THE TRUCE AND THE PEACE

 

11

​

Peace to the world in time or in a year,  
But always all our lives this peace was ours.  
Peace is not hard to have, it lies more near  
Than breathing to the breast. When brigand powers  
Of anger or pain or the sick dream of sin  
Break our soul’s house outside the ruins we weep. 
We look through the breached wall, why there within 
All the red while our peace was lying asleep. 
Smiling in dreams while the broad knives drank blood, 
The robbers triumphed, the roof burned overhead, 
The eternal living and untroubled God 
Lying asleep upon a lily bed. 
Men screamed, the bugles screamed, walls broke in the air,  
We never knew till then that He was there.

​

Robinson Jeffers, October 21, 2024 

 

 

 

THE TRUCE AND THE PEACE

 

10

​

All in a simple innocence I strove 
To give myself away to any power, 
Wasting on women’s bodies wealth of love,  
Worshiping every sunrise mountain tower; 
Some failure mocked me still denying perfection, 
Parts of me might be spended not the whole, 
I sought of wine surrender and self-correction, 
I failed, I could not give away my soul. 
Again seeking to give myself I sought 
Outward in vain through all things, out through God,  
And tried all heights, all gulfs, all dreams, all thought.  
I found this wisdom on the wonderful road, 
The essential Me cannot be given away, 
The single Eye, God cased in blood-shot clay.

​

Robinson Jeffers, October 18, 2024 

 

 

 

THE TRUCE AND THE PEACE

 

9

​

It does not worship him, it will not serve. 
And death and life within that Eye combine, 
Within that only untorturable nerve 
Of those that make a man, within that shrine 
Which there is nothing ever can profane, 
Where life and death are sister and brother and lovers, 
The golden voice of Christ were heard in vain, 
The holy spirit of God visibly hovers. 
Small-breasted girls, lithe women heavy-haired, 
Loves that once grew into our nerves and veins, 
Yours Freedom was desire that deeper dared 
To the citadel where mastery remains,  
Yours to the spirit … discount the penny that is  
Ungivable, this Eye, this God, this Peace.

​

Robinson Jeffers, October 14, 2024 

 

 

 

THE TRUCE AND THE PEACE

 

8

​

That ice within the soul, the admonisher 
Of madness when we’re wildest, the unwinking eye  
That measures all things with indifferent stare,  
Choosing far stars to check near objects by,  
That quiet lake inside and underneath, 
Strong, undisturbed by any angel of strife, 
Being so tranquil seems the presence of death,  
Being so central seems the essence of life. 
Is it perhaps that death and life make truce 
In neutral zone while their old feud beyond 
Fires the towered cities? Surely for a strange use  
He sphered that eye of flawless diamond. 
It does not serve him but with line and rod  
Measures him, how indeed should God serve God?

​

Robinson Jeffers, October 11, 2024 

 

 

 

THE TRUCE AND THE PEACE

 

7

​

After all, after all we endured, who has grown wise?  
We take our mortal momentary hour 
With too much gesture, the derisive skies 
Twinkle against our wrongs, our rights, our power. 
Look up the night, starlight’s a steadying draught 
For nerves at angry tension. They have all meant well, 
Our enemies and the knaves at whom we’ve laughed, 
The liars, the clowns in office, the kings in hell, 
They have all meant well in the main… some of them tried 
The mountain road of tolerance … They have made war, 
Conspired, oppressed, robbed, murdered, lied and lied, 
Meant well, played the loud fool … and star by star 
Winter Orion pursues the Pleiades 
In pale and huge parade, silence and peace.

​

Robinson Jeffers, October 7, 2024 

 

 

 

THE TRUCE AND THE PEACE

 

6

​

Women cried that morning, bells rocked with mirth, 
We all were glad a long while afterward, 
But still in dreary places of the earth 
A hundred hardly fed shall labor hard 
To clothe one belly and stuff it with soft meat, 
Blood paid for peace but still those poor shall buy it,  
This sweat of slaves is no good wine but yet  
Sometimes it climbs to the brain. Be happy and quiet,  
Be happy and live, be quiet or God might wake. 
He sleeps in the mountain that is heart of man’s heart,  
He also in promontory fists, and make 
Of stubborn-muscled limbs, he will not start 
For a little thing … his great hands grope, unclose,  
Feel out for the main pillars … pull down the house …

​

Robinson Jeffers, October 4, 2024 

 

​

 

THE TRUCE AND THE PEACE

 

5

​

South of the Big Sur River up the hill 
Three graves are marked thick weeds and grasses heap,  
Under the forest there I have stood still 
Hours, thinking it the sweetest place to sleep …  
Strewing all-sufficient death with compliments 
Sincere and unrequired, coveting peace. 
Boards at the head not stones, the text’s rude paints  
Mossed, rain-rubbed … wasting hours of scanty lease  
To admire their peace made perfect. From that height  
But for the trees the whole valley might be seen, 
But for the heavy dirt, the eye-pits no light 
Enters, the heavy dirt, the grass growing green 
Over the dirt, the molelike secretness, 
The immense withdrawal, the dirt, the quiet, the peace.

​

Robinson Jeffers, September 30, 2024

 

 

 

THE TRUCE AND THE PEACE

 

4

​

Peace now poor earth. They fought for freedom’s sake,  
She was starving in a corner while they fought.  
They knew not whom they stabbed by Onega Lake,  
Whom lashed from Archangel, whom loved, whom sought.  
How can she die, she is the blood unborn,  
The energy in earth’s arteries beating red,  
The world will flame with her in some great morn,  
The whole great world flame with her, and we be dead.  
Here in the west it grows by dim degrees,  
In the east flashed and will flame terror and light.  
Peace now poor earth, peace to that holier peace  
Deep in the soul held secret from all sight.  
That crystal, the pure home, the holier peace,  
Fires flaw not, scars the cruelest cannot crease.

​

Robinson Jeffers, September 27, 2024

 

 

 

THE TRUCE AND THE PEACE

 

3

​

Peace to the world in time or in a year,

In the inner world I have touched the instant peace.

Man’s soul’s a flawless crystal coldly clear,

A cold white mansion that he yields in lease

To tenant dreams and tyrants from the brain

And riotous burnings of the lovelier flesh.

We pour strange wines and purples all in vain.

The crystal remains pure, the mansion fresh.

All the Asian bacchanals and those from Thrace

Lived there and left no wine-mark on the walls.

What were they doing in that more sacred place

All the Asian and the Thracian bacchanals?

Peace to the world to-morrow or in a year,

Peace in that mansion white, that crystal clear.

​

Robinson Jeffers, September 23, 2024

 

 

 

THE TRUCE AND THE PEACE

 

2

​

Peace now, though purgatory fires were hot

They always had a heart something like ice

That coldly peered and wondered, suffering not

Nor pleased in any park, nor paradise

Of slightly swelling breasts and beautiful arms

And throat engorged with very carnal blood.

It coldly peered and wondered, ‘Strong God your charms

Are glorious, I remember solitude.

Before youth towered we knew a time of truth

To have eyes was nearly rapture.’ Peace now, for war

Will find the cave that childhood found and youth.

Ten million lives are stolen and not one star

Dulled; wars die out, life will die out, death cease,

Beauty lives always and the beauty of peace.

​

Robinson Jeffers, September 20, 2024

 

 

 

THE TRUCE AND THE PEACE 

 

1 

​

Peace now for every fury has had her day, 
Their natural make is moribund, they cease, 
They carry the inward seeds of quick decay, 
Build breakwaters for storm but build on peace.  
The mountains’ peace answers the peace of the stars,  
Our petulances are cracked against their term.  
God built our peace and plastered it with wars,  
Those frescoes fade, flake off, peace remains firm.  
In the beginning before light began 
We lay or fluttered blind in burdened wombs,  
And like that first so is the last of man, 
When under death for husband the amorous tombs  
Are covered and conceive; nine months go by 
No midwife called, nine years no baby’s cry.

​

Robinson Jeffers, September 16, 2024

 

 

 

A MAP OF THE WESTERN PART OF THE COUNTY OF ESSEX

IN ENGLAND

​

Something forgotten for twenty years: though my fathers 
and mothers came from Cordova and Vitepsk and Caernarvon, 
and though I am a citizen of the United States and less a 
stranger here than anywhere else, perhaps, 
I am Essex-born: 
Cranbrook Wash called me into its dark tunnel, 
the little streams of Valentines heard my resolves, 
Roding held my head above water when I thought it was 
drowning me; in Hainault only a haze of thin trees 
stood between the red doubledecker buses and the boar-hunt, 
the spirit of merciful Phillipa glimmered there. 
Pergo Park knew me, and Clavering, and Havering-atte-Bower, 
Stanford Rivers lost me in osier beds, Stapleford Abbots 
sent me safe home on the dark road after Simeon-quiet evensong, 
Wanstead drew me over and over into its basic poetry, 
in its serpentine lake I saw bass-viols among the golden dead leaves, 
through its trees the ghost of a great house. In 
Ilford High Road I saw the multitudes passing pale under the 
light of flaring sundown, seven kings 
in somber starry robes gathered at Seven Kings 
the place of law 
where my birth and marriage are recorded 
and the death of my father. Woodford Wells 
where an old house was called The Naked Beauty (a white 
statue forlorn in its garden) 
saw the meeting and parting of two sisters, 
(forgotten? and further away 
the hill before Thaxted? where peace befell us? not once 
but many times?). 
All the Ivans dreaming of their villages 
all the Marias dreaming of their walled cities, 
picking up fragments of New World slowly, 
not knowing how to put them together nor how to join 
image with image, now I know how it was with you, an old map 
made long before I was born shows ancient 
rights of way where I walked when I was ten burning with desire 
for the world's great splendors, a child who traced voyages 
indelibly all over the atlas, who now in a far country 
remembers the first river, the first 
field, bricks and lumber dumped in it ready for building, 
that new smell, and remembers 
the walls of the garden, the first light.

​

Denise Levertov, September 13, 2024

 

 

 

MONEY

 

Quarterly, is it, money reproaches me: 
   'Why do you let me lie here wastefully? 
I am all you never had of goods and sex,
   You could get them still by writing a few cheques.'
   
So I look at others, what they do with theirs:
   They certainly don't keep it upstairs.
By now they've a second house and car and wife:
   Clearly money has something to do with life 
   
- In fact, they've a lot in common, if you enquire:
   You can't put off being young until you retire,
And however you bank your screw, the money you save
   Won't in the end buy you more than a shave.
   
I listen to money singing. It's like looking down
   From long French windows at a provincial town,
The slums, the canal, the churches ornate and mad
   In the evening sun. It is intensely sad.

​

Philip Larkin, September 9, 2024

 

 

 

IN EXCELSIS

 

It is half winter, half spring,
and Barbara and I are standing
confronting the ocean.
Its mouth is open very wide,
and it has dug up its green,
throwing it, throwing it at the shore.
You say it is angry.
I say it is like a kicked Madonna.
Its womb collapses, drunk with its fever.
We breathe in its fury.

I, the inlander,
am here with you for just a small space.
I am almost afraid,
so long gone from the sea.
I have seen her smooth as a cheek.
I have seen her easy,
doing her business,
lapping in.
I have seen her rolling her hoops of blue.
I have seen her tear the land off.
I have seen her drown me twice,
and yet not take me.
You tell me that as the green drains backward
it covers Britain,
but have you never stood on that shore
and seen it cover you?

We have come to worship,
the tongues of the surf are prayers,
and we vow,
the unspeakable vow.
Both silently.
Both differently.
I wish to enter her like a dream,
leaving my roots here on the beach
like a pan of knives.
And my past to unravel, with its knots and snarls,
and walk into ocean,
letting it explode over me
and outward, where I would drink the moon
and my clothes would slip away,
and I would sink into the great mother arms
I never had,
except here where the abyss
throws itself on the sand
blow by blow,
over and over,
and we stand on the shore
loving its pulse
as it swallows the stars,
and has since it all began
and will continue into oblivion,
past our knowing
and the wild toppling green that enters us today,
for a small time
in half winter, half spring.

​

Ann Sexton, September 6, 2024

 

 

 

DEATH & CO.

 

Two, of course there are two.
It seems perfectly natural now--
The one who never looks up, whose eyes are lidded
And balled¸ like Blake's.
Who exhibits

 

The birthmarks that are his trademark--
The scald scar of water,
The nude
Verdigris of the condor.
I am red meat. His beak

 

Claps sidewise: I am not his yet.
He tells me how badly I photograph.
He tells me how sweet
The babies look in their hospital
Icebox, a simple

 

Frill at the neck
Then the flutings of their Ionian
Death-gowns.
Then two little feet.
He does not smile or smoke.

 

The other does that
His hair long and plausive
Bastard
Masturbating a glitter
He wants to be loved.

 

I do not stir.
The frost makes a flower,
The dew makes a star,
The dead bell,
The dead bell.

 

Somebody's done for.

​

Sylvia Plath, September 2, 2024

 

​

 

QUIA ABSURDUM

 

Guard yourself from the terrible empty light of space, the bottomless
Pool of the stars. (Expose yourself to it: you might learn something.)

Guard yourself from perceiving the inherent nastiness of man and woman.
(Expose yourself to it: you might learn something.)

Faith, as they now confess, is preposterous, an act of will. Choose the Christian sheep-cote
Or the Communist rat-fight: faith will cover your head from the man-devouring stars.

​

Robinson Jeffers, August 30, 2024

 

 

 

THE DEATH KING

 

I hired a carpenter
to build my coffin
and last night I lay in it,
braced by a pillow,
sniffing the wood,
letting the old king
breathe on me,
thinking of my poor murdered body,
murdered by time,
waiting to turn stiff as a field marshal,
letting the silence dishonor me,
remembering that I'll never cough again.

Death will be the end of fear
and the fear of dying,
fear like a dog stuffed in my mouth,
feal like dung stuffed up my nose,
fear where water turns into steel,
fear as my breast flies into the Disposall,
fear as flies tremble in my ear,
fear as the sun ignites in my lap,
fear as night can't be shut off,
and the dawn, my habitual dawn,
is locked up forever.

Fear and a coffin to lie in
like a dead potato.
Even then I will dance in my dire clothes,
a crematory flight,
blinding my hair and my fingers,
wounding God with his blue face,
his tyranny, his absolute kingdom,
with my aphrodisiac.

​

Anne Sexton, August 26, 2024

 

 

 

RIMBAUD

​

The nights, the railway-arches, the bad sky,
His horrible companions did not know it;
But in that child the rhetorician’s lie
Burst like a pipe: the cold had made a poet.

​

Drinks bought him by his weak and lyric friend
His five wits systematically deranged,
To all accustomed nonsense put an end;
Till he from lyre and weakness was estranged.

​

Verse was a special illness of the ear;
Integrity was not enough; that seemed
The hell of childhood: he must try again.

​

Now, galloping through Africa, he dreamed
Of a new self, a son, an engineer,
His truth acceptable to lying men.

​

Wystan Hugh Auden, August 23, 2024

 

 

 

MOTHER, SUMMER, I

 

My mother, who hates thunder storms,  
Holds up each summer day and shakes  
It out suspiciously, lest swarms  
Of grape-dark clouds are lurking there;  
But when the August weather breaks  
And rains begin, and brittle frost  
Sharpens the bird-abandoned air,  
Her worried summer look is lost.
 
And I her son, though summer-born  
And summer-loving, none the less  
Am easier when the leaves are gone; 
Too often summer days appear  
Emblems of perfect happiness  
I can't confront: I must await  
A time less bold, less rich, less clear:  
An autumn more appropriate.  

 

Philip Larkin, August 19, 2024

 

 

 

PATRONYMIC

 

What ancestor of mine in wet Wales or wild Scotland

Was named Godfrey? – from which by the Anglo-French erosion

Geoffrey, Jeffry’s son, Jeffry’s, Jeffers in Ireland –

A totally undistinguished man; the whirlwinds of history

Passed him and passed him by. They marked him no doubt,

Hurt him or helped him, they rolled over his head

And he I suppose fought back, but entirely unnoticed;

Nothing of him remains. 

 

                                                I should like to meet him,

And sit beside him, drinking his muddy beer,

Talking about the Norman nobles and parish politics

And the damned foreigners: I think his tales of woe

Would be as queer as ours, and even farther

From reality.  His mind was as quick as ours

But perhaps even more credulous.

 

                                                  He was a Christian

No doubt – I am not dreaming back into prehistory –

And christened Godfrey, which means the peace of God.

He never in his life found it, when he died it found him.

He has been dead six or eight centuries,

Mouldering in some forgotten British graveyard, nettles and rain-slime.

 

Nettlebed: I remember a place in Oxfordshire,

That prickly name, I have twisted and turned on a bed of nettles      

All my life long: an apt name for life: nettlebed.

Deep under it swim the dead, down the dark tides and bloodshot eras of

    time, bathed in God’s peace.

 

Robinson Jeffers, August 16, 2024

 

 

 

WORDS

Axes
After whose stroke the wood rings,
And the echoes!
Echoes traveling
Off from the center like horses.

The sap
Wells like tears, like the
Water striving
To re-establish its mirror
Over the rock

That drops and turns,
A white skull,
Eaten by weedy greens.
Years later I
Encounter them on the road-

Words dry and riderless,
The indefatigable hoof-taps.
While
From the bottom of the pool, fixed stars
Govern a life.

​

Sylvia Plath, August 12, 2024

 

​

​

SIGN-POST

Civilized, crying: how to be human again; this will tell you how.
Turn outward, love things, not men, turn right away from humanity,
Let that doll lie. Consider if you like how the lilies grow,
Lean on the silent rock until you feel its divinity
Make your veins cold; look at the silent stars, let your eyes
Climb the great ladder out of the pit of yourself and man.
Things are so beautiful, your love will follow your eyes;
Things are the God; you will love God and not in vain,
For what we love, we grow to it, we share its nature. At length
You will look back along the star's rays and see that even
The poor doll humanity has a place under heaven.
Its qualities repair their mosaic around you, the chips of strength
And sickness; but now you are free, even to be human,
But born of the rock and the air, not of a woman.

 

Robinson Jeffers, August 9, 2024

​

​

​

WAYS OF CONQUEST

You invaded my country by accident,
not knowing you had crossed the border.
Vines that grew there touched you.
You ran past them,
shaking raindrops off the leaves – you or the wind.
It was toward the hills you ran,
inland –

I invaded your country with all my
'passionate intensity',
pontoons and parachutes of my blindness.
But living now in the suburbs of the capital
incognito,
my will to take the heart of the city
has dwindled. I love
its unsuspecting life,
its adolescents who come to tell me their dreams in the dusty park
among the rocks and benches,
I the stranger who will listen.
I love
the wild herons who return each year to the marshy outskirts.
What I invaded has
invaded me.

 

Denise Levertov, August 5, 2024

 

 

 

THE WIFEBEATER

There will be mud on the carpet tonight
and blood in the gravy as well.
The wifebeater is out,
the childbeater is out
eating soil and drinking bullets from a cup.
He strides back and forth
in front of my study window
chewing little red pieces of my heart.
His eyes flash like a birthday cake
and he makes bread out of rock.
Yesterday he was walking
like a man in the world.
He was upright and conservative
but somehow evasive, somehow contagious.
Yesterday he built me a country
and laid out a shadow where I could sleep
but today a coffin for the madonna and child,
today two women in baby clothes will be hamburg.
With a tongue like a razor he will kiss,
the mother, the child,
and we three will color the stars black
in memory of his mother
who kept him chained to the food tree
or turned him on and off like a water faucet
and made women through all these hazy years
the enemy with a heart of lies.
Tonight all the red dogs lie down in fear
and the wife and daughter knit into each other
until they are killed.
 

Anne Sexton, August 2, 2024

 

 

 

HERE

​

Swerving east, from rich industrial shadows
And traffic all night north; swerving through fields
Too thin and thistled to be called meadows,
And now and then a harsh-named halt, that shields
Workmen at dawn; swerving to solitude
Of skies and scarecrows, haystacks, hares and pheasants,
And the widening river's slow presence,
The piled gold clouds, the shining gull-marked mud,

Gathers to the surprise of a large town:
Here domes and statues, spires and cranes cluster
Beside grain-scattered streets, barge-crowded water,
And residents from raw estates, brought down
The dead straight miles by stealing flat-faced trolleys,
Push through plate-glass swing doors to their desires—
Cheap suits, red kitchen-ware, sharp shoes, iced lollies,
Electric mixers, toasters, washers, driers—

A cut-price crowd, urban yet simple, dwelling
Where only salesmen and relations come
Within a terminate and fishy-smelling
Pastoral of ships up streets, the slave museum,
Tattoo-shops, consulates, grim head-scarfed wives;
And out beyond its mortgaged half-build edges
Fast-shadowed wheat-fields, running high as hedges,
Isolate villages where removed lives

Loneliness clarifies. Here silence stands
Like heat. Here leaves unnoticed thicken,
Hidden weeds flower, neglected waters quicken,
Luminously-peopled air ascends;
And past the poppies bluish neutral distance
Ends the land suddenly beyond a beach
Of shapes and shingles. Here is unfettered existence:
Facing the sun, untalkative, out of reach.

 

Philip Larkin, July 29, 2024

 

 

 

A BIRTHDAY PRESENT

 

What is this, behind this veil, is it ugly, is it beautiful?
It is shimmering, has it breasts, has it edges?

I am sure it is unique, I am sure it is what I want.
When I am quiet at my cooking I feel it looking, I feel it thinking

'Is this the one I am too appear for,
Is this the elect one, the one with black eye-pits and a scar?

Measuring the flour, cutting off the surplus,
Adhering to rules, to rules, to rules.

Is this the one for the annunciation?
My god, what a laugh!'

But it shimmers, it does not stop, and I think it wants me.
I would not mind if it were bones, or a pearl button.

I do not want much of a present, anyway, this year.
After all I am alive only by accident.

I would have killed myself gladly that time any possible way.
Now there are these veils, shimmering like curtains,

The diaphanous satins of a January window
White as babies' bedding and glittering with dead breath. O ivory!

It must be a tusk there, a ghost column.
Can you not see I do not mind what it is.

Can you not give it to me?
Do not be ashamed—I do not mind if it is small.

Do not be mean, I am ready for enormity.
Let us sit down to it, one on either side, admiring the gleam,

The glaze, the mirrory variety of it.
Let us eat our last supper at it, like a hospital plate.

I know why you will not give it to me,
You are terrified

The world will go up in a shriek, and your head with it,
Bossed, brazen, an antique shield,

A marvel to your great-grandchildren.
Do not be afraid, it is not so.

I will only take it and go aside quietly.
You will not even hear me opening it, no paper crackle,

No falling ribbons, no scream at the end.
I do not think you credit me with this discretion.

If you only knew how the veils were killing my days.
To you they are only transparencies, clear air.

But my god, the clouds are like cotton.
Armies of them. They are carbon monoxide.

Sweetly, sweetly I breathe in,
Filling my veins with invisibles, with the million

Probable motes that tick the years off my life.
You are silver-suited for the occasion. O adding machine—

Is it impossible for you to let something go and have it go whole?
Must you stamp each piece purple,

Must you kill what you can?
There is one thing I want today, and only you can give it to me.

It stands at my window, big as the sky.
It breathes from my sheets, the cold dead center

Where split lives congeal and stiffen to history.
Let it not come by the mail, finger by finger.

Let it not come by word of mouth, I should be sixty
By the time the whole of it was delivered, and too numb to use it.

Only let down the veil, the veil, the veil.
If it were death

I would admire the deep gravity of it, its timeless eyes.
I would know you were serious.

There would be a nobility then, there would be a birthday.
And the knife not carve, but enter

Pure and clean as the cry of a baby,
And the universe slide from my side.

 

Sylvia Plath, July 26, 2024

 

 

 

HOUSWIFE

 

Some women marry houses.

It’s another kind of skin; it has a heart,

a mouth, a liver and bowel movements.

The walls are permanent and pink.

See how she sits on her knees all day,

faithfully washing herself down.

Men enter by force, drawn back like Jonah

into their fleshy mothers.

A woman is her mother.

That’s the main thing.

 

Anne Sexton, July 22, 2024

 

 

​

LULLABY FOR THE CAT

​

Minnow, go to sleep and dream,
Close your great big eyes;
Round your bed Events prepare
The pleasantest surprise.

Darling Minnow, drop that frown,
Just cooperate,
Not a kitten shall be drowned
In the Marxist State.

Joy and Love will both be yours,
Minnow, don't be glum.
Happy days are coming soon —
Sleep, and let them come…

 

Elizabeth Bishop, July 19, 2024

 

 

 

NOTHING TO BE SAID

 

For nations vague as weed,
For nomads among stones,
Small-statured cross-faced tribes
And cobble-close families
In mill-towns on dark mornings
Life is slow dying.

So are their separate ways
Of building, benediction,
Measuring love and money
Ways of slowly dying.
The day spent hunting pig 
Or holding a garden-party,

Hours giving evidence
Or birth, advance
On death equally slowly.
And saying so to some
Means nothing; others it leaves
Nothing to be said.

​

Philip Larkin, July 15, 2024

 

 

 

THE NOVEL

 

A wind is blowing. The book being written
shifts, halts, pages
yellow and white drawing apart
and inching together in
new tries. A single white half sheet
skims out under the door.

 

And cramped in their not yet
halfwritten lives, a man and a woman
grimace in pain. Their cat
yawning its animal secret,
stirs in the monstrous limbo of erasure.
They live (when they live) in fear

 

of blinding, of burning, of choking under a
mushroom cloud in the year of the roach.
And they want (like us) the eternity
of today, they want this fear to be
struck out at once by a thick black
magic marker, everywhere, every page,

 

the whole sheets of it crushed, crackling,
and tossed in the fire 
and when they were fine ashes 
the stove would cool and be cleaned 
and a jar of flowers would be put to stand 
on top of the stove in the spring light.

 

Meanwhile from page to page they
buy things, acquiring the look of a
full life; they argue, make silence bitter,
plan journeys, move house, implant
despair in each other
and then in the nick of time

 

they save one another with tears,
remorse, tenderness —
hooked on those wonder-drugs.
Yet they do have —
don’t they — like us —
their days of grace, they

 

halt, stretch, a vision
breaks in on the cramped grimace,
inscape of transformation.
Something sundered begins to knit.
By scene, by sentence, something is rendered
back into life, back to the gods.

 

Denise Levertov, July 12, 2024

 

 

 

STREET LAMPS

​

When night slinks, like a puma, down the sky,

And the bare, windy streets echo with silence,

Street lamps come out, and lean at corners, awry.

Casting black shadows, oblique and intense;

So they burn on, impersonal, through the night,

Hearing the hours slowly topple past

Like cold drops from glistening stalactite,

Until grey planes splinter the gloom at last;

Then they go out.

 

I think I noticed once,

— T’was morning—one sole street-lamp still bright-lit,

Which, with a senile grin, like an old dunce,

Vied the blue sky, and tried to rival it;

And, leering pallid

Though its use was done,

Tried to cast shadows contrary to the sun.

 

Philip Larkin, July 8, 2024

 

 

 

HOPE IS NOT FOR THE WISE

 

Hope is not for the wise, fear is for fools;
Change and the world, we think, are racing to a fall,
Open-eyed and helpless, in every newscast that is the news:
The time's events would seem mere chaos but all
Drift the one deadly direction. But this is only
The August thunder of the age, not the November.
Wise men hope nothing, the wise are naturally lonely
And think November as good as April, the wise remember
That Caesar and even final Augustulus had heirs,
And men lived on; rich unplanned life on earth
After the foreign wars and the civil wars, the border wars
And the barbarians: music and religion, honor and mirth
Renewed life's lost enchantments. But if life even
Had perished utterly, Oh perfect loveliness of earth and heaven.

​

Robinson Jeffers, July 5, 2024

 

 

AMONG THE NARCISSI

 

Spry, wry, and gray as these March sticks, 
Percy bows, in his blue peajacket, among the narcissi. 
He is recuperating from something on the lung. 

The narcissi, too, are bowing to some big thing : 
It rattles their stars on the green hill where Percy 
Nurses the hardship of his stitches, and walks and walks. 

There is a dignity to this; there is a formality- 
The flowers vivid as bandages, and the man mending. 
They bow and stand: they suffer such attacks! 

And the octogenarian loves the little flocks. 
He is quite blue; the terrible wind tries his breathing. 
The narcissi look up like children, quickly and whitely.

 

Sylvia Plath, July 1, 2024

 

 

 

THE POET OF IGNORANCE

​

Perhaps the earth is floating,
I do not know.
Perhaps the stars are little paper cutups
made by some giant scissors,
I do not know.
Perhaps the moon is a frozen tear,
I do not know.
Perhaps God is only a deep voice
heard by the deaf,
I do not know.

Perhaps I am no one.
True, I have a body
and I cannot escape from it.
I would like to fly out of my head,
but that is out of the question.
It is written on the tablet of destiny
that I am stuck here in this human form.
That being the case
I would like to call attention to my problem.

There is an animal inside me,
clutching fast to my heart,
a huge crab.
The doctors of Boston
have thrown up their hands.
They have tried scalpels,
needles, poison gasses and the like.
The crab remains.
It is a great weight.
I try to forget it, go about my business,
cook the broccoli, open the shut books,

brush my teeth and tie my shoes.
I have tried prayer
but as I pray the crab grips harder
and the pain enlarges.

I had a dream once, 
perhaps it was a dream,
that the crab was my ignorance of God.
But who am I to believe in dreams?

​

Anne Sexton, June 28, 2024

 

 

 

HANDOVER OF POWER

 

I admit defeat, Adolf, and leave the people

to you to use as you wish! Deal with that

impersonal, treacherous mass however you

see fit. Democracy is a miracle. Without a shot

fired, nor, so to speak, a drop of blood spilled,

you’ve earned a mandate to kill. Now you’re

dropping bombs all over the world, hard

at work, as if sowing wheat. The blackshirts of all

colors tear the children from their sleep in night

raids and deport them in their pajamas.

 

I have no complaints about your victory, Adolf,

but I’m a sore loser, so I toss and turn in bed

all night like a lamb on a spit. I rarely dream,

yet when I do, I see a giant bird that has just laid

a bunker, and now, in exasperation, screeches

on the branch, as if it didn’t get to do all the things

it planned for that day. In the bunker, on the table,

a bottle of cyanide and a loaded gun. Come in,

Milorad, help yourself!

​

Milorad Pejić (Translated by Esma Hadžiselimović) June 24, 2024

 

​

 

SUMMER HOLIDAY

​

When the sun shouts and people abound

One thinks there were the ages of stone and the age of

     bronze

And the iron age; iron the unstable metal;

Steel made of iron, unstable as his mother; the tow-

     ered-up cities

Will be stains of rust on mounds of plaster.

Roots will not pierce the heaps for a time, kind rains

     will cure them,

Then nothing will remain of the iron age

And all these people but a thigh-bone or so, a poem

Stuck in the world's thought, splinters of glass

In the rubbish dumps, a concrete dam far off in the

     mountain...

​

Robinson Jeffers, June 21, 2024

 

 

 

TALKING TO GRIEF

​

Ah, grief, I should not treat you
like a homeless dog
who comes to the back door
for a crust, for a meatless bone.
I should trust you.

 

I should coax you
into the house and give you
your own corner,
a worn mat to lie on,
your own water dish.

 

You think I don’t know you’ve been living
under my porch.
You long for your real place to be readied
before winter comes. You need
your name,
your collar and tag. You need
the right to warn off intruders,
to consider my house your own
and me your person
and yourself
my own dog.

 

Denise Levertov, June 17, 2024

 

 

 

SANDPIPER

 

The roaring alongside he takes for granted,
and that every so often the world is bound to shake.
He runs, he runs to the south, finical, awkward,
in a state of controlled panic, a student of Blake.

The beach hisses like fat. On his left, a sheet
of interrupting water comes and goes
and glazes over his dark and brittle feet.
He runs, he runs straight through it, watching his toes.

- Watching, rather, the spaces of sand between them
where (no detail too small) the Atlantic drains
rapidly backwards and downwards. As he runs,
he stares at the dragging grains.

The world is a mist. And then the world is
minute and vast and clear. The tide
is higher or lower. He couldn't tell you which.
His beak is focused; he is preoccupied,

looking for something, something, something.
Poor bird, he is obsessed!
The millions of grains are black, white, tan, and gray
mixed with quartz grains, rose and amethyst.

 

Elizabeth Bishop, June 14, 2024

 

 

 

ABROAD

 

Tickets are expensive. So are the hotels.

Names range from Rita to Juanita.

In walks a policeman, and what he tells

You is “You are persona non grata in terra incognita.”

 

Joseph Brodsky, June 10, 2024

 

 

 

ONE WHITE DAY 

​

     For my fifth birthday I received a large gift wrapped in colorful paper. When I lifted it up, I heard a strange sound. I tore off the paper and found a wooden box with black and white squares painted on it. Inside the box were a bunch of little wooden pieces. This is a chess set, I was told. I looked over the box and the pieces trying to figure out how this game was played. In a short period of time I was able to learn the names of the chess pieces and how they move around the board. The game could begin!

​

     Around that time, I easily learned the alphabet but didn’t know how to connect the letters to make words or to write whole words or read them. Playing chess came more easily to me than writing or reading. Later in school, my teacher tried to help me as much as she could, but there were more than thirty kids in my class and not enough time for her to pay attention to my problems. In the time I read a complex sentence I could finish a rapid chess game. My father noticed that I was struggling and decided to help. Every day after work and dinner he would lie down on the sofa, read the newspaper and take a nap. This was a ritual we children were expected to be quiet for. We knew this well, and during that time we stayed silent. One day, he said: “Son, you know how important it is for me to read the newspaper. But I am very tired today. Will you read it for me?” I was both confused and honored. Reading the newspaper was a serious matter, something only grownups do. He pointed to an article in Oslobodjenje, lay down and said, “Here, read it.”. The newspaper, when opened, was as big as a blanket, so I couldn’t see my father any more. While I was struggling reading words that were too hard for a first grader, my dad enjoyed his afternoon nap. The role reversal – I helping him instead of him helping me, that was a masterstroke.

​

     For us, chess was a family game. My father was an excellent player, but the game was never his chief preoccupation. His job always occupied first place. He graduated from the High School of Mines in Tuzla after the end of the World War II. “I went from being a student in a high school to becoming a mining specialist and manager. But instead of managing regular folks, I was working with inmates. Mostly petty criminals, but some were war criminals, war prisoners, ustashe, chetniks, all kinds. I was young and inexperienced, knew very little about anything, and these men had all already been through thick and thin. Once, in a tunnel, at a crossroads 500 meters underground I caught one of these guys trying to light a match, with a pile of extinguished matches already lying on the ground around him. If the methane had exploded, I wouldn’t be here! And who knows how many others wouldn’t be? I had to report him. Never saw him again.” At the time he worked in the mine, my father was the chess champion of Zenica.

​

     Later on, in addition to spending his time and energy on work and girls, he also managed to get the title of chess master candidate. He was so good that he could play an entire match in his head. I remember one scene vividly: I was seven or eight, we were on a train travelling somewhere, and the compartment was full. We were all silently staring at my father and another traveler – both deadly serious as if attending some important party meeting or a church mass – exchanging some mysterious and coded words: e4 g6, bishop on d4 g7, knight on f3 d6, bishop on c4 knight on f6, queen on e2 bishop on g4, e5… I suspected something exciting was going on but I couldn’t see what.

​

     My father taught his younger brother to play chess. This was in the fifties. At that time there were no chess schools in Bosnia, or anywhere in Yugoslavia. As it happened, his younger brother was really talented. He soon became the first youth chess champion of Bosnia and Herzegovina, winning the championship without a single draw. After graduating from high school, he was drafted to play for a well-known chess club in Indjija, a town near Beograd. Everything was fine until the time he was scheduled to compete for the title of grand master. That’s when everything went downhill. My uncle won the title, as did another player, who, the story goes, bribed some members of the jury. In protest, my uncle refused to accept the title while the other player was more than happy to take it. I don’t know how many grand masters there are today, but in the 1970s there were only about one hundred or so of them in the world. A big scandal broke out, but scandals come and go, and titles stay. My uncle continued to play “only” at the level of an international master. He remained well regarded and he often played with grand masters as his equals, sometimes even being assigned to the First Board simply because he was a better player than the grand master. But Bosnian spite only takes you so far before you get eaten by injustice and bitterness along the way. That is exactly what happened to my uncle.

​

     I heard this story about my uncle refusing to accept the grand master title years later, in Sarajevo, from a person I was close to but not related to by blood -- we both shared a love for poetry and chess. I hadn’t heard it earlier because this episode was never discussed in my family, probably for educational reasons. My parents probably knew that insisting on justice might have disastrous consequences on people, and not only in the Balkans. Stories like these weren’t told in front of children but were hushed up on principle. Growing up, we were only fed “good” and “positive” stories, and our parents went to great pains not to let anything “bad” or “negative” impact our personal and spiritual development. I can understand that. The problem is just that parents tend not to notice when we become grownups and even age. They continue to shield us, even today, from anything “negative” that could poison us. Perhaps here lies the root of my constant dissatisfaction with my worldview – whichever way I arrange things, the picture is always black and white, the images never vivid enough. I seem not to be able to reach that ultimate level of contentment with the world… I’m in my late forties now (the age my uncle was when he died -- killed himself or was murdered), and my father still refuses to tell me the true story. “I don’t know what happened,” he angrily replied when I asked him “Why did he really refuse the title of grand master?”

​

     And that’s the tragedy: it seems like every war in this part of the world had as its main goal the destruction of national books, libraries and archives, so the only way to learn about your roots and your ancestors is through family testimonies, the stories and legends the family members are willing to tell. But they often tell these stories not the way they really happened, but how they want you to believe they happened. Unfortunately, most of us are not skilled in decoding the past the way Champollion* was.

​

     My father did indeed play chess from memory with an unknown fellow traveler. What is not known is which chess variant they played. The opening moves I described earlier in this story are borrowed from the match between my uncle Mirsad Ljuca and Jan Timman, a well-known Dutch grand master, one of the world’s leading players in the early 1980s, behind only Anatoly Karpov. I found a book on the Internet about the International Chess Tournament in Sombor, in 1974. The ad for the book says for chess enthusiasts only. Who else would order a book like this today, in 2013? I ordered it. From it I learned that my uncle did not fare well at that tournament. Timman won both the game and the tournament. But I could tell that my uncle’s performance at that tournament was gutsy and fair – he even won a match against the Latvian-American grand master Edmar Mednis, whose rating at that time was 2455 points – a rating my uncle never scored. It’s just that my uncle never took pride in his wins, it was his losses that he kept pondering. But in life, one should not only learn from mistakes. As Mikhail Botvinnik, former world champion, used to say to his younger colleagues, keep analyzing the matches you won. My uncle definitely missed Botvinnik’s advice.

​

     There are only a handful of people left in our town who still remember my uncle. When they are gone, not a trace of him will be left in his own country. But his name is still on the International Chess Federation’s (FIDE) rating lists for the years between 1976 and 1990. His highest rating – 2315 points – was in 1980. Twenty-three years after his death, all I could come up with about his life are the notes about the games he played at various tournaments. And he played quite a few, going, like a medieval knight, from one tournament to another. Based on an analysis of those notes a talented person who was educated in chess could write a study of his character. I can’t do it. I don’t have that gift. I just played a bit, while my uncle was a chess player.

​

     When I was a kid, chess was the game. It was more than just a game. Now it’s a highly specialized world unto itself. Every daily newspaper used to print a detailed analysis of the most recent domestic or international chess game or chess problem. We envied the children in Armenia where chess was a mandatory subject in school. In every village and every town at that time, it was well known who the best chess player was. Friends used to bring a chess set along when visiting, just in case the host didn’t have one. It was impossible to go on vacation without a chess set – it brought meaning to those long hours on the beach. Once, in the Writers’ Club in Sarajevo, when all the chess sets were in use, Avdo called a cab, gave the driver his home address and said: Tell my wife to give you the chess set and bring it back here. The duels between the titans were watched by the entire world: Fisher vs Spassky, Karpov vs Korchnoi, Karpov vs Kasparov. Only some boxing matches – Ali vs Frazier or Ali vs Foreman – could generate as much excitement… Then Kasparov decided to play against a computer. I want a rematch! he said after losing to IBM’s Deep Blue by 3.5-2.5. However, when he was defeated by a computer, everything stopped making sense. Now, people play chess with themselves. There are still tournaments, sure, but once the match is over, people don’t linger to talk about the game. Everybody rushes to sit at the computer and analyze the game for themselves. We used to analyze the match with our opponent afterward, said Ljubomir Ljubojević in one interview. Ljubojević, who for fifteen years – from 1976 to 1990 – was always one place and some three hundred points ahead of my uncle on the FIDE alphabetized rating lists. For fifteen years, nobody in the world got in between Ljub and Ljuc.

​

     Life is sometimes like the game of chess: one hasty move and all is lost. My friend Željko wasn’t destroyed by injustice or spite like my uncle. He was destroyed by an accident. Željko got killed on August 16, 1988. The two of us played countless matches. He knew every single opening: Indian defense, Sicilian, Nimzowitsch, Russian Game, Alekhine’s… but nothing could save him from touching a high voltage electric wire – 10,000 v one morning at work! He went to work and never came back. One careless move, or just a fluke, and his life was over. If that one match had started an explosion in the Zenica mine many years ago, I would have never found out what chess was. I probably never would have played one single game.

 

     When Željko got killed, I was asleep, and hadn’t dreamt anything.

     Around that time I first read the poem Chess by Marin Sorescu: “I move a white day./ He moves a black night./ I advance with a dream./ He takes me to war./ He attacks my lungs./ I think for a year in the hospital.”

​

     One night, before the war, Zoran Kršul and I sat in a seedy bar sipping Sarajevsko pivo, when he, in that deep voice of his, started reciting one of his poems about a bishop figuring out the paroxysm that his white body and his black head are causing. I stopped playing chess then, retiring to the ranks of the kibitzers.

​

     To be honest, I never even began to be a serious chess player. If you can’t be the best at something even in your own family, then it’s not for you, I reasoned. In my case, chess was obviously something you do for fun, for socializing, for jokes. Chess, for me, was not a game played only on those sixty-four black and white squares. It was everything happening around the chess board that I liked, all the psychological sparring, spiced with hilarious jokes. We would play everywhere, most frequently in fire departments. It could get so heated that a fire department seemed to be the only appropriate place for us to play – in case it burst into flames. The most brutal reaction to my performance that I remember was one without words. Jasko and I were playing, Željko sat on the side and kibitzed. He held Damir, Jasko’s three-year-old son, in his lap. After I made my final move, Željko put his hand over little Damir’s eyes. He didn’t say it, but the meaning was clear: Don’t let the kid see this massacre.

____

* Jean-François Champollion (1790 -1832), French historian and linguist who deciphered the Rosetta Stone and first read the hieroglyphic script.

​

Adin Ljuca (Translated by Esma Hadžiselimović), June 7, 2024

 

 

 

JOY  

​

Though joy is better than sorrow joy is not great;

Peace is great, strength is great.

Not for joy the stars burn, not for joy the vulture

Spreads her gray sails on the air

Over the mountain; not for joy the worn mountain

Stands, while years like water

Trench his long sides. "I am neither mountain nor bird

Nor star; and I seek joy."

The weakness of your breed: yet at length quietness

Will cover those wistful eyes.   

​

Robinson Jeffers, June 3, 2024

 

​

 

I REMEMBER, I REMEMBER

 

Coming up England by a different line                                     
For once, early in the cold new year,                                     
We stopped, and, watching men with number plates                 
Sprint down the platform to familiar gates,                             
'Why, Coventry!' I exclaimed. 'I was born here.'

I leant far out, and squinnied for a sign                                  
That this was still the town that had been 'mine' 
So long, but found I wasn't even clear                                    
Which side was which. From where those cycle-crates
Were standing, had we annually departed                               

For all those family hols? . . . A whistle went:   
Things moved. I sat back, staring at my boots.  
'Was that,' my friend smiled, 'where you "have your roots"?' 
No, only where my childhood was unspent,                            
I wanted to retort, just where I started:                                   

By now I've got the whole place clearly charted.                         
Our garden, first: where I did not invent                                 
Blinding theologies of flowers and fruits,                               
And wasn't spoken to by an old hat.                                                              
And here we have that splendid family                                  

I never ran to when I got depressed,                                      
The boys all biceps and the girls all chest,                                
Their comic Ford, their farm where I could be   
'Really myself'. I'll show you, come to that,                            
The bracken where I never trembling sat,                               

Determined to go through with it; where she                           
Lay back, and 'all became a burning mist'.                                
And, in those offices, my doggerel                                                              
Was not set up in blunt ten-point, nor read                              
By a distinguished cousin of the mayor,                                 

Who didn't call and tell my father There                                 
Before us, had we the gift to see ahead -                                 
'You look as though you wished the place in Hell,'                   
My friend said, 'judging from your face.' 'Oh well,                   
I suppose it's not the place's fault,' I said.                                

'Nothing, like something, happens anywhere.'

​

Philip Larkin, May 31, 2024

 

 

 

BIRDS  

​

The fierce musical cries of a couple of sparrowhawks hunting

on the headland,

Hovering and darting, their heads northwestward,

Prick like silver arrows shot through a curtain the noise of the ocean

Trampling its granite; their red backs gleam

Under my window around the stone corners; nothing gracefuller, nothing

Nimbler in the wind. Westward the wave-gleaners,

The old gray sea-going gulls are gathered together, the north-

west wind wakening

Their wings to the wild spirals of the wind-dance.

Fresh as the air, salt as the foam, play birds in the bright wind, fly falcons

Forgetting the oak and the pinewood, come gulls

From the Carmel sands and the sands at the river-mouth, from

Lobos and out of the limitless

Power of the mass of the sea, for a poem

Needs multitude, multitudes of thoughts, all fierce, all flesh-eaters,

musically clamorous

Bright hawks that hover and dart headlong, and ungainly

Gray hungers fledged with desire of transgression, salt slimed

beaks, from the sharp

Rock-shores of the world and the secret waters.

 

Robinson Jeffers, May 27, 2024

 

 

 

SINCE THE MAJORITY OF ME

Since the majority of me
Rejects the majority of you,
Debating ends forthwith, and we
Divide. And sure of what to do

We disinfect new blocks of days
For our majorities to rent
With unshared friends and unwalked ways,
But silence too is eloquent:

A silence of minorities
That, unopposed at last, return
Each night with cancelled promises
They want renewed. They never learn.

 

Philip Larkin, May 24, 2024

 

 

 

FIERCE MUSIC

 

All night long the rush and trampling of water
And hoarse withdrawals, the endless ocean throwing his

skirmish-lines against granite,
Come to my ears and stop there. I have heard them so long
That I don’t hear them – How long? Forty years.

But that fierce music has gone on for a thousand

Millions of years.  Oh well, we get our share.  But weep

That we lose so much

Because mere use won’t cover up the glory.

We have our moments: but mostly we are too tired to

hear and too dull to see.

 

Robinson Jeffers, May 20, 2024

 

 

 

EVENING EBB  

 

The ocean has not been so quiet for a long while; five night-herons

Fly shorelong voiceless in the hush of the air

Over the calm of an ebb that almost mirrors their wings.  

The sun has gone down, and the water has gone down

From the weed-clad rock, but the distant cloud-wall rises.

The ebb whispers.

Great cloud-shadows float in the opal water.

Through rifts in the screen of the world pale gold gleams, and the evening

Star suddenly glides like a flying torch.  

As if we had not been meant to see her; rehearsing behind

The screen of the world for another audience.  

 

Robinson Jeffers, May 17, 2024

 

 

 

ESSENTIAL BEAUTY

​

In frames as large as rooms that face all ways  
And block the ends of streets with giant loaves,  
Screen graves with custard, cover slums with praise  
Of motor-oil and cuts of salmon, shine  
Perpetually these sharply-pictured groves  
Of how life should be. High above the gutter  
A silver knife sinks into golden butter,  
A glass of milk stands in a meadow, and  
Well-balanced families, in fine  
Midsummer weather, owe their smiles, their cars,  
Even their youth, to that small cube each hand  
Stretches towards. These, and the deep armchairs  
Aligned to cups at bedtime, radiant bars  
(Gas or electric), quarter-profile cats  
By slippers on warm mats,  
Reflect none of the rained-on streets and squares  
 
They dominate outdoors. Rather, they rise    
Serenely to proclaim pure crust, pure foam,     
Pure coldness to our live imperfect eyes     
That stare beyond this world, where nothing's made    
As new or washed quite clean, seeking the home    
All such inhabit. There, dark raftered pubs     
Are filled with white-clothed ones from tennis-clubs,   
And the boy puking his heart out in the Gents    
Just missed them, as the pensioner paid     
A halfpenny more for Granny Graveclothes' Tea    
To taste old age, and dying smokers sense     
Walking towards them through some dappled park    
As if on water that unfocused she      
No match lit up, nor drag ever brought near,     
Who now stands newly clear,      
Smiling, and recognising, and going dark.          

 

Philip Larkin, May 13, 2024

 

 

 

EXETER REVISITED

​

Playing chess on the oil tablecloth at Sparky’s

Café, with half & half for whites,

against your specter at noon, two flights

down from that mattress, and seven years later. Scarcely

a gambit, by any standard. The fan’s dust-plagued

shamrock still hums in your window – seven

years later and pints of semen

under the bridge – apparently not unplugged.

What does it take to pledge allegiance

to another biography, ocean, creed?

The expiration date on the Indian Deed?

A pair of turtledoves, two young pigeons?

The Atlantic whose long-brewed invasion looks,

on the beaches of Salisbury, self-defeating?

Or the town hall cupola, still breast-feeding

its pale, cloud-swaddled Lux?

 

Joseph Brodsky, May 10, 2024

 

 

 

LADY LAZARUS

 

I have done it again.   

One year in every ten   

I manage it –

 

A sort of walking miracle, my skin   

Bright as a Nazi lampshade,   

My right foot

 

A paperweight,

My face a featureless, fine   

Jew linen.

 

Peel off the napkin   

O my enemy.   

Do I terrify? –

 

The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth?   

The sour breath

Will vanish in a day.

 

Soon, soon the flesh

The grave cave ate will be   

At home on me

 

And I a smiling woman.   

I am only thirty.

And like the cat I have nine times to die.

 

This is Number Three.   

What a trash

To annihilate each decade.

 

What a million filaments.   

The peanut-crunching crowd   

Shoves in to see

 

Them unwrap me hand and foot –

The big strip tease.   

Gentlemen, ladies

 

These are my hands   

My knees.

I may be skin and bone,

 

Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman.   

The first time it happened I was ten.   

It was an accident.

 

The second time I meant

To last it out and not come back at all.   

I rocked shut

 

As a seashell.

They had to call and call

And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.

 

Dying

Is an art, like everything else.   

I do it exceptionally well.

 

I do it so it feels like hell.   

I do it so it feels real.

I guess you could say I’ve a call.

 

It’s easy enough to do it in a cell.

It’s easy enough to do it and stay put.   

It’s the theatrical

 

Comeback in broad day

To the same place, the same face, the same brute   

Amused shout:

 

‘A miracle!’

That knocks me out.   

There is a charge

 

For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge   

For the hearing of my heart –

It really goes.

 

And there is a charge, a very large charge   

For a word or a touch   

Or a bit of blood

 

Or a piece of my hair or my clothes.   

So, so, Herr Doktor.   

So, Herr Enemy.

 

I am your opus,

I am your valuable,   

The pure gold baby

 

That melts to a shriek.   

I turn and burn.

Do not think I underestimate your great concern.

 

Ash, ash –

You poke and stir.

Flesh, bone, there is nothing there –

 

A cake of soap,   

A wedding ring,   

A gold filling.

 

Herr God, Herr Lucifer   

Beware

Beware.

 

Out of the ash

I rise with my red hair   

And I eat men like air.

 

Sylvia Plath, May 6, 2024

 

 

 

A POSTCARD

The country is so populous that polygamists and serial
killers get off scot-free and airplane crashes
are reported (usually on the evening news) only when they occur
in a wooded area–the difficulty of access
is most grievous if it's tinged with feelings for the environment.
Theaters are packed, both stalls and stage.
An aria is never sung by a single tenor:
normally they use six at once, or one that's as fat as six.
And the same goes for the government, whose offices stay lit up
through the night, working in shifts, like factories,
hostage to the census. Everything is pandemic.
What is loved by one is loved by many,
be it an athlete, a perfume or a bouillabaisse.
Therfore, no matter what you say or do is loyal.
Nature too seems to have taken note of the common denominator, 
and whenever it rains, which is seldom, clouds linger longest over
not the army and navy stadium but the cemetery.

Joseph Brodsky, May 3, 2024