Wednesday, November 18, 2015

If You Forget Me by Pablo Neruda

I want you to know
one thing.

You know how this is:
if I look
at the crystal moon, at the red branch
of the slow autumn at my window,
if I touch
near the fire
the impalpable ash
or the wrinkled body of the log,
everything carries me to you,
as if everything that exists,
aromas, light, metals,
were little boats
that sail
toward those isles of yours that wait for me.

Well, now,
if little by little you stop loving me
I shall stop loving you little by little.

If suddenly
you forget me
do not look for me,
for I shall already have forgotten you.

If you think it long and mad,
the wind of banners
that passes through my life,
and you decide
to leave me at the shore
of the heart where I have roots,
remember
that on that day,
at that hour,
I shall lift my arms
and my roots will set off
to seek another land.

But
if each day,
each hour,
you feel that you are destined for me
with implacable sweetness,
if each day a flower
climbs up to your lips to seek me,
ah my love, ah my own,
in me all that fire is repeated,
in me nothing is extinguished or forgotten,
my love feeds on your love, beloved,
and as long as you live it will be in your arms
without leaving mine. 

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening by Robert Frost

Whose woods these are I think I know.   
His house is in the village though;   
He will not see me stopping here   
To watch his woods fill up with snow.   

My little horse must think it queer   
To stop without a farmhouse near   
Between the woods and frozen lake   
The darkest evening of the year.   

He gives his harness bells a shake   
To ask if there is some mistake.   
The only other sound’s the sweep   
Of easy wind and downy flake.   

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,   
But I have promises to keep,   
And miles to go before I sleep,   
And miles to go before I sleep.

My Country by Dorothea Mackellar

The love of field and coppice,
Of green and shaded lanes.
Of ordered woods and gardens
Is running in your veins,
Strong love of grey-blue distance
Brown streams and soft dim skies
I know but cannot share it,
My love is otherwise.

I love a sunburnt country,
A land of sweeping plains,
Of ragged mountain ranges,
Of droughts and flooding rains.
I love her far horizons,
I love her jewel-sea,
Her beauty and her terror -
The wide brown land for me!

A stark white ring-barked forest
All tragic to the moon,
The sapphire-misted mountains,
The hot gold hush of noon.
Green tangle of the brushes,
Where lithe lianas coil,
And orchids deck the tree-tops
And ferns the warm dark soil.

Core of my heart, my country!
Her pitiless blue sky,
When sick at heart, around us,
We see the cattle die -
But then the grey clouds gather,
And we can bless again
The drumming of an army,
The steady, soaking rain.

Core of my heart, my country!
Land of the Rainbow Gold,
For flood and fire and famine,
She pays us back threefold -
Over the thirsty paddocks,
Watch, after many days,
The filmy veil of greenness
That thickens as we gaze.

An opal-hearted country,
A wilful, lavish land -
All you who have not loved her,
You will not understand -
Though earth holds many splendours,
Wherever I may die,
I know to what brown country
My homing thoughts will fly.

Thursday, July 30, 2015

Day of Wrath (The Schoolboy's Tale) by Christina Stead


Do the moutains wear black for the death of a bee in the old world? Not so in the new. Perhaps Ardennes wept over the “unreturning brave”, but I saw death ride naked on a tropic shore and his breath never darkened the water nor brushed the sky; nature's children drowned, curdled the water in their blood, while she painted her cheeks, wreathed in smiles, and the hills sparked with jollity by the pacific sea.

I lived in Avallon, a waterside village in the seaport. A woman in the district was divorced for adultery. Her husband was a cabinet minister, a rich man, coarse, luxurious, and trynnical. Public opinion was bitter against his wife because she had left his house and gone to live with her lover and it was proved that because they were poor, she had slept with her two children nightly in her lover's bed. The children had to appear in court and give this evidence. The father renounced these children, who he declared were not of his blood, and he left all three in great poverty: this was not condemned, for a woman who forsakes wealth for poverty is obviously poor-spirited, and beneath commiseration: even the poor despised her.

The son was ten years old, the daughter was fourteen. I knew her, her name was Viola. She was pretty, but thin, with long black hair, and rather smart with her tongue. Certainly she suffered in such an honest city, where the “Decameron” was forbidden, and England's colonial history is expurgated for the school books.

I saw her mother once, a pretty, dark, sweet woman, who ventured timidly into the ladies cabin on the ferry and looked quickly but without expectation of greeting at the female faces decorating the walls. When I raised my hat to her she smiled with pleasure, but with indulgence also; she knew I pitied her, but she regarded us all very calmly from another world. The ladies were indignant that she continued to live in our district. “She would have at least the delicacy to go where she is not known,” said my maiden aunt. Society, great beast of tender skin, blind with elephant ears, fell indigent, lashed its little tail and got hot round the rump. It required a sacrifice, and when Jumbo wants something the god themselves obey.

One Wednesday afternoon, the four o'clock ferry, which carried the school children home from tow, was struck amidships by an ocean liner and sank immediately, carrying down more than fifty souls. Thirty children were drowned, and all those who died were from our village of Avallon. I went down to catch the four-thirty ferry and saw the stretchers with bodies brought in already by the rescuers. All the way home, with my book on the seat, lifebouys and splinterd wood rose up into the bays and rivers. Eddies of soot and oil floated past. In a few minutes we reached the spot where the ferry lay with her passengers, and I felt paralyzed with a strange and almost voluptuous cramp, and my spirit being wound out of me like a djinn out of a pot. We went dead slow, with our flag at halfmast, and there was a silence on the boat. I thought of those people sitting below, almost living, with a glow on their cheeks still through the green gloom of the deep water channel; they seemed a company that had gone apart for some conclave. I believe my two young sisters were there, waiting for me with open eyes, and I wanted to dive in, but I could not move. When we neared home I saw my little brother running and jumping on our lawn, so I was reassured.

After a few days, when the last rumours and hoped had died out, and the whole village was in mourning, in the lovely weather, only one piece of fantasy remained. Viola alone had not been found. She must have been carried, or been lost in the deeper mud at the bottom; the ferry itself had moved several hundred feet. It seemed to my mother and aunt that this was the “judgement of God” though for what mortal sins the other bereaved women had been punished, no one thought to conjecture.

At the end of the week Viola was found on one end of the wreck, standing upright, uninjured, her right foot simply entangled in a rope. The founts of pitty at this word broek the seadl and jettled in each breast, and everyone that night had before his eys the image of Viola standing in the green gloon for a week, upright, looking for the rescuers, astonished that they did not come for her, perhaps with a lively word in her lips at ther slowness, and then prisoned by her poor weak foot, decaying, but with her arms still floating up; a watermaiden tangled in a lily-food, and not able to reach the surface. I cried and thought how she died in that attitude to ask pity.


In fact, it turned out that wat, or at least, if the church and justice were not moved, for they should be above the frailties of fresh and blood, the women began to lament on her mother's account, to say she was well punished and one could even pity er. The beast was appeased, as in ancient days, by the sacrifice of a virgin. 

Sunday, July 26, 2015

Telephone Conversation by Wole Soyinka


The price seemed reasonable, location
Indifferent. The landlady swore she lived
Off premises. Nothing remained
But self-confession. "Madam" , I warned,
"I hate a wasted journey - I am African."
Silence. Silenced transmission of pressurized good-breeding. Voice, when it came,
Lipstick coated, long gold-rolled
Cigarette-holder pipped. Caught I was, foully.
"HOW DARK?"...I had not misheard...."ARE YOU LIGHT OR VERY DARK?" Button B. Button A. Stench
Of rancid breath of public hide-and-speak.
Red booth. Red pillar-box. Red double-tiered
Omnibus squelching tar.
It was real! Shamed
By ill-mannered silence, surrender
Pushed dumbfoundment to beg simplification.
Considerate she was, varying the emphasis-
"ARE YOU DARK? OR VERY LIGHT" Revelation came
"You mean- like plain or milk chocolate?"
Her accent was clinical, crushing in its light
Impersonality. Rapidly, wave-length adjusted
I chose. "West African sepia"_ and as afterthought.
"Down in my passport." Silence for spectroscopic
Flight of fancy, till truthfulness changed her accent
Hard on the mouthpiece "WHAT'S THAT?" conceding "DON'T KNOW WHAT THAT IS." "Like brunette."
"THAT'S DARK, ISN'T IT?"
"Not altogether.
Facially, I am brunette, but madam you should see the rest of me. Palm of my hand, soles of my feet.
Are a peroxide blonde. Friction, caused-
Foolishly madam- by sitting down, has turned
My bottom raven black- One moment madam! - sensing
Her receiver rearing on the thunderclap
About my ears- "Madam," I pleaded, "wouldn't you rather
See for yourself?"

Sunday, June 28, 2015

The River Merchant's Wife by Li Po

translated by Ezra Pound 

While my hair was still cut straight 
across my forehead
I played at the front gate, pulling
flowers.
You came by on bamboo stilts, playing
horse,
You walked about my seat, playing with
blue plums. 
And we went on living in the village of 
Chokan:
Two small people, without dislike or 
suspicion. 

At fourteen I married My Lord you.
I never laughed, being bashful.
Lowering my head, I looked at the wall.
Called to, a thousand times, I never
looked back.

At fifteen I stopped scowling, 
I desired my dust to be mingled with
yours
Forever and forever and forever.
Why should I climb the lookout?

At sixteen you departed,
You went into far Ku-to-en, by the river
of swirling eddies,
And you have been gone five months.
The monkeys make sorrowful noise 
overhead.

You dragged your feet when you went 
out,
By the gate now, the moss is grown, 
the different mosses,
Too deep to clear them away!
The leaves fall early this autumn, in 
wind.
The paired butterflies are already 
yellow with August
Over the grass in the West garden;
They hurt me. I grow older.
If you are coming down through the
narrows of the river Kiang,
Please let me know beforehand,
And I will come out to meet you
As far as Cho-fu-sa.

The Diameter Of The Bomb by Yehuda Amichai


The diameter of the bomb was thirty centimeters
and the diameter of its effective range about seven meters,
with four dead and eleven wounded.
And around these, in a larger circle
of pain and time, two hospitals are scattered
and one graveyard. But the young woman
who was buried in the city she came from,
at a distance of more than a hundred kilometers,
enlarges the circle considerably,
and the solitary man mourning her death
at the distant shores of a country far across the sea
includes the entire world in the circle.
And I won’t even mention the crying of orphans
that reaches up to the throne of God and
beyond, making a circle with no end and no God.