Bukowski Night with Ink, Sweat & Tears

Imagine holding a party where Charles Bukowski, Allen Ginsberg and George Szirtes are the guests. How would it all turn out? What would one learn? Would one learn anything? It's on yesterday's INK, SWEAT & TEARS (via MY LINKS) front page and it's called Bukowski Night.

Five Minutes after the Air Raid by Miroslav Holub

Here is the fourth poem in the mini-series of new translations. As previously stated the translations are taken from German translations of the original Czech and subsequently translated here into English.

Five Minutes after the Air Raid

In Pilsen,
Bahnhofstraße 26,
she climbed to the third floor,
up the stairs, all that remained
of the whole house,
opened the door,
that led into the sky,
stared over the abyss.

Because here
the world ended.

Then she closed it firmly
so that neither
Sirius
or Aldebaran
could call her from the kitchen,
descended the stairs
and took her place,
to wait
for the house to grow back
and her husband to come home
from the ashes
and the children's legs
to be stuck back on.

In the morning they found her
turned to stone.
Sparrows pecked from her hands.

----
gw 2009

Alphabet from Miroslav Holub

Once again, a poem translated from the German translation of the original Czech.

Alphabet

Ten million years
from Miocene
to the school in the Gerstengasse.

We know everything
from A to Z.

Though sometimes the finger
is on the place between A and B,
empty as the prairie by night.

Between G and H,
deep as the Carpathian Lakes

between M and N,
long as the history of Man,

sometimes it is
on the Galactic cool spot
after the letter Z,
on the beginning and the end,
and it shakes slightly
like a strange bird.

Not from hopelessness.

It's simply so.

----
gw 2009

The Fly from Miroslav Holub

As with Miroslav Holub's poem The Door (see below) this is another one of P-i-R's Czech-to-German-to-English translations. The system brings a certain je ne sais quoi.

The Fly

She sat on a willow stem,
observing
a part of the battle of Crecy,
the roars,
the gasps,
the groans,
the trampling and falling.

During the fourteenth attack
of the French cavalry
she mated
with a brown-eyed male fly
from Vadincourt.

She rubbed her legs together
on a slit-open horse
and pondered
on the immortality of flies.

Relieved she settled
on the blue tongue
of the Duke of Clairvaux.

As silence settled
and the whispers of decay
spread
and only
a few arms and legs
twitched under the beech trees,

she began to lay her eggs
on the one eye
of Johann Uhr,
the King's Armourer.

And there she was pecked off
by a swift
in flight
from the flames of Estrees

-----
gw 2009

The Door from Miroslav Holub

The first of several Miroslav Holub poems in English translated by P-i-R from Reihe Hanser's (Franz Peter Künzel) German translation of the Czech originals. They are therefore not direct translations. The result is a kind of poetic Chinese whispers.

The Door

Go and open the door.
Perhaps outside
there's a tree, or a wood,
or a garden,
or a magic town.

Go and open the door.
Perhaps outside
there's a dog scratching.
Perhaps there's a face outside,
or an eye
or the picture
of a picture.

Go and open the door.
If there's fog outside
it will go.

Go and open the door.
There could be outside only
singing darkness,
and there could be outside only
wind's hollow breath
and there could be
absolutely nothing
outside,
go and open the door.

At least
there would be
a draught.

-----
gw 2009

Sonnet to Sir John Betjeman

There has been some demand for Poet-in-Residence the anti-Laureate to poetise on the latest appointment of Ms Duffy to the noble rank of Queen's Canary. But, to be fair, this would not be very fair for the royal and gilded bird has not yet begun to sing. Instead here's a sonnet of sorts to that stalwart Betjeman, the poet laureate buried in St. Enodoc's pocket handkerchief graveyard in the middle of a golf links.
A lovely story goes that one Sunday morning after gale force winds the priest and congregation arrived at the church on the sand dunes to find the building buried in sand and were forced to enter through a hole in the roof.

Across from Padstow - Beware of Flying Golfballs
in memory of Sir John Betjeman (1906-1984)

Gently we laid him down
at last in the sands of time
the laureate 'neath the scribbled name
scrolled on the simple stone unrhymed

where sloughy seagulls
squall and squawk
on the rain-lashed gale-blasted
church yard patch

and wild flapped golfers somehow tee off
to bomb us all with unworthy attempts

which curl in and over and wildly astray
- loose formations of pimply balls
driven through and on the Atlantic gales
to fall on poet, church and sand ...

_______
gw 2009

Duffy relieves Motion

With a rare flutter of his sadly drooping feathers and a few quiet chirps of relief the ex-Poet Laureate Andrew Motion, ten years in the gilded cage has finally flown. Carol Ann Duffy, selected by Prime Minister Gordon Brown, will now hop onto the empty still swinging swing and take upon herself the role of Queen's Canary.
Poet-in-Residence has already posted his Dylanesque views on the whole Queen's Canary business and these, in a series of posts, can be found by entering 'queens canary' in the search box. Others may now write their fill. And they will.