Goldfish

Because they're cheap, convenient,
and tough enough to last for days
in a cup of stagnant tap water
sprinkled with a few flakes of food,

we love them. Even their disposal
after death is easy, the way,
in their hearses of flushed toilets,
they drift to their interment

in the sewer. We say they're gold
though they're usually yellow
or orange. Perhaps we love most
the way their flowing fins and tails

belie their homely status as carp,
the way, in flashes of brilliance,
they tinsel our terrible darkness,
lustering the shadows of our skulls.



© by Larry Thomas

http://www.valpo.edu/english/vpr/thomasgoldfish.html

The Ransom

Man has, for paying his ransom,
Two fields of rich, deep, porous rock
That he must clear and cultivate
With the iron of his reason;

To obtain the sorriest rose,
To extort a few ears of grain,
He must water them constantly
With salty sweat from his gray brow.

One is Art and the other Love.
— To win the judge's favor
When the terrible day
Of dispassionate justice dawns,

He will have to show granaries
Filled with harvests and with flowers
Whose forms and colors will
Win the suffrage of the Angels.

— William Aggeler, The Flowers of Evil (Fresno, CA: Academy Library Guild, 1954)



To read the Original in French: http://fleursdumal.org/poem/315