XENOPHON(430-354 BCE)

He build his career

upon two cadavers,

one cut down in the bloom of youth

on a riverine battlefield in Mesopotamia,

the other in old age's wisdom

made to drink the silencing hemlock

in the city he himself would betray.

On these solid foundations,

which time's passing could not rot,

he built a Spartan mansion,

a pile of books that made

worthier peers' works crumble to dust,

and misconceptions to beguile aeons.

20.06.2021

THE WORLD IS DEFINED BY ABSENCES

 The world

is now defined by absences

when it was, in those

years fallen into memory,

full of presences;

presences which,

one by one,

slipped through careless hands,

and a careless mind,

and became the towering

pillars of absence

keeping up

the clouded sky of gray

under which the soil

harbours the names.

18.06.2021

WHEN DEATH COMES TO YOU

You have seen that stranger, Death,

more and more amidst the crowds,

watched when He in somber tones

talked with others and led them away.

Now, on this of all days, one that

was so ordinary, Death suddenly

stands there before you, with an

apologetic smile on his thin lips,

and, reluctantly, offers his hand

for you to shake, and dolefully says:

I know this comes at an ill moment,

but we really need to talk, you and me...

16.06.-17.06.2021

REMEMBER, YOU

 Remember,

in the dark green morning

of the cold June day,

that your life has been long

and its joys have been few,

and that amply you have given

to others from your mistakes,

conferring them great burdens

of grief and anguish to carry,

great burdens of

earthen soil to sleep under.

Remember,

in the dark green morning

of the long June day,

the pain that you weaved

through their stricken days,

the lives you tore apart -

you who only wanted

good things and could do none,

yet digged many a grave

for shattered dreams

and cold hearts to lay.

16.06.2021

I WHO AM WATCHING FROM AFAR

I have been on the edge of living

after long watching from afar;

I have crept near

and gone around its rim,

I who was tempted; I have long

stood on the edge of living -

and gone back,

I who am watching from afar

with bitter regret in my mind.

16.06.2021

#Poem #Poems #Poetry

IT DOESN'T SURPRISE ME AT ALL

It doesn't surprise me at all

that after the wind and rain

of the chill day

comes a calm evening

of mild warmth and some light,

that the press here 

doesn't even mention

what is happening

in occupied East Jerusalem.

It doesn't surprise me at all

that the night is

calm and cloudless,

that all is as still as

the conscience of

a journalist.

16.06.2021

THE GUILT COMES TOO LATE

 I wish you were all here,

you dead and stricken;

instead of distanced in time

and place, you would be

old and ill

and troubled each

in your way,

and I, in place of this

circle of solitary hell

with hours and days flowing

in idleness towards oblivion

with all wasted, I

be burdened with your

aching lives, gladly,

like you were

with mine.

Yet this remorse

and wish

grows on

fatal mistakes.

15.06.2021

OF SWEDES AND CATS

Spain can't score, 

the Swedes get their lucky draw,

the cat uses his chance

and gets to slip into the cellar

when at midnight

I come up carrying laundry;

all those dank rooms

for it to search mice in vain,

a route outside

to the clutch of a fox,

like the Swedes

in their starting group.

15.06.2021

IN THE GLOOM OF THE EVENING

 Chill winds the dark evening blow,

black over darkened willows'

edge the tall pine rises,

the memory of an old forest felled.

Comes a fox, a brooding shadow

through the years' long grass

hiding the stones gathered

by your departed, calloused hands.

It shall rain cold all through

the short night's midsummer gloom,

the morning in birdsong shivering

over hare's blood in golden light.

14.-15.06.2021

STILL SETTING OUR MESSAGES ADRIFT

Our happiness is not in words

spoken to many listening ears,

minds waiting in sympathy;

our happiness is in words

written without certainty

of reading eyes and minds. 

Our happiness is in these words

cast adrift in time and space,

these messengers, our adults'

evolution of the tiny bark boats

we cast to sail on the gloomy waters

of silently-running brooks.

14.06.2021

ELECTION DAY IN THE COUNTRYSIDE

I walk an hour and more on the sunny, warm evening

to vote, reading Guy de Maupassant through

the undulating hills and ravines in gold and green,

 sweat and smell like a pig when I write

the number three on the ballot

and drop it in the box, 

then walk towards the store before

remembering it closed early today,

on Sunday, and deflated, don't bother

to walk back reading, just sit on the bus-stop,

wait an hour and more reading news

from my loaned cell phone,

watch kids cycle past

with their front wheels

up in the air, cursing.

14.06.2021

#Poem #Poems #Poetry

IN THE LABYRINTH

Pale blue sky at half past three

in the morning, birds chirp in bursts,

the sun still hidden beyond dim ridges,

I feel the past waiting behind

some strange geometric turn

I'm unable to make

past this grief and remorse,

abundant like the dark green foliage

and rampant grass around me.

14.06.2021

IF OUR LIVES ARE CARVED IN ETERNITY

 There is only true meaning

in life if we are immortal,

in flesh or 'soul'

or through the species;

one of them has to be true

for our achievements and failures

and fatal mistakes

to have a lasting meaning

- and nothing less is worth living.

Only eternity can give that meaning

to this laboured existence

where each of us

have their crown of thorns

and the moments when we kiss

and thrice deny.

All else will be ripples

on the surface

of an evaporating sea,

movement in closing time

which the end erases

if it fully erases us.

13.06.2021

WHEN I SHOULD BE ASLEEP

 Now that it rains without

an end in sight

I am awake,

awake under violet clouds

as the raindrops hit the

rusty roof,

flow down across

the window-panes,

an endless rain,

and we -

flowing down across

time, billions

of raindrops

through the gloom

of existence.

16.06.2021

WHY THE HORRORS OF THE SLEEP ARE BENIGN

  a rainy morning

throwing drops

across the dark green;
a pot of old coffee

to fill the mouth

with faded taste,

and some words

to scatter

in manner of raindrops,

before the nightmares

close around

as the unwomb,

and the dead

with their presence remind

why that is just.

13.06.2021

AMONG THE AUSCHWITZ DEAD 2

How strange

that I can now

look at the face of a man

who died at 42 -

an electro-mechanic,

his life derailed

& ended

by Fascism -

and think

that when

he perished,

he died young.

But then,

all those whose lives

are stolen from them,

cut short by a bullet,

famine, noose,

waves 

or gas,

are young,

and we who watch

it happen again,

and do little,

are old.

08.06.2021 

AMONG THE AUSCHWITZ DEAD 1

There is inequality in death

between the victims; some

only names and numbers,

others gaze at us from pictures,

anchoring their fate longer

in our minds. After a faceless

Romani child or a Soviet

prisoner of war, when we see

the serious eyes of a Polish priest

looking directly at us, a middle-class

Dutch Jewish child, with his stuffed toy,

watching past us to something beyond,

are we not touched more,

are the latter not made more real,

do we not feel deeper the loss

of those who are images to us,

not just words and numbers?

Perhaps. Or perhaps the faceless

dead, in the totality of their

erasure, briefly disturb

us even more than those

who we can see before us -

in telling us how little

is left of these lives?

Even their images

turned to ash.

05.06.2021

AN EVENING IN EARLY JUNE

 white clouds

on a blue sky

atop green

multitude

of young birches & willows

lone old surviving pine

from the forest that was

still rising

in the june evening

between sun and rain

going coming

birdsong

& the human a

being among beings

an observer for all things

that shall be as they are

after he has gone

to the green

and the blue

and the white

06.05.2021

#Poem #Poems #Poetry

MISANTHROPHE

If nothing else leaves your loins,

at least beget and conceive mistakes,

little horrors that shall outlive your misery,

reach their slimy little tentacles

beyond the sphere of your defeat,

and deface the existence of others.

06.05.2021

DUBLIN III

 In the summer night

I sit listening to distant complaints,

this voice that just won't stop,

while my mind is full of relief

and gladness

over two foolish escape artist

felines back in the fold,

and your birthday

is approaching,

and I should be listening

to you, not this poor being

imprisoned in a prison

cell of his mind,

with an unlocked, opened

door and he can't leave,

because misery and suffering

is the safe

iron maiden womb

of his existence,

and he can't leave

its spiked shelter

for the uncertain world,

because what would

he be without his pain

and fear?

Instead of this,

this act of playing some kind of

Catholic priest listening to

litany of hopelessness instead of sins,

this occasional saying

of a word in the flood

of his endless repeating

of the same dreadful things,

instead of listening

how there is no way out,

how this being

has no rights,

again and again and again,

I should be doing

something for you,

and he just keeps repeating

the same things

I have listened to

since November,

but someone has to,

even when this clinging

being, this desperate suicide

artist, will never

leave that cell

he beliefs

he is in.

Because who I am

to send him to

his death,

this moth circling

the flame,

when I have sent

people I loved?

03.06.2021

JUSSI

Happiness is finding a cat,

who opened a locked front door,

waiting behind the kitchen door

in the inner foyer,

after you had given up

looking after him

in the warm summer night,

were thinking of foxes feasting

as you sat in the kitchen,

having left the front door open

in the chance that he would

avoid the fox and the lynx

and the raccoon dog and the wolf

and the tire. That

is happiness.

03.06.2021

EVEN ITS LIFE MATTERED

 I kill the first fly this year,

absent-mindedly, not realizing

what I am doing,

until I am rolling its

little, crushed body

as a black ball

between my greasy fingers,

which lured it

to its death

which I now regret.

02.06.2021

FOLLY

In the evening, the still pale

green landscape bathing in light,

I sit inside before the laptop, translating

a pretentious poem about life and art

by a young Aldous Huxley, full

of the the 'wisdom' of a well-educated,

well-read and little-lived youth,

instead of being outside,

in the light, living,

and why?

My act of translation

doesn't matter; his poem,

when it was still being read,

didn't matter - second-rate

words from a first class talent

who would write only one immortal work

(and that not his best),

so why bother?

It's warm outside, and light

would drive out the shadows

from the mind, sooth

the vengeful conscience,

but this pointless act,

this time wasted,

gives me a shard of joy,

like a ray of sun,

yet earned,

more lasting.

 

02.06.2021