Contemporary Ethiopian poets: Fekade Azeze
“Yes, I have walked your streets, I have made no strides./ Your secrets are endless, Addis!” Poetry by Fekade Azeze, translated from Amharic by the author and Chris Beckett.
Read Morepoetry
Contemporary Ethiopian poets: Liyou Libsekal
“Always in a flowered dress, always drenched in fate/ you sit, a lakeside lullaby/ a picture of youth then, and forever and forever/ I gnaw on whether you knew near the end…” Poetry by Liyou Libsekal.
Read More
Contemporary Ethiopian poets: Zewdu Milikit
“in the year of the spider —/ everyone’s weaving a ladder/ of cobwebs, and trying/ to fly when they’re falling…”
Poetry by Zewdu Milikit, in Amharic and English.
Contemporary Ethiopian poets: Bewketu Seyoum
“For him/ she is not just a woman:/ she holds the stars in her body, / the earth in her soul….”
Poetry by Bewketu Seyoum, in Amharic and English.
A selection of Q’ene
“We do not respect an angel for his wings/ or because he covers his face with his wings…” A selection of q’ene from Ethiopia, translated by Chris Beckett and Donald Levine.
Read More
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.
Read More
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.
Read More
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.
Read More
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.
Read More
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.
Read More