Reading Romain Gary(1914-1980) At My Old Home

I sit on the red-painted floor in the now almost empty room

where I once, as a child afraid of the night, held my mother's warm hand

each night as I fell asleep. Now,

from a dusty book-shelf I pick up a book by Romain Gary,

one I never finished, and read how his mother - so proud of him -

embarrassed him before his air force comrades in 1939,

announcing  'You will be a second Guynemer!'

So lucky those of us, who still can be

embarrassed in public by loving mothers

bursting with their pride towards us,

the undeserving... It's evening, the shadows

gather, grow larger. The sea, harsh

like the reality we encounter after leaving the years

when our mothers could still protect us from suffering,

hits the coast at Big Sur. He has twenty-one years

to live, that son of a proud mother, who

once wore the air force leather jacket. On

that December day still

to come there was no proud mother
 to hold his hand as he faced
the night.

30.06.2017

Hinc illae lacrimae

On this quiet June evening of bird-song

and faded sunlight

I feel you close to me, all my

loved ones I have lost to time,

marooned in our own islands of space-time.

I now feel you all close to me,

your presence beside mine,

a memory of the unity we shared,

a promise of the unity we will share

as time shall release me from it's

forward rushing stream.

28.06.2017

Tempus edax rerum

Long since we, ridden of illusions of

life's vast horizons,

found the walls of our cell.

The years have come and the years have gone,

and we still rattle the bars of time's prison,

our only escape to eternity's mass grave.

27.06.2017

Vesper

The long rain has ended, the birds

are chirping and singing, hidden

in the green. I sit on the veranda, drinking

coffee as the mosquitoes gather like

the clouds in turmoil above. It's

evening; from the hidden road, the

rumble of traffic, the voice of civilization

muttering to itself. I let it all flow past.

27.06.2017

Exeunt omnes

Time is not a thief that steals the days,

it's the master that drives a young horse to the field

to plow it at the sunrise,

and brings an old back at sunset, after harvest;

time is the master that takes his shotgun,

goes out with the old horse, the old family dog

for the final walk, the worn hand caressing

the aged skin and fur. The final kind

words, to us.

27.06.2017

The True Cancer: The Fate Of Liu Xiaobo

Freedom of expression is the foundation of human rights, the source of humanity, and the mother of truth.

Liu Xiaobo: I Have No Enemies: My Final Statement(2009)

They worship him, those Occidental lands,

in their eloquent rhetoric

of pre-obituaries they are pouring out;

but not one trade deal will they cancel,

not one signature will be left unsigned

for his sake. Words are

cheap, cheap and plentiful. Actions,

actions carry a price that goes unpaid.

Cancer will eat him, there will be

the most modest of funerals,

and the Occident will claim him a martyr to democracy

and a hero of freedom, and then,

and then they will take their pens

and sign the trade deals and the business agreements,

there will be handshakes

and "The question of Liu Xiaobo was raised in private conversation

with the president, the prime minister, the minister..."

26.06.2017

In memory of the 146 burned to death in Pakistan today

An inferno, they describe it, like something Dante

wrote in his Divine Comedy.

You are poor, you

are needy - thus

you are condemned to be burned

alive with the

click of a cigarette lighter,

all 146 of you.

The oil is insured. No loss is suffered.

What the flames devour will be repaid.

The property is sacred.

25.06.2017

The morning that never comes (to us)

There will come a morning

quite ordinary remembered by a few,

when we no longer will make our

way to the kitchen to put on the coffee machine,

switch on the radio and the computer

to assure ourselves of the continued existence

of the world while we drifted

in Morpheus' bosom.

No quick attempt to capture on

pen to paper the misty fragments of sleep

vanishing in the light of sensory intake,

no little haiku written to carve

our presence to that day's fabric.

No, it will be the morning of frantic

relatives and neighbours ringing the mobile

and the bell, of yawning medics

at the end of a long shift exchanging

a few words with the police among

what we called home and beside

what remains of life: Those stubborn

cells refusing to believe that the
mind was us and nothing more.

25.06.2017

My soul is in the sky

Thunder, announcing the displeasure of forgotten gods,

creeps closer. The dark green,

under the turmoil of the clouds gray and blue of all hues,

showered by swift, hard rain,

come and gone. The

wind arrives to make

dance with the trees and bushes in their green foliage,

such harsh merriment. The slower,

longer rain begins, those

tears that arrive on their own, unannounced,

not knowing if its for us, or

those who have departed, left us

solitary under the wrath of thunder, wind and rain.

25.06.2017

Naked I came out of my mother's womb

How many lives lost on Midsummer night?

The divers in their wet suits

under cloudy skies, in dark waters

hit by droplets of rain

searching for flesh caressed by the

waters of the womb, 

which gave birth to all life

and now took it away.

25.06.2017

In the evening light, the tall grass growing wild

The grass in the front-yard has grown tall;

I haven't mowed it -

why reduce life, when we

have just lost you? Among the grass,

flowers have come and gone,

like slow heart-beats scattering

their seeds. Death

will claim all of this,

yet before the void

there will be abundant life, uncontrolled.

21.06.2017

Ad perpetuam rei memoriam

These empty days,

these hollow days

with their long hours

voids in time

leading nowhere,

the bare bones of existence

built on the bones

of loved ones

under the long, green grass.

A limbo, a purgatory of regret.

18.06.2017

AT THE THRESHOLD

Eheu fugaces labuntur anni

- Horace(65-8 BCE)

Let us seek solace from the past,

take the path to it's changing shadows under the canopy

of half-remembered trees,

the glittering water of a stream emerging,

carrying, polishing pebbles with it's swift movement.

We once kneeled beside it, feeling

it's cold water, but when and where

eludes us, a drifting leaf torn asunder.

The worn hands of time shaping

us as it shaped the landscape around us,

never-tiring, every result

good, complete, perishable;

leaving us with these flakes from the sculpting,

bright, faded.

13.06.2017

1793: Ode to revolutionary terror

Every royal is born

for that moment

when the rickety wagons

carrying them

at last clear their way

through the screaming mob

and the guillotine,

it's blade shining,

emerges; the stage

on which the last

act is to be played in.

08,06.2017

THE FALL OF ICARUS (1917)

In the serene blue

the flames eat the canvas and the wood

one last movement of the stick

the land of mud and trenches becomes the sky above

undo the belt

into the blue

away from the burning star

Icarus falls

a moment of awe

he feels like he flies on his own with wings on his back

a moment in the blue

weeks and months

one more crushed body

rotting sinking in to the mud between the trenches of ant-men

08.06.2017

scattered like

this spring's pollen

the years

the memories

making up our past

making up us

31.05.2017

green grass

under your feet

last summer

green grass

on this summer

on your grave

my father

31.05.2017

like a sudden breeze

coming going

a human life

31.05.2017

 THE SPEECH OF MARIANUS AT THERMOPYLAE, AFTER DEXIPPUS

At Thermopylae, in the shadow

Of those who found death facing the might of Xerxes,

Seven centuries have passed and the

Goths are approaching. A speech

Raising spectres for living men's strength,

Preparations for a battle

Whose course eludes as;

Their fate unknown, fame unfound,

These defenders of Thermopylae

Even fainter spectres, barely seen.

17.07.2017

Is this a faint echo

Of the pain you felt

The pain of which

There was no escape

The pain that became

Everything

Mother Father

Is this what I feel

A faint echo

Of your deaths?

08.05.2017

If this night the

Void would open 

Before me

I would step forward

Embracing it

Like one welcomes

Long-lost loved

04.05.-06.05.2017

THOSE WHO BLAME NAZIM HIKMET

They blame Hikmet, accuse him of being a 'Stalinist'

But they never blame those

Who were silent, without raising a voice

Or moving a pen

When Hikmet was in prison those long years.

From his Turkish prison cell, they claim,

Hikmet should have raged against the Soviet purges,

The gulags and the show trials;

The Left, they demand, must

Not have any of the faults

They accept with an indifferent shrug

In the Centre and the Right.

Outside the brick and stone walls,

The iron and steel in doors and windows

They demand, they who have never

Defecated and pissed in rusty buckets,

They demand and pass judgment -

Silent on those who now count the years

From freedom.

04.05.2017

I feel ill, a union

of physical and mental

failure, a state

of being on my knees,

as the world, life

turn and capsize.

My father, he died

on this floor I lay on,

remade by him, I

have forgotten the colour

it had, on that day

I first stepped in.

I only recall, remember,

the light of that day.

The light of all, of all

the coming days and years,

until now, on floorboards

he set, I seek the feeling

of his hands that placed them,

those hard, work-scarred

hands that still in that photo

wash me, few months old.

I don't think he was ever as happy

with me afterwards, as he was then.

14.04.2017

The Day Before Your Funeral

Cold, gray mid-day, the day

before your funeral. Nothing

moves outside. I'm shivering,

drinking bad coffee, black,

ran out of milk. In this

room where you spent

so much time, you died. Soon

three weeks, and tomorrow

I will be carrying

you to your grave, far

from where you were born,

at a sauna among the

ruins of a burned town. So

many years, so short

a life, you both

now, my father

and my mother, away

in the cold ground,

and your faith in

me, what I have to

show for it? All

those sacrifices, all

what you did and

what you gave up -

nothing, nothing.

Just years like

last summer's dead weeds

breaking through

the snow of the past.

16.02.2017

Andre, Henry, Roger and the other Roger and so on...

One can whine about 'socialist realism',

but look at all the pedophiles

producing the 'bourgeois literature' 

of the time; a cabinet of monsters.

Genius justifies everything,

goal of social progress and equality nothing

- so say the

guardians of literary immortality still.

And when a genius betrays everything

he claims he stood for, what he claimed

society and civilization stands for,

when he betrays basic human decency...

Then he's still a genius, a worthy one,

his work adored, his crimes pushed aside,

justified - he didn't really hurt anyone,

did he, when he fucked a ten-year-old?

Because he was bourgeois,

he made art for the sake of art,

he made art for the bourgeois

and for the bourgeois who despise the bourgeois.

He was one of them, one of them

who have the keys to the kingdom of literature,

who anoint with holy oil the chosen

and put laurels on their embalmed heads.

27.03.2017

Against the defense of a sexual predator Andre Gide by Edmund White

But as Alan Sheridan writes of Gide in his comprehensive (et compréhensif!) book, ‘surprisingly, no complaint was ever made against him, either by a boy or by his parents. He was, of course, protected by the innocence of the times. But he never forced his attentions on anyone.’

Edmund White: On the chance that a shepherd boy …

London Review of Books, Vol. 20 No. 24, 10th December 1998.

Except poor boys, barely in their teens,

living under colonial military occupation,

who had to prostitute themselves to survive

and help their families to survive.

Poor boys who sucked his dick to get bread

and who let him put his dick in their asshole

and fuck them

so that they could get almonds and dates

to bring back to their siblings to eat.

But they don't count, do they, Edmund White?

And the 'innocence of the times' -

perhaps 'someone' just got through

part of his 'private education'

by sleeping with his history teachers?

A Memory From the Eighties

I remember awakening among the clouds

on the top of a Norwegian fell,

moss and lichen and rocks

all else erased by the clouds

and behind me a tent, in

sleeping bags my family,

my whole world that circle

of thirty meters of silence I could see.

Below, the fjords, the blue sea,

somewhere behind the NATO base

we had driven past - No Stopping -

and the nuclear war fears

the time harboured, the fear

of sirens, of a message in the radio,

the cloud. The end, silent.

What hour was it? I didn't

know. Deep northern summer,

the endless light, seeping

through the clouds; timeless

moment, timeless

existence, and

behind, in the tent

my whole world.

25.03.2017 

Its not news in this time of ours

that someone eats human brain in a TV program,

what is newsworthy is

that some people still get offended by it.

And what is even more surprising

is that some care

about them being offended.

So quaintly charming.

11.03.2017

Eulogy for a Giant African Snail

There are supposed big deaths

of Very Important People

that don't really matter.

Very Important People,

allegedly, who seem oddly

inconsequential to the world,

existence, us and the human civilization.

There are small deaths

of small beings

that matter. 

That touch us.

Hurt us.

Make us stand back, changed.

This death of a giant African snail

was such a death.

It had an impact, it affects me.

Indirectly I was responsible.

I could have avoided it.

If I would have known,

I could have stopped

its needless suffering.

A bland man who played in some mediocre movies

which made a lot of money

(without it being down to him)

and in some bad movies

which made little money

(without either being his fault)

died also.

For him I couldn't have done anything.

To him I owed nothing.

His death raised no emotions in me.

I remember making facial expressions

didn't come to him easily or convincingly.

Perhaps it was botox.

Perhaps it was bad acting.

Perhaps, just like with the

Giant African Snail,

emotions just weren't his thing.

He was a good man,

another Very Important Person says.

Who am I to argue with that?

I would have still chosen

to save the Giant African Snail

instead of Bill Paxton.

27.02.2017

Electric light passes for life

in this darkness,

rising, fading, rising

like a beating heart,

a chest rising and falling

with each breath taken, desperate

gulps of air in to the lungs,

grasping to each minute

as it falls away to

become the past,

life becoming memories

and death,

death all around,

the darkness waiting

knowing in the end

it will become all there is.

16.09.2016-27.02.2017

All the prints left on the snow,

no matter the size of the feet

or the paws that left them,

are white. The mark

on the material becomes it,

a memory made visible.

15.01.-27.02.2017

Answer To My Friend Simon

We are echoes in eternity, fading.

27.02.2017

To My Father

The house is cold and empty

Your bed stands stripped

Your mattress among the firewood

The linen thrown away

Just silence

Inside the walls

Where I kissed your cold brow

Where I failed you

Where I failed you so many times

Where I failed you one final time

Twice you spoke of the pain

Twice you spoke

And I didn't save us

07.02.2017

Sojourn In Egypt

1

Omar Pound

never knew

his father.

2

From Isis

Dorothy got

what Ezra

couldn't give

her: a son.

3

Sand now

only

knows the

well beside

which the

bloody clothes

were left.

4

At the bottom,

a living Joseph

or a dead Caliph

al-Hakim?

5

Dust

and secrets

turned to dust.

6

Ezra signed

the birth certificate

but Ernest

was with her

at the hospital.

7

The soap bubble lives

of the artistes

turned to art

and reflection

from gossip -

a Midas' touch

turning everything

into words.

24.01.2017

the thoughts slippery at night

sentences falling away depths unseen

coherence lost left the 'I' wondering

grasping losing nothing but itself

generating throwing vanishing thoughts

small stones thrown at black water at night

gone thrown gone sent gone lost gone

gone gone gone gone gone going

peeling layers of thoughts the onion of mind

never hitting that gray piece that is I

wanting to feel itself holding itself

pressing pressing crushing

20.01.2017

We all are the sum

of our mistakes

more than our successes;

the harm done

always goes deeper

than the good achieved.

Yet that good

is all we have

to pay for the harm,

and increasing it

the justification

for our
continued existence.

15.01.2017

An Answer For My Niece

For Jii

Why do yo write so much? she asks,

the young voice exasperated.

I seek an answer, stumble,

then grab what I can

and mould it into an answer:

I want to preserve moments.

Now, looking back,

I have more to say.

The words I couldn't find for you then:

To write is to record;

a text is a memory

of at least of the process of writing

and to read is to experience

the past, to unite

the past and this moment -

simply, culture.

14.01.2017

Snow swirling,

writing in the air

between the grasping branches

tapping the sky.

13.01.2017

The Sweet Lie about Li Bai(701-762)

Once again I am reading how Li Bai

supposedly drowned while trying to embrace the Moon

reflected on the surface of a river.

This time, the writer tells how it comforts her,

that death she sees as pleasant concerning alternative

fates imagined up by Du Fu, his friend.

And I think how often I have read this,

this sweet lie, and when first I learned

- it was decades ago, surely -

about the letter Li Bai's cousin wrote of the poet's death;

that how after a long and painful illness

the poet expired at the cousin's home, in bed.

An ordinary death, the Moon hovering cold and distant;

no more poetic than dying

lungs full of water.

11.01.2017

An Epitaph

He - like you -

was nothing.

11.01.2017

Lost in the Landscape

A harsh gale blows through

the black-white land,

black branches dance up and down

naked, the snow long fallen.

I walk, what else?

From one point to another

in space and time,

an afternoon walk,

a life among biting winds and snow

to erase all tracks

after erasing the cause.

11.01.2017

Sometimes we need a Year Zero,

to guillotine the memories

and blow up the relics of bygone eras

of our lives;

let them collapse to dust

so that we can escape,

a hacksaw in one hand,

leg-irons cut from our feet,

for a brief dash to freedom.

11.01.2017