De Engelse dichter George Granville Barker werd geboren op 26 februari 1913 in Loughton, Essex. Zie ook alle tags voor George Barker op dit blog.

True Confession

1
Today, recovering from influenza,
I begin, having nothing worse to do,
This autobiography that ends a
Half of my life I’m glad I’m through.
O Love, what a bloody hullaballoo
I look back at, shaken and sober,
When that intemperate life I view
From this temperate October.
To nineteen hundred and forty-seven
I pay the deepest of respects,
For during this year I was given
Some insight into the other sex.
I was a victim, till forty-six,
Of the rosy bed with bitches in it;
But now, in spite of all pretexts,
I never sleep a single minute.

O fellow sailor on the tossing sea,
O fleeting virgin in the night,
O privates, general in lechery,
Shun, shun the bedroom like a blight:
Evade, O amorous acolyte,
That pillow where your heart can bury –
For if the thing was stood upright
It would become a cemetery.

I start with this apostrophe
To all apostles of true love:
With your devotion visit me,
Give me the glory of the dove
That dies of dereliction. Give
True love to me, true love to me,
And in two shakes I will prove
It’s false to you and false to me.

Bright spawner, on your sandbank dwell
Coldblooded as a plumber’s pipe –
The procreatory ocean swell
Warming, till they’re over ripe,
The cockles of your cold heart, will
Teach us true love can instil
Temperature into any type.

Does not the oyster in its bed
Open a yearning yoni when
The full moon passes overhead
Feeling for pearls? O nothing, then,
Too low a form of life is, when
Love, abandoning the cloister,
Can animate the bedded oyster,
The spawning tiddler, and men.

Thus all of us, the pig and prince,
The prince and the psychiatrist,
Owe everything to true love, since
How the devil could we exist
If our parents had never kissed?
All biographies, therefore,
– No matter what else they evince –
Open, like prisons, with adore.

Remember, when you love another,
Who demonstrably is a bitch,
Even Venus had a mother
Whose love, like a silent aitch,
Incepted your erotic itch.
Love, Love has the longest history,
For we can tell an ape his father
Begot him on a mystery.

I, born in Essex thirty-four
Essentially sexual years ago,
Stepped down, looked around, and saw
I had been cast a little low
In the social register
For the friends whom I now know.
Is a constable a mister?
Bob’s your uncle, even so.

Better men than I have wondered
Why one’s father could not see
That at one’s birth he had blundered.
His ill-chosen paternity
Embarrasses the fraternity
Of one’s friends who, living Huysmans,
Understandably have wondered
At fatherhood permitted policemen.

So I, the son of an administer
Of the facts of civil laws
Delight in uncivil and even sinister
Violations. Thus my cause
Is simply, friend, to hell with yours.
In misdemeanours I was nourished –
Learnt, like altruists in Westminster,
By what duplicities one flourished.

At five, but feeling rather young,
With a blue eye beauty over six,
Hand in hand and tongue to tongue
I took a sin upon my sex.
Sin? It was pleasure. So I told her.
And ever since, persisting in
Concupiscences no bolder
My pleasure’s been to undress sin.

What’s the point of a confession
If you have nothing to confess?
I follow the perjuring profession
– O poet, lying to impress! –
But the beautiful lie in a beautiful dress
Is the least heinous of my transgressions:
When a new one’s added, ‘O who was it? ‘
Sigh the skeletons in my closet.

Ladybird, ladybird, come home, come home:
Muse and mistress wherever you are.
The evening is here and in the gloom
Each bisexual worm burns like a star
And the love of man is crepuscular.
In the day the world. But, at night, we
Lonely on egoes dark and far
Apart as worlds, between sea and sea,

Yearn on each other as the stars hold
One another in fields together.
O rose of all the world, enfold
Each weeping worm against the cold
Of the bitter ego’s weather;
To warm our isothermal pride
Cause sometimes, Love, another
To keep us by an unselfish side.

The act of human procreation
– The rutting tongue, the grunt and shudder,
The sweat, the reek of defecation,
The cradle hanging by the bladder,
The scramble up the hairy ladder,
And from the thumping bed of Time
Immortality, a white slime,
Sucking at its mother’s udder –

The act of human procreation
– The sore dug plugging, the lugged out bub,
The small man priming a lactation,
The grunt, the drooping teat, the rub
Of gum and dug, the slobbing kiss:
Behold the mater amabilis,
Sow with a saviour, messiah and cow,
Virgin and piglet, son and sow:

The act of human procreation,
– O crown and flower, O culmination
Of perfect love throughout creation –
What can I compare it to?
O eternal butterflies in the belly,
O trembling of the heavenly jelly,
O miracle of birth! Really
We are excreted, like shit.

Op de ontsnapping van een vriend aan de verdrinkingsdood voor Holland’s kust

Kwam koud die zee op bij Katwijk die zijn graf voor hem dolf
langszij terwijl hij zich
wild vocht naar de kust, maar voorlangs sloeg de golf
brandingzwart hem terug
en hij zag zijn kastelen bouwende zoon op het reddende strand.
Toen rees het wuivende duin
voor het laatst voor zijn oog. En hij schreeuwde het uit,
maar een klauwende luim
van de zee smoorde de angstkreet waarin hij verdronk
als een stervende vlieger. En zij,
die naast haar zoon op het zandloperzand in slaap verzonk,
werd gewekt door wie wist
dat dit het uur nog niet was en die haar de dood
in de ogen liet zien
van die haar zoon verwekt had. Op sprong zij
en wierp zich in de muil
van het monster waar hij zijn leven al sloot
voor haar die zo rijk hem gebed had.
Maar zij dreef zich door zijn verdrinken als Orpheus en trok
aan zijn haren terug
haar ontsnappende bruigom. En op het strand
stond lachend hun zoon
die toch bijna een wees was. Toen lagen de drie terneer
op dat koude zand,
ieder de ander houdend bij een levende hand.

Vertaald door Jan Zitman

Zie voor nog meer schrijvers van de 26e februari ook  mijn blog van 26 februari 2022 en ook mijn blog van 26 februari 2019 en eveneens mijn blog van 26 februari 2017 deel 2.