Written by
Nazim Hikmet |
Taut, thick fingers punch
the teeth of my typewriter.
Three words are down on paper
in capitals:
SPRING
SPRING
SPRING.
.
.
And me -- poet, proofreader,
the man who's forced to read
two thousand bad lines
every day
for two liras--
why,
since spring
has come, am I
still sitting here
like a ragged
black chair?
My head puts on its cap by itself,
I fly out of the printer's,
I'm on the street.
The lead dirt of the composing room
on my face,
seventy-five cents in my pocket.
SPRING IN THE AIR.
.
.
In the barbershops
they're powdering
the sallow cheeks
of the pariah of Publishers Row.
And in the store windows
three-color bookcovers
flash like sunstruck mirrors.
But me,
I don't have even a book of ABC's
that lives on this street
and carries my name on its door!
But what the hell.
.
.
I don't look back,
the lead dirt of the composing room
on my face,
seventy-five cents in my pocket,
SPRING IN THE AIR.
.
.
*
The piece got left in the middle.
It rained and swamped the lines.
But oh! what I would have written.
.
.
The starving writer sitting on his three-thousand-page
three-volume manuscript
wouldn't stare at the window of the kebab joint
but with his shining eyes would take
the Armenian bookseller's dark plump daughter by storm.
.
.
The sea would start smelling sweet.
Spring would rear up
like a sweating red mare
and, leaping onto its bare back,
I'd ride it
into the water.
Then
my typewriter would follow me
every step of the way.
I'd say:
"Oh, don't do it!
Leave me alone for an hour.
.
.
"
then
my head-my hair failing out--
would shout into the distance:
"I AM IN LOVE.
.
.
"
*
I'm twenty-seven,
she's seventeen.
"Blind Cupid,
lame Cupid,
both blind and lame Cupid
said, Love this girl,"
I was going to write;
I couldn't say it
but still can!
But if
it rained,
if the lines I wrote got swamped,
if I have twenty-five cents left in my pocket,
what the hell.
.
.
Hey, spring is here spring is here spring
spring is here!
My blood is budding inside me!
20 and 21 April 1929
|
Written by
Laure-Anne Bosselaar |
amidst swirling wine
and flickers of silver guests quote
Dante, Brecht, Kant and each other.
I wait in the hall after not
powdering my nose, trying to re-
compose that woman who’ll
graciously take her place
at the table and won’t tell her hosts:
I looked into your bedroom
and closets, smelled your
“Obsession” and “Brut,” sat
on your bed, imagined you
in those spotless sheets, looked
long into the sad eyes of your son
staring at your walls from his frame.
I tried to smile at myself
in your mirrors, wondering if you
smile that way too: those resilient
little smiles one smiles
at one’s self before facing the day,
or another long night ahead —
guests coming for dinner.
So I wait in this hall because
there are nights it’s hard
not to blurt out Stop! Stop
our babble: Pulitzer, Wall Street, sex,
Dante, politics, wars, have some Chianti.
.
.
let’s stop and talk.
Of our thirsts
and obsessions, our bedrooms
and closets, the brutes in our mirrors,
the eyes of our sons.
There is time yet — let’s talk.
I am starving.
|
Written by
Anna Akhmatova |
I have enough treasures from the past
to last me longer than I need, or want.
You know as well as I .
.
.
malevolent memory
won't let go of half of them:
a modest church, with its gold cupola
slightly askew; a harsh chorus
of crows; the whistle of a train;
a birch tree haggard in a field
as if it had just been sprung from jail;
a secret midnight conclave
of monumental Bible-oaks;
and a tiny rowboat that comes drifting out
of somebody's dreams, slowly foundering.
Winter has already loitered here,
lightly powdering these fields,
casting an impenetrable haze
that fills the world as far as the horizon.
I used to think that after we are gone
there's nothing, simply nothing at all.
Then who's that wandering by the porch
again and calling us by name?
Whose face is pressed against the frosted pane?
What hand out there is waving like a branch?
By way of reply, in that cobwebbed corner
a sunstruck tatter dances in the mirror.
|