De Vlaamse dichter Jan Lauwereyns werd geboren op 13 mei 1969 in Antwerpen. Zie ook alle tags voor Jan Lauwereyns op dit blog.
Het pure spectrum
Het pure spectrum
Lang in vloed gelegen
Ebde jij
Onwaarschijnlijk weg
Door mij onder alle sterren verkozen
Heropgeroepen, verdampt
Vele woorden van liefde
Bij het finale aflopen van alles, absurd
En toch, en evengoed, zal niets gedaan zijn
Wat achteraf gezien onmogelijk bleek
Nergens resten wat ooit zeker zou
Geen wijsheid of richtlijn
Dan in het brandpunt
De verdwenen parabool
Die cirkel werd, meisje
Hemelsblauw
Ongelooflijk veel verdriet
Terwijl ze langdurig en gewelddadig schreeuwt
zijn haar ogen stevig gesloten, zodat de huid
er rond rimpelt, en het voorhoofd zich
samentrekt tot een frons.
Zuigeling: meesteres in het beoefenen
van de buigzaamheden.
Die overtuigender dan de dichter
voorwendt pijn te zijn haar werkelijk
doorvoelde pijn?
Gegeven hoe droog haar tranen zijn.
En als je zwicht voor haar chantage
houdt ze in minder dan een vingerknip op.
Anatomie van melancholie
Is de Kilimanjaro hoog genoeg?
Om jezelf in de rug te schieten?
Wanneer je voeten wegzinken in eeuwige sneeuw.
Nu dan?
Je strekt je arm,
je haalt de ijzeren hoektand over.
De draak in je hand spuwt vuur.
Draak: orbitaleur, brenger van veelal
ongewenste voorwerpen in een baan rond de aarde
ware het niet
dat de slaagkans omgekeerd evenredig is
met zwaartekracht. Tegenwind?
Jan Lauwereyns (Antwerpen, 13 mei 1969)
De Vlaamse dichter Reinout Verbeke werd geboren op 13 mei 1981 in Roeselare. Zie ook alle tags voor Reinout Verbeke op dit blog.
Dorp
We hangen aan de aderen van anderen
als klimplanten. We tappen af en vertakken
tot één vaatstelsel. Iemand ratelt. We vervangen
zijn falende organen. We bonken synchroon
bloed naar de aorta van het dorp: een open hart
dat warmt en roept als honderd vogeljongen
We vergeten onze bloedgroep en denken
alleen nog aan vloeien en stuwen en vloeien
Wie nog van een ander vat tapt
maakt zich onmogelijk
De achterkant van flatgebouwen
Aan de achterkant van flatgebouwen
liggen opengepikte vuilniszakken
worden borsten aan de zon gegeven
hebben geliefden ruwer lief. Geen flaneren
geen plezierboten. Op het achterbalkon
ebben we naar het zijn van de zee
Aan de achterkant van flatgebouwen
trekken wolken als zeewier
halvelings aan ons vissenoog voorbij
Hier geldt deining van altijd dezelfde gordijnen
Hier waak ik over mijn kind dat in de kamer
naar haar eerste klanken hapt
Aan de achterkant van flatgebouwen
heerst wederzijdsheid van kijken, loeren
we elkaar uit het koraal. We vinden er
onze vinnen als vanouds
Reinout Verbeke (Roeselare, 13 mei 1981)
De Engelse schrijver Bruce Chatwin werd op 13 mei 1940 in Sheffield geboren. Zie ook alle tags voor Bruce Chatwin op dit blog.
Uit: The Songlines
“IN ALICE SPRINGS – a grid of scorching streets where men in long white socks were forever getting in and out of Land Cruisers – I met a Russian who was mapping the sacred sites of the Aboriginals.
His name was Arkady Volchok. He was an Australian citizen. He was thirty-three years old.
His father, Ivan Volchok, was a Cossack from a village near Rostov-on-Don, who, in 1942., was arrested and sent with a trainload of other Ostarbeiter to work in a German factory.
One night, somewhere in the Ukraine, he jumped from the cattle-car into a field of sunflowers. Soldiers in grey uniforms hunted him up and down the long lines of sunflowers, but he gave them the slip. Somewhere else, lost between murdering armies, he met a girl from Kiev and married her. Together they drifted to a forgetful Adelaide suburb, where he rigged up a vodka still and fathered three sturdy sons.
The youngest of these was Arkady.
Nothing in Arkady’s temperament predisposed him to live in the hugger-mugger of Anglo-Saxon suburbia or take a conventional job. He had a flattish face and a gentle smile, and he moved through the bright Australian spaces with the ease of his footloose forbears.
His hair was thick and straight, the colour of straw. His lips had cracked in the heat. He did not have the drawn-in lips of so many white Australians in the Outback; nor did he swallow his words. He rolled his r’s in a very Russian way. Only when you came up close did you realise how big his bones were.
He had married, he told me, and had a daughter of six. Yet, preferring solitude to domestic chaos, he no longer lived with his wife. He had few possessions apart from a harpsichord and a shelf of books.
He was a tireless bushwalker. He thought nothing of setting out, with a water-flask and a few bites of food, for a hundredmile walk along the Ranges. Then he would come home, out of the heat and light, and draw the curtains, and play the music of Buxtehude and Bach on the harpsichord. Their orderly progressions, he said, conformed to the contours of the Central Australian landscape.”
Bruce Chatwin (13 mei 1940 – 18 januari 1989)
De Britse schrijfster Daphne du Maurier werd geboren in Londen op 13 mei 1907. Zie ook alle tags voor Daphne du Maurier op dit blog.
Uit: The Doll
“I want to know if men realise when they are insane. Sometimes I think that my brain cannot hold together, it is filled with too much horror – too great a despair.
And there is no one; I have never been so unutterably alone. Why should it help me to write this? . . . Vomit forth the poison in my brain.
For I am poisoned, I cannot sleep, I cannot close my eyes without seeing his damned face . . . If only it had been a dream, something to laugh over, a festered imagination.
It’s easy enough to laugh, who wouldn’t crack their sides and split their tongues with laughing. Let’s laugh till the blood runs from our eyes – there’s fun, if you like. No, it’s the emptiness that hurts, the breaking up of everything inside me.
If I could feel, I should have followed her to the ends of the earth, no matter how she pleaded or how she loathed me. I should have taught her what it is to be loved by a man – yes – a man, and I would have thrown his filthy battered body from the window, watched him disappear for ever, his evil scarlet mouth distorted . . .
It’s the hot feeling that has filled me, the utter incapacity to reason.
And I am deceiving myself when I say she would have come to me. I did not follow her because I knew that it was hopeless. She would never have loved me – she will never love any man.
Sometimes I can think of it all dispassionately, and I pity her. She misses so much – so much – and no one will ever know the truth. What was her life before I knew her, what is it now?
Rebecca – Rebecca, when I think of you with your pale earnest face, your great wide fanatical eyes like a saint, the narrow mouth that hid your teeth, sharp and white as ivory, and your halo of savage hair, electric, dark, uncontrolled – there has never been anyone more beautiful. Who will ever know your heart, who will ever know your mind?“
Daphne du Maurier (13 mei 1907 – 19 april 1989)
De Schotse dichteres Kathleen Jamie werd geboren op 13 mei 1962 in Currie, Edinburgh. Zie ook alle tags voor Kathleen Jamie op dit blog.
Moon
Last night, when the moon
slipped into my attic-room
as an oblong of light,
I sensed she’d come to commiserate.
It was August. She travelled
with a small valise
of darkness, and the first few stars
returning to the northern sky,
and my room, it seemed,
had missed her. She pretended
an interest in the bookcase
while other objects
stirred, as in a rockpool,
with unexpected life:
strings of beads in their green bowl gleamed,
the paper-crowded desk;
the books, too, appeared inclined
to open and confess.
Being sure the moon
harboured some intention,
I waited; watched for an age
her cool glaze shift
first toward a flower sketch
pinned on the far wall
then glide to recline
along the pinewood floor
before I’d had enough. Moon,
I said, we’re both scarred now.
Are they quite beyond you,
the simple words of love? Say them.
You are not my mother;
with my mother, I waited unto death.
Kathleen Jamie (Currie, 13 mei 1962)
De Amerikaanse schrijver Armistead Jones Maupin Jr. werd geboren op 13 mei 1944 in Washington. Zie ook alle tags voor Armistead Maupin op dit blog.
Uit:Tales of the City
“Well, you certainly aren’t acting like it! I’ve never heard such a thing! You can’t just run away from your family and friends to go live with a bunch of hippies and mass murderers!”
“Oh, Mom, that’s just a lot of TV crap!”
Her mother lowered her voice reproachfully. “Don’t you talk nasty to your mother, Mary Ann . . . and it’s not a lot of TV . . . stuff. What about those Giraffe Killers?”
“Zebra.”
“Well, whatever. And what about those earthquakes? Your Daddy took me to see that awful movie, and I nearly had a heart attack when Ava Gardner . . .”
“Mom. I’ve made up my mind about this. Will you just call Mr. Lassiter for me?”
Her mother began to cry. “Something terrible is going to happen to you. I know it.”
“Now who’s being silly? What could possibly happen to me, Mom? San Francisco is a lot safer than Cleveland, and the people are are so mellow.”
Her mother stopped sobbing for a moment. “What does that mean?” she asked suspiciously.
WHEN IT WAS OVER, Mary Ann left the Buena Vista and walked through Aquatic Park to the bay. For several minutes, she stared at the Alcatraz beacon, drunk with the prospect of an undefined future.
“What could possible happen to me, Mom?” The words came back to her on a chill wind, nibbling uncertainly on a corner of her mind.
Back at the Fisherman’s Wharf Holiday Inn she looked up Connie Bradshaw’s phone number. Connie was the only person she knew in San Francisco. Mary Ann had heard that she was a stewardess for United, but hadn’t spoken to her old high school friend since 1968.
“Oh, God, I can’t believe it!” squealed Connie, when Mary Ann identified herself. “How long are you here for?”
“For good,” said Mary Ann, savoring the words.”
Armistead Maupin ( Washington, 13 mei 1944)
De Franse schrijver Alphonse Daudet werd geboren in Nîmes op 13 mei 1840. Zie ook alle tags voor Alphonse Daudet op dit blog.
L’Oiseau bleu
J’ai dans mon cœur un oiseau bleu,
Une charmante créature,
Si mignonne que sa ceinture
N’a pas l’épaisseur d’un cheveu
Il lui faut du sang pour pâture.
Bien longtemps, je me fis un jeu
De lui donner sa nourriture :
Les petits oiseaux mangent peu.
Mais, sans en rien laisser paraître,
Dans mon cœur il a fait, le traître,
Un trou large comme la main,
Et son bec, fin comme une lame,
En continuant son chemin,
M’est entré jusqu’au fond de l’âme !…
Autre Amoureuse
Lorsque je vivais loin de vous,
Toujours triste, toujours en larmes,
Pour mon cœur malade et jaloux
Le sommeil seul avait des charmes.
Maintenant que tu m’appartiens
Et que mon cœur a sa pâture,
– Il ne m’est plus qu’une torture,
Le sommeil cher aux jours anciens.
Lorsque je dormais loin de vous,
Dans un rêve toujours le même,
Je vous voyais à mes genoux
Me dire chaque nuit : « Je t’aime ! »
Maintenant que tu m’appartiens,
Dans les bras chaque nuit je rêve
Que tu pars, qu’un méchant t’enlève
Et que je meurs quand tu reviens.
Alphonse Daudet (13 mei 1840 – 17 december 1897)
Zie voor nog meer schrijvers van de 13 mei ook mijn blog van 13 mei 2011 deel 1 en eveneens deel 2.