Rilke, "Abschied"

A work ("Farewell") by this Austrian poet.  You can read the original here.

And now I've felt what farewell costs.   
I know it as unwounded, dark, 
And cruel, aflame with beauty's spark,
Shown once and held, then smothered, lost.

Defenseless, I, to look upon
What calls me here, am left behind,
As if all women were unkind, 
Yet small and white, they act as one:

A wave no longer mine, I fear,
A wave again, now faint and slight;
A plum tree which may fade from sight
Just as the cuckoo quits its pier. 

Borges, "Adam Cast Forth"

A poem (original title in English) by this Argentine.  You can read the original here.

Was there a garden or was it a dream?
Myself I asked, in fading light so slow.
And if the past, it comforts me to know,
Now Adam's own and sad, were but sleep's reams,

No realer than a magical, mad hoax
Of God?  All has been rendered imprecise
In memory, that clearest Paradise,
Exist it must, and will endure in hopes.

But not for me.  The stubborn dirt we shift
Has exiled me, red internecine spray
Of Cains and Abels and descendants' dread.
But to have loved remains our greatest gift.

To have been happy and to have touched
The living Garden, if but for one day.

Borges, "Poema de los dones"

A work ("Poem of the gifts") by this Argentine writer.  You can read the original here.

May none in tears or with reproach then slight         
God's statement of His mastery, 
Who, with majestic irony,                    
Gave me at once both these books and the night.      

Of these books, now a city, lightless eyes         
He made the owners; eyes, it seems,      
Which in the libraries of dreams                     
Could only read some foolish tracts that tie         

The sun-ups to their zeal.  In vain the day        
Upon them foists its endless tomes;          
As toilsome as those ancient rolls        
That once in Alexandria decayed.                      

From hunger and from thirst (says a Greek tale) 
Near fonts and gardens dies a king; 
Such confines I roam, tiring          
Of this blind library, deep, blind, and pale.              

Encyclopedias, atlases, the East,             
The West, centuries, dynasties,            
Cosmos, symbols, cosmogonies             
Are fêted by these walls, if uselessly.              

Slow in my shade, this hollow darkness free 
With doubting cane I will entice;          
I, who imagined Paradise                     
As being but a kind of library.                 

Some thing that certainly does not entail 
That broad word "chance" – it rules these things;      
Once, many blurry evenings        
Another lost to books and to our shade. 

As through slow galleries I go astray,         
One sacred horror likes this plan:   
That I'm this other, the dead man,      
Perhaps with the same steps on those same days. 

What matters then that word which forms my name,              
(Which of us two has this verse spun,
Of plural I and shadow one?)    
When our anathema is but the same?          

Groussac or Borges, I thus gaze upon   
Our world, unforming, fading fast    
To palest and uncertain ash,                            
Akin to sleep or mere oblivion.                 

Pushkin, "Поэт"

Another masterpiece ("The Poet") by this Russian poet.  You can read the original here.

Until he hears Apollo's voice
By sacred immolation's fire,                  
The world's vain cares will not inspire      
The poet, burdened against choice.     
By holy harp in silent thrall,                      
His soul will taste but chilling sleep,                    
And from the world's most artless keep,
Perhaps is he the worst of all.          

For only words of root divine                              
Could ever reach his pristine sounds;                 
Entranced, the poet's soul abounds
An eagle waking at a sign.     
No worldly pleasures; no, instead        
So alien to the rabble's talk,       
At icon's feet will he then balk, 
Refuse to bend his haughty head; 
And wild and fierce, he will but flee 
Full of commotion and of sound,
To shores of empty waves aground, 
To oaks still louder than the sea.

Esenin, "Мне грустно на тебя смотреть"

A work ("To look at you so saddens me") by this poet.  The original can be found here.

To look at you so saddens me:
What pain! What pity!  For I know
We’ve but the copper willow tree
In this September left to show.

Another’s lips have come to feel
Your warmth and bodily convulse,
As if soft rain were to reveal
A heart deprived of mortal pulse.

But anyway, I fear him not,
Another joy has since obtained.
You see, everything that remained
Is only damp and yellowed rot. 

Myself I never had preserved
For peaceful life, much less for smiles.
I’ve walked already so few miles,
By so many mistakes unnerved.

Life’s laughable in its off–tones
So it has been, so it will stay:
A cemetery, as gnawed bones
Of birch tree in a garden lay.

So this is how we wither, fade,
And quell our noise like garden guests.
If winter flowers so forbade,
For them one then should not distress.