‘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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.