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.
Last Words
Splendidly, Shakespeare’s heroes,
Shakespeare’s heroines, once the spotlight’s on,
enact every night, with such grace, their verbose deaths.
Then great plush curtains, then smiling resurrection
to applause – and never their good looks gone.
The last recorded words too
of real kings, real queens, all the famous dead,
are but pithy pretences, quotable fictions
composed by anonymous men decades later,
never with ready notebooks at the bed.
Most do not know who they are
when they die or where they are, country or town,
nor which hand on their brow. Some clapped-out actor may
imagine distant clapping, bow, but no real queen
will sigh, ‘Give me my robe, put on my crown.’
Death scenes not life-enhancing,
death scenes not beautiful nor with breeding;
yet bravo Sydney Carton, bravo Duc de Chavost
who, euphoric beside the guillotine, turned down
the corner of the page he was reading.
And how would I wish to go?
Not as in opera – that would offend –
nor like a blue-eyed cowboy shot and short of words,
but finger-tapping still our private morse,’…love you,’
before the last flowers and flies descend.
Ask the Moon
1
Wakeful past 3 a.m.
near the frontiers of Nothing
it’s easy, so easy
to imagine (like William Blake)
an archaic angel standing askew
in a cone of light
not of this world;
easy at this cheating hour
to believe an angel cometh
to touch babies’ skulls,
their fontanelles,
deleting the long memory
of generations—
the genesis of déjà vu;
easy to conceive angel-light
bright as that sudden
ordinary window
I saw at midnight
across the road
before the drawing of a blind.
Dannie Abse (Cardiff, 22 september 1923 – 28 september 2014)
Portret door Peter Douglas Edwards, 1980
Lees verder “Dannie Abse, Lodewijk van Deyssel, Nick Cave, Fay Weldon, György Faludy, Hans Leip”
