Tuesday 31 May 2011

‘When I was a boy’ by Friedrich Hölderlin


‘When I was a boy’

When I was a boy
A god often rescued me
From the shouts and the rods of men
And I played among trees and flowers
Secure in their kindness
And the breezes of heaven
Were playing there too.

And as you delight
The hearts of plants
When they stretch towards you
With little strength

So you delighted the heart in me
Father Helios, and like Endymion
I was your favourite,
Moon. O all

You friendly
And faithful gods
I wish you could know
How my soul has loved you.

Even though when I called to you then
It was not yet with names, and you
Never named me as people do
As though they knew one another

I knew you better
Than I have ever known them.
I understood the stillness above the sky
But never the words of men.

Trees were my teachers
Melodious trees
And I learned to love
Among flowers.

I grew up in the arms of the gods.


Friedrich Hölderlin, Selected Poems, trans. by David Constantine (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 1996), 13.

Home by Friedrich Hölderlin


Home

And nobody knows

Let me walk meanwhile
And pick wild berries
To quench my love of the earth
On her paths

Here where –
                        and the thorns of roses
And lime trees scenting sweetly by
The beeches, at noon, when in the dun cornfield
Growth rustles through the straight stalks
And the corn bows sideways at the neck
Like autumn, but now beneath the high
Vault of the oaks where I wonder
And ask upward the bell
Well-known
Strikes from a distance, golden notes, at the hour
When the birds wake again. Wellbeing.


Friedrich Hölderlin, Selected Poems, trans. by David Constantine (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 1996), 75.

Monday 30 May 2011

cars and men by Eugen Gomringer


                              cars and men
                              cars and elevators
                              cars and men
                              elevators and elevators
                              elevators and men
                              men and cars and elevators
                              men and men

                              trains and trains
                              trains and men and elevators
                              trains and elevators
                              men and trains
                              men and men

                              cars and trains
                              cars and men and trains
                              men and men


Eugen Gomringer, The Book of Hours and Constellations: Poems of Eugen GOMRINGER presented by Jerome ROTHENBERG (New York: Something Else Press, 1968), no pagination.

silence by Eugen Gomringer


silence  silence  silence
 silence  silence  silence 
silence              silence
silence  silence  silence
silence  silence  silence


Eugen Gomringer, The Book of Hours and Constellations: Poems of Eugen GOMRINGER presented by Jerome ROTHENBERG (New York: Something Else Press, 1968), no pagination.

sprig leaf bloom by Eugen Gomringer



                                                                           bloom  bloom  bloom
                                                                    sprig   leaf   bloom
                                                         bloom  sprig   leaf
                                                 leaf   bloom  sprig
                                        sprig  leaf   bloom


Eugen Gomringer, "zweig blatt blüte". My translation.

Sunday 29 May 2011

Blue Moon by Anna Robinson


BLUE MOON


When you appear twice in one month, they call you Blue, Blue
Moon and then you have no other names. And every sad song
that ever was sung, every cheap sad song makes those who
hear it remember every cheap sad thing that happened in that
sad, sad month, and it’s all they can do to leave the pub while
they can still see to cross the road.


A mouth has grown in the back of my head, Blue Moon. It
speaks to me. It says I must lay, face down, in the back yard,
after dark – not worrying what the neighbours think, and wait
‘til those hard little eyes form that can look up at you without
cloud cover to protect them.


Anna Robinson, The Finders of London (London: Enitharmon Press, 2010), 47.

Monday 23 May 2011

On Not Writing My Novel by Hylda Sims


On Not Writing My Novel

I get up, puzzle on a little poem
I eat a bowl of yoghurt, wash my clothes
then fetch the post, and make the bed, too late
by now, I think, for getting down to prose
which can't be dreamed up in the bath; deadlines
is what I need - exactly what I've got
dead lines, espaliered, rootless, black on white
to rearrange in miles of well-turned plot
all bedded in and diligently pruned
with every branchlet tensioned on a string;
meanwhile the sturdy poem grows and blooms,
self-watering, an independent thing
not much to do but turn it to the sun,
its stems will straighten up, its petals sing


Hylda Sims, Sayling the Babel (London: Hearing Eye, 2006), 67.

Sunday 22 May 2011

History by Tom Warner


History

O loved one, better you’re not mentioned in poems.
Better your name appears in no shifting library.

Let’s leave history well alone to level
cities to monochromic rubble

to its harvesting, to barns of human hair
and unclaimed names.

Plates drift and collide.
The piled volcanoes of histories darken.

Let’s lie together where we end, tired and heavy
as a cow falling to her shins in the heat.


Tom Warner, Faber New Poets 8 (London: Faber and Faber, 2010), 3.

Sunlight and Rain by Tom Warner


Sunlight and Rain

They drove in silence
and brightness of dawn.

They drove in the strobe
of dawn bright in trees.

They drove in brightness
through brightness

into a whale like a storm
like clouds humped black
at the motorway’s end.

They drove in silence
and brightness
and blackness
into a whale
into rain as fat as pennies

into the white noise of rain
as fat as pennies
into the static fuzz of rain
and brightness
where flyovers where gasps
in the white noise of rain as fat as pennies
gobfuls of air
grabbed in the grapple of drowning
in the white noise fuzz
of rain as fat as pennies.

They drove in silence
over miles of worn pelts and feather
flattened beneath a black anvil of cloud.
They drove in silence and rain

through silver pennies
and smudged pelts
into the gape of a whale

and a crushed wing
lifted in their windy wake

turn round
come back.


Tom Warner, Faber New Poets 8 (London: Faber and Faber, 2010), 1-2.

Saturday 21 May 2011

Existential by John Stammers


Existential

When we designed the world we found it necessary
to leave room for the absences.
You will notice there is a good deal more emptiness
than objects. This ensures that when an item
passes out of existence it may be accommodated.
It would be more correct to say that the world is composed
both of the things that are and the things that are not.
The same holds true for people. When a person passes
they become a void precisely equivalent to themselves.
In a regrettable misapprehension, there are those who believe
they can in some way perceive the lost ones.
They give names to such things: ghosts, spirits, visitations.
I assure you they cannot; they that are gone
are gone for good and all, and are manifestly absent
in every way. So much will surely now be obvious:
otherwise they would be unable to occupy
that particular non-existence corresponding to the former them.
Since the beginning these spaces have continued
to grow in number with no sign of abatement.
It is our conclusion, therefore, that in the end
the whole of existence will be a single miraculous absence.


John Stammers, Interior Night (London: Picador, 2010), 17.