Dylan Thomas, Sylvia Plath, Nawal el Saadawi

De Engelse dichter Dylan Thomas werd geboren op 27 oktober 1914 in Swansea in Wales. Zie ook mijn blog van 27 oktober 2010 en eveneens alle tags voor Dylan Thomas op dit blog.

 

Being But Men

Being but men, we walked into the trees

Afraid, letting our syllables be soft

For fear of waking the rooks,

For fear of coming

Noiselessly into a world of wings and cries.

If we were children we might climb,

Catch the rooks sleeping, and break no twig,

And, after the soft ascent,

Thrust out our heads above the branches

To wonder at the unfailing stars.

Out of confusion, as the way is,

And the wonder, that man knows,

Out of the chaos would come bliss.

That, then, is loveliness, we said,

Children in wonder watching the stars,

Is the aim and the end.

Being but men, we walked into the trees.

A Saint About To Fall

A saint about to fall,

The stained flats of heaven hit and razed

To the kissed kite hems of his shawl,

On the last street wave praised

The unwinding, song by rock,

Of the woven wall

Of his father’s house in the sands,

The vanishing of the musical ship-work and the chucked bells,

The wound-down cough of the blood-counting clock

Behind a face of hands,

On the angelic etna of the last whirring featherlands,

Wind-heeled foot in the hole of a fireball,

Hymned his shrivelling flock,

On the last rick’s tip by spilled wine-wells

Sang heaven hungry and the quick

Cut Christbread spitting vinegar and all

The mazes of his praise and envious tongue were worked in flames and shells.

Glory cracked like a flea.

The sun-leaved holy candlewoods

Drivelled down to one singeing tree

With a stub of black buds,

The sweet, fish-gilled boats bringing blood

Lurched through a scuttled sea

With a hold of leeches and straws,

Heaven fell with his fall and one crocked bell beat the left air.

O wake in me in my house in the mud

Of the crotch of the squawking shores,

Flicked from the carbolic city puzzle in a bed of sores

The scudding base of the familiar sky,

The lofty roots of the clouds.

From an odd room in a split house stare,

Milk in your mouth, at the sour floods

That bury the sweet street slowly, see

The skull of the earth is barbed with a war of burning brains and hair.

Strike in the time-bomb town,

Raise the live rafters of the eardrum,

Throw your fear a parcel of stone

Through the dark asylum,

Lapped among herods wail

As their blade marches in

That the eyes are already murdered,

The stocked heart is forced, and agony has another mouth to feed.

O wake to see, after a noble fall,

The old mud hatch again, the horrid

Woe drip from the dishrag hands and the pressed sponge of the forehead,

The breath draw back like a bolt through white oil

And a stranger enter like iron.

Cry joy that hits witchlike midwife second

Bullies into rough seas you so gentle

And makes with a flick of the thumb and sun

A thundering bullring of your silent and girl-circled island.

 

Dylan Thomas (27 oktober 1914 – 9 november 1953)

Hier met zijn vrouw Caitlin

 

De Amerikaanse dichteres en schrijfster Sylvia Plath werd geboren op 27 oktober 1932 in Jamaica Plain, een buitenwijk van Boston. Zie ook mijn blog van 27 oktober 2010 en eveneens alle tags voor Sylvia Plathop dit blog.

 

Black Pine Tree in an Orange Light

Tell me what you see in it :
The pine tree like a Rorschach-blot
black against the orange light :

Plant an orange pumpkin patch
which at twelve will quaintly hatch
nine black mice with ebon coach,

or walk into the orange and make
a devil’s cataract of black
obscure god’s eye with corkscrew fleck;

put orange mistress half in sun,
half in shade, until her skin
tattoos black leaves on tangerine.

Read black magic or holy book
or lyric of love in the orange and black
till dark is conquered by orange cock,

but more pragmatic than all this,
say how crafty the painter was
to make orange and black ambiguous.

 

Doomsday

The idiot bird leaps out and drunken leans
Atop the broken universal clock:
The hour is crowed in lunatic thirteens.
Out painted stages fall apart by scenes
While all the actors halt in mortal shock:
The idiot bird leaps out and drunken leans.

Streets crack through in havoc-split ravines
As the doomstruck city crumbles block by block:
The hour is crowed in lunatic thirteens.

Fractured glass flies down in smithereens;
Our lucky relics have been put in hock:
The idiot bird leaps out and drunken leans.

The monkey’s wrench has blasted all machines;
We never thought to hear the holy cock:
The hour is crowed in lunatic thirteens.

Too late to ask if end was worth the means,
Too late to calculate the toppling stock:
The idiot bird leaps out and drunken leans,
The hour is crowed in lunatic thirteens.

 

Winter Trees

The wet dawn inks are doing their blue dissolve.
On their blotter of fog the trees
Seem a botanical drawing.
Memories growing, ring on ring,
A series of weddings.

Knowing neither abortions nor bitchery,
Truer than women,
They seed so effortlessly!
Tasting the winds, that are footless,
Waist-deep in history.

Full of wings, otherworldliness.
In this, they are Ledas.
O mother of leaves and sweetness
Who are these pietas?
The shadows of ringdoves chanting, but chasing nothing.

Sylvia Plath (27 oktober 1932 – 11 februari 1963)

Hier met de dichter Ted Hughes

 

De Egyptische schrijfster, gynaecologe, moslimfeministe en politiek activiste Nawal el Saadawi werd geboren in Kafr Tahla op 27 oktober 1931. Zie ook mijn blog van 27 oktober 2008 en ook mijn blog van 27 oktober 2009 en ook mijn blog van 27 oktober 2010

 

Uit: The Circling Song (Vertaald door Marilyn Booth)

„…He filled his chest with the night air, and realized that he had been born motherless, that his paternal grandfather had been a soldier in the army of Muhammad Ali and that he had been slain in prison…

(…)

…She recognized the black stains on the finger, and whispered: ‘Hamido!” But Hamido heard nothing, and remained stiffly upright, his head raised to the sky and one black finger to his ear. (Those travelling abroad used to see this memorial to the unknown soldier erected at the entrance to every capital city.) Hamida stretched out her had and grabbed his. His fingers were like hers, and the lines on his palm resembled hers. In a rush of sympathy – for their lot was a shared one – she tried to bend his arm downwards. But the stone arm, raised wearily, would not move. She raised her eyes and noticed that the wide ebony eyes shone with a real tear, a childlike one…

(…)

…When Hamido opened his eyes, daylight was filling the room. He thought for sure that what he had seen had been nothing but a dream. He jumped up from the mat and ran out into the street. His friends…were playing as usual in the narrow lane extending along the mud-brick façades. Each child grasped the next one’s hand, forming a ring that circled round and round…Because they were circling and singing uninterruptedly, it was impossible to pick out the song’s beginning or end by ear, just as it was impossible to tell by looking where the circle began and where it ended… „

 

Nawal el Saadawi (Kafr Tahla, 27 oktober 1931)

 

Zie voor nog meer schrijvers van de 27e oktober ook mijn vorige blog van vandaag.