My Father

This morning, in a dream, you came through

to me from there where you are now,

spoke, so clearly and with full of life

- and I, surprised, grasped after those words

already fading; grasped after your presence

- and fell into this bleak day, into this

day in which you are dead, even when so clearly

everything here is ready for your appearance,

everything waits you, expects your return...

31.08.2017

The Heliades

Those foolish sons, Icarus and Phaethon

- what if they would have met, each set

to spiral into their deaths in the embrace of

Poseidon's waves and Gaia's soil;

Icarus' wings burned by Phaethon's chariot burning the Earth.

These sons, heralds of Greek wisdom

that sons should not try to equal or exceed their fathers,

that golden age can't follow silver age.

After greatness, only living in shadow

or the long fall, the arms waving in the sea,

the sisters, crying, turned

into trees on the shore of the fast-flowing Rhone.

28.08.2017

The Email Sent About Tabucchi's Isabel

There is certain kind of idiocy which

knows no bounds, the kind of which, blind, doesn't

recognize Slowacki written on a page when it sees it.

The kind of idiocy that, not willing

to be one in a faceless mass of wrong,

rushes forward like a long distance runner

in the very beginning of the contest, just

to be seen - and ashamed. Like a kamikaze

pilot that crashes beside his target ship,

sinking in defeat and meaningless death.

28.08.2017

Evening swathed in gold

that avoided the day, languorous

light on land draping herself

for autumn; like old lovers,

meeting again.

28.08.2017

G. K. Chesterton(1874-1936)

1

It takes much for a man

to be his own caricature;

but some, with great devotion,

this height scale.

2

Many a man has written

himself to face the noose or

barrels of guns, some - alas! -

failed, while tried.

3

If I would err, and in

 Christian Heaven myself find

 one thing would console

- I wouldn't run into you!

24.08.2017

To the apologists of Apartheid

Let's not defend what can't be defended;

the blood on the ground can't be made to be the fault

of the one who shed it,

different hands than his held the gun,

different hands than his pulled the trigger.

You try to shield the one who aimed and fired,

behind your back you try to put him

who watched his victim bleed.

The words you utter deserve no

counter-argument than the blood on the ground,

the body in the freezer - they are enough.

24.08.2017

Hilaire Belloc in the fireplace fell

There is certain irony, perhaps cruel

but irony nonetheless of the sort we

might call 'appropriate', that a man

who had done so much to stoke the

fires of antisemitism would, after a

million bodies had been burned in

Auschwitz, die of burns himself. The

fire had found its way to one of its

begetters and he who had burned with

hate now literally burned himself.

24.08.2017

What are we?

What are we, we humans?

Thoughts,

that no one will

think again.

24.08.2017

The wind comes in its cold fury,

makes the trees bend; an autumn

wrath, scattering gold.

24.08.2017

August, the month of my grandfather,

he of the imperial name, son

of a Red Guard, once

dying of stroke and tuberculosis

in a freezing hut. Our

family, repeating the scenes

from generation to generation:

The dying father, the son
helpless to save him.

24.08.2017

Two blocks of ice

My feet two blocks of ice, blood

weakly flowing in them. One day

they might be chopped off

and freely mingling with the limbs of others,

as smoke rise to the sky.

Just like your leg, in 1967;

it's lack never defined you, not to us,

so the lack of these blocks of ice

won't define me.

24.08.2017

To the dead

The dead, sleep and rest.

So little have you lost,

for the living sleep also;

sleep and dream

and pass from life

without ever waking.

24.08.2017

Autumn and all that

Autumn and all that

Which comes along,

The falling yellow

Leaves in the cold wind;

The dying grass

On a new grave.

From death, death.

23.08.2017

What shall be one, again

Let the dead be dead

and the living alive,

but soon, the dividing line

erased, they will be one.

The dead can't live again,

the living must perish

and what heartbeats divided

the cold silence shall unite.

23.08.2017

Our Global Consciences At The Ground In Barcelona

Bodies laying on the ground, unmoving,

and you, the one recording and those two walking

just before you, you all just walk. There

was the man with the water bottle, vanishing

quickly, perhaps he at least, unseen

to us, went to help, and let an injured to drink

- at least we hope that, despairingly.

None of you stop to help, not

even to check that child laying twisted on the ground,

if she has a pulse or not. Nor

that woman, with deep red, spreading

halo around her head. No, you three

- our representatives on the ground, through

which we live this, our consciences -

walk on, treating yourself detached

from all of this; it doesn't concern you,

the one who records this for us,

except as an observer, and those two ahead

- they act like it's some unpleasantness

that they must escape, something

they can leave behind them. You,

of course, already see your video spreading

around the globe, and perhaps congratulate

yourself on your good luck, not

just surviving, not just those

seconds or minutes that separated you from 

the metal and tires of the van,

but being there to record this. Your

fifteen minutes of the fame, like

the driver of the van's.

17.08.2017

A Modern Eustache Dauger, Or A Christian Sage

There is certain irony, like cold sunlight

dancing on red and yellow leaves on a cold autumn morning

with illusion of warmth, when

a man who could not give answers

to the mysteries of his own life, whose

relationships were Gordion's Knots no sword ever tested,

when such a man gave a fountain of answers

to those who sought guidance and hope

in a world where he himself couldn't find solid ground

to stand on and to remove his mask. (Yet,

would there have been a face behind

that velvet cloth?) The sage

who had no answers to give to himself

poured them to others; the man enchanted

by Pagan myths telling how to live a Christian life

in a modern world while pining for the medieval world

that never was. There is certain irony, of the

bitter sort, like when a panthalassic ocean Eden

is revealed to be a volcanic Hell

that once was Perelandra, a planet of seas.

13.08.2017

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON(1850-1894)

He looks like he has clammy hands,

sweat on his brow.

You feel that as earnest as his eyes are,

you can't trust him. There

is an element of a scared readiness

to betray, like the man

in Western movies to come

who will betray the heroes to the villains,

with some regret, and

will get shot in stomach,

dying immediately.

You decide that this meeting

out of time must be short.

12.08.2017

Ludwig van Beethoven's(1770-1827) Piano Concerto No.1 In C Major Op.15
(1795-1800)

It's raining, one of those insistent rains at the end of a summer,

that go on and on, cold rain on a cold day, while flowers still bloom,

and the leaves are still green, deep green under these rain-pregnant

clouds of milk, a landscape of full of coming loss to human mind,

human mind living always in the tomorrow through memory of yesterdays;

the summers that ended live on in this summer, yet

they live on for trees too, that remember, remember and adapt,

without nostalgia, full of purpose, while the human mind, paralyzed,

knows, but filled with the past, like Buridan's ass, succumbs between plenty.

04.08.2017

Great American Novels are

written with blood

on the skin of other nations,

with the real victims forgotten

beside black walls of names

used as mirrors.

04.08.2017

A cobweb of mist on the fallow fields at night,

the Moon a yellow orb hanging over a gothic treeline.

Something is in limbo between twilight and morning,

not knowing whether to die or to be born.

03.08.2017