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

A Stranger At Ithaca

And so, that stranger who claimed to be

the long-lost old king Ulysses

 killed all the other strangers drawn

as suitors to the queen Penelope's court

and made a claim on the queen and the kingdom;

and the king's son accepted, for

he was no match to the stranger in arms,

and the queen, fearing for her son,

and left with only one suitor,

accepted and declared to all that

this was her husband and their king, regained.

But not one of the men who left

with the king to Troy came back with

this stranger, and afterwards

he often told odd tales of how these men

allegedly pershed in hands

 of monsters out of tales told to children;

and the people felt he mocked them

and their acceptance of him as their lost king.

He told how their fathers had been turned into pigs

and anger teared their insides.

But they did nothing, these

weak men of Ithaca, and from the eyes of

their queen Penelope

they thought they recognized the same

sense of humiliation.

30.07.-31.07.2017

Of Libertarian Suicide

Inspired by the final act of H. Beam Piper(1904-1964)

There is no greater act showing your individuality and love

of liberty from all constraints

than killing yourself; to die in the quest for freedom

is not only optional but a mandatory

to one wanting to escape the rigidity of a state

where the rights of the individual

to act as he chooses have limits put on them.

To him there is only death.

Let us send him on his way

and celebrate.

30.07.2017

The Last Years of Du Fu(712-770)

Wandering, wandering among the mountains and rivers,

in the torn world bleeding

the body cast away from home, the mind soaring, soaring

above the darkening world

on movements of brush on paper.

Adrift, adrift in the south with broken roots,

the brush a heart-beat inscribing breathing,

inhaling, exhaling; then, 

sailing, sailing on the Dongting lake. sight

dissolving, dissolving in the night.

29.07.2017

The Videos on The Screen, The Yard at Evening

Something about Cavafy, and Voyager in the clean room

in the year of my birth; the Grand Tour,

and an Alexandria lost, as Alexandria is always lost,

the light is fading, my coffee in the paper cup

grows cold, I hear the Greek words

I can't decipher, being no Ventris fated

for that most Greek of fates, struck

down at moment of triumph, the gods

true to their form, and in the interstellar space,

cameras frozen, the travellers you often asked

me about, my father, my father... You,

who flickering sit on the porch, so

thoughtful, on this summer evening six

months after your death, in the fading

light, fading... A signal through

time and space, flickering...

26.07.2017

A Lively Form Of Death

Oh eyes, no eyes, but fountains fraught with tears; O life, no life, but lively form of death...

Thomas Kyd(1558-1594): The Spanish Tragedy(1592)

Through the clouds like milk,

light piercing to faded eyes

and time stands, a stage set

for the unscripted to take

place, a sudden change -

a voice to break the silence

of days, a bird in black costume

falling to the ground, the

pale orange cat

with feathers emerging,

the curtain white torn

open with the blue sliver

of a heavenly blade, herald

to set the play moving. Let

it end here, this Kyd's

Hamlet of a life lost.

26.07.2017

Of God And Mortals

First take:

Give god
what is yours
and take from him
what is his.

Second take:

Take from god
what is his
and give to him
what is yours.

Coda:

Put the Supreme Being
on those rickety wagons
let him ride it
to the guillotine's steel blade.

24.07.2017

Beyond The Void

And then, what shall you do, oh my

stricken friend, when even that light

has gone out, when there is no hope

left to cling onto, when your god has

abandoned you on the cross?

What you will do, when you are laying on

the cold stone, and the creation recedes,

the doors of the universe close and

you, you oh my friend, are facing

the annihilation beyond the void itself?

You die, you die like one hundred billion

human beings before you, you die like I

will do, like we all will do, no heaven

and no hell, just that nothingness with no

creator, the emptiness that birthed endless death.

24.07.2017

Writer's Block

Words come, words go,

not into the corrals of a poem,

but escape free into the wide

plains of oblivion,

fading, losing shape

as they gallop beyond memory.

24.07.2017

Malaise

The clouds above terrible brightness,

pure white light hurting my eyes.

All around, silence. The birds

have done their duty for their species,

the songs of procreation

and territory no use now.

Soon there will be more rain,

on this landscape soaked with

water. The harvest will be bad;

but then, the fields closest lie fallow,

and I will be soon away, like

the birds migrating, to some

place where shadows will be

even longer, silence more deafening.

20.07.2017

The Hunter's Rest

Death comes in the night with sharp teeth,

ripping flesh and fur and tendons.

In the morning sun, on the leaves dew

and dried blood, and fur.

Among the evergreens, a hole in the ground,

amid roots of pines lies the fox

and what dreams she sees!

The flight, the fight, the flesh struggling

against the teeth, against death.

16.07.2017

The Time Of Miracles Has Ended

Picking up his decapitated head,

St. Denis started his march from the mountain of the martyrs.

Where he collapsed, the head rolling

a moment before stopping, they

raised the monastery for the kings' graves.

When it came time to behead

a king, the head just fell

into the basket. No miracle after

the God's Anointed, Most Christian King

had been put to the guillotine -

just five seconds or so of consciousness

and no ability to scream.

14.07.2017

Rain, clouds

and this day,

in a stream

rushing off.

12.07.2017

Light, silence

- and an absence

nature abhors

vacuum

rushing away

preserving it

a quarantine zone

in space, time

and a presence

felt

09.07.2017

What if?

The unthinkable is becoming normal

- curse my pliable mind, which

to each loss adapts, yet mourns

and asks 'What if?'

'What if you wouldn't have,

what if you would have.'

Yes - what if they would

all have had a chance and lived!

This mind of mine, it moves on

yet a chain connects it

to each loss, each world

splitting mistake others paid for.

A rusted chain, a so far endless chain,

pass the deaths and graves and indignities

heaped upon those I was meant to help,

not pass in disgraceful, cowardly silence.

I wonder how long it shall go on,

that rusted chain, pass how many mistakes

and deaths and injustices, until all taut

it stops me for the reckoning.

06.07.2017

A Woman of the Pharisees

Sunlight dances on the floor, the breeze opens and closes,

opens and closes the window. I am reading Mauriac,

and on every page I think; he's like a middlebrow Proust.

Sunlight dances on the floor, the breeze slaps the window shut.

My feet, with their bad circulation, for once are warm.

What Proust made deep, Mauriac made banal

- the slights of childhood metamorphosed

into wounds of adulthood, carved with a blunt pen-knife.

The rising wind throws the window open.

02.07.2017

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