team behind Girls at Dhabas.
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Millipede
“now I want to return,/ return to that alerted night,/ when you walked on my face/ with a thousand legs like a millipede,/ as if you owned the place…” Weekend poem, by Jeremy Freedman.
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My Weakness
“As a boy I gave a hateful teacher/ a list of one hundred quotes on compassion from the Quran./ He hung a poster of George Bush by the blackboard/ and started purposely mispronouncing my name…” Poem of the Week (March 16), by Kaveh Akbar.
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Two Figures in Superposition
“Look how the words bend/ back and touch themselves;/ or break…” Poem of the Week (March 9), by Fintan Calpin.
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Poet of the Month: Priya Sarukkai Chabria
“Yours is a large question to which I provide partial answers, like fireflies going off…” In our February 2016 Poet of the Month interview, Priya Sarukkai Chabria talks to Pratyusha Prakash.
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