Dannie Abse, Lodewijk van Deyssel, Fay Weldon, György Faludy

De Britse dichter en schrijver Dannie Abse werd geboren op 22 september 1923 in Cardiff, Wales. Zie ook mijn blog van 22 september 2010 en eveneens alle tags voor Dannie Abse op dit blog.

A Heritage

A heritage of a sort.

A heritage of comradeship and suffocation.

The bawling pit-hooter and the god’s

explosive foray, vengeance, before retreating

to his throne of sulphur.

Now this black-robed god of fossils

and funerals,

petrifier of underground forests

and flowers,

emerges with his grim retinue

past a pony’s skeleton, past human skulls,

into his half-propped up, empty, carbon colony.

Above, on the brutalised,

unstitched side of a Welsh mountain,

it has to be someone from somewhere else

who will sing solo

not of the marasmus of the Valleys,

the pit-wheels that do not turn,

the pump-house abandoned;

nor of how, after a half-mile fall

regiments of miners’ lamps

no longer, midge-like,

rise and slip and bob.

Only someone uncommitted,

someone from somewhere else,

panorama-high on a coal-tip,

may jubilantly laud

the re-entry of the exiled god

into his shadowless kingdom.

He, drunk with methane,

raising a man’s femur like a sceptre;

she, his ravished queen,

admiring the blood-stained black roses

that could not thrive on the plains of Enna.

 

Lachrymae

Later

I went to her funeral.

I cried.

I went home that was not home.

What happened cannot keep.

Already there’s a perceptible change of light.

Put out that light. Shades

lengthen in the losing sun.

She is everywhere and nowhere

now that I am less than one.

Most days leave no visiting cards behind

and still consoling letters make me weep.

I must wait for pigeon memory

to fly away, come back changed

to inhabit aching somnolence

and disguising sleep.

(ii) Winter

What is more intimate

than a lover’s demure whisper?

Like the moment before Klimt’s The Kiss.

What’s more conspiratorial

than two people in love?

So it was all our eager summers

but now the yellow leaf has fallen

and the old rooted happiness

plucked out. Must I rejoice when

teardrops on a wire turn to ice?

Last night, lying in bed,

I remembered how, pensioners both,

before sleep, winter come,

your warm foot suddenly

would console my cold one.

 

Dannie Abse (Cardiff, 22 september 1923)

Lees verder “Dannie Abse, Lodewijk van Deyssel, Fay Weldon, György Faludy”

Uri Zvi Greenberg, Rosamunde Pilcher, Hans Leip, Barthold Heinrich Brockes

De Israëlische Hebreeuwse en Jiddische dichter en politicus Uri Zvi Greenberg werd geboren op 22 september 1896 in Bialikamin, Lviv, in Galicië, destijds behorend tot Oostenrijk-Hongarije. Zie ook mijn blog van 22 september 2010

 

Under the Tooth of their Plough

Once more the snows have melted there…and the murderers gone back to farming.
There they have gone out to plough their fields, for that is their name for my graveyards.
If the tooth of their plough, rolling skull-like over the furrow, should churn up
A skeleton of mine, the ploughman will not be saddened or shocked,
But will grin and recognize it, recognize the mark where his tools struck.

Spring anew over land: bud and bulb and lilac and warbling birds.
By the shining stream of shallow waters, the resting place of herds,
The roving Jews are no more: no more with their beards and side-curls.
They are no more in the inns with tallit and tsitsit over their shirts;
They are no more in the grocery store or the clothing store,
They are no more in their workshops and traincars now,
They are no more in the synagogue, even, or in the marketplace,
But under the tooth of the Christian plough.
For the Lord doth visit His goys with grace.

But spring will be spring- and summer comes fatly ever after,
The roadside trees are fruit-fat as garden trees, as never before.
The fruit has never been as red or juicy as it is now
That the Jews are no more.

The Jews didn’t have any bells to beckon God by1
Blessèd are the Christians, for theirs are the bells on high,
Bells whose voice booms gravely through the plain there now in spring,
Thickly spewed through the breadth of lands that fragrance and colors cover.
It is almighty and master of all: there is nothing more to pass over
As once He passed over the roofs of the Jews.

Blessèd are the Christians, for theirs are the bells on high,
To honor a God who loves all Christians and all of humankind.
And all of the Jews are corpses under the tooth of their plough
Or under the grass of pastures.

Or in the forest’s graves
On river banks, on river bottoms, or dumped along
The roads where they belong.

O praise ye your dear sweet Jesus
With the bang of your big bells:
Bing-bong.

Vertaald door A.Z. Foreman

 

Uri Zvi Greenberg (22 september 1896 – 8 mei 1981)

Lees verder “Uri Zvi Greenberg, Rosamunde Pilcher, Hans Leip, Barthold Heinrich Brockes”