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Preface
So many verses. Their
root rhythm – trees.
Marked with sacrificial
blood, they too are leaves.
So many dances. At
the root of every footfall
an earthen god, dry
palms open for alms.
So many seas. Their
primordial faces afloat.
Mountains rise out of
seabeds sucked skywards.
The vaster the plains
– the faster the cattle run –
the easier they
lose the men who mind the herds.
So many rhythms. Their
tree-life, dance.
And yet, tree, you turn to
ash in so many fires.
I chase the ash – in a
flash I catch it – I break
each verse and
discover the atomic gyres!
(reference: Nils Bohr,
1913) |
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My lightning-sudden hope
When night falls, the
old cannon behind the clouds
slowly turns to
face it
From the black gun’s
gullet rises a fireball of spit –
honour long
torched and cindered
Who hears my words? A
blood-smeared god! |
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On the earth’s metallic
surface
Spiky steel grass has risen
Under cover of night,
the sky sleeps
The unread ‘Book of
Lightning’ in his hand,
The slave walks on,
shaking off each and every prison… |
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The fisherman who
walks
splashing along the sea
who collects comets
clinking in his upturned hat,
that same fisherman’s
head
burst into flame one dawn
when the moon drilled
holes
in the sea.
The dam of your
patience bursts
Centuries later, the
blood stirs again
in my hard wooden
fin… |
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On the roof, the idiot child.
Growing long
its neck goes off to drink
from a faraway pond.
On the forest-road from
time to time the harpy calls, hypnotic.
Walking on the
cloudpath around midnight,
a skeleton salesman
is hawking:
Curd, fresh curd…
The
idiot child on the roof,
with its rockhard
thirst, I bring my mouth to the pond
to keep
it company and drink
not water but blood. I
drink… |
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What a treacherous moon strung to one
end of your boat!
And at the other, what a
lovely boatman!
His face skeletal, his arms
rusted iron.
Tell him, tell your
boatman to strike his iron blow.
The priceless
moon, even that’s willing to be broken into
scrap!
Falling chunk by chunk into the water,
the water spurting high and low…
Tell me, don’t you wish
you could see the waters parting
again, the
comets being eaten by the watergod as he
floats,
wearing the face of a monstrous fish?
Don’t you wish? |
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Beheading is the issue here.
That
explains the dug-up earth, soft to the
touch.
All proof is drenched
in fear.
Never tell anyone what you know, or
how much. |
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Today how certain how sudden
how deer-swift this race
How vast, how
blown-away-sand this hand
How pavian this dance
How well-deep how
closed-room how tongue-out this envy
How
inevitably grave-like each hole
And each
persistently-pursuing ghoul how suddenly sunk
Today how urgent this
verse
Which even the devil would not dream of
buying |
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They rise out of the water on to the
banks
Their whole lives they have spent
fleeing
From one age to another
Missiles, arrows come
flying
Bursting into flame the
refugee camps
The din of old-young
mother-son wife-daughter dying |
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The tortoise is leaving. The earth
suddenly rolls off
his back and plummets
through space, breaking
the sleep of the rabbit that leaps
to catch it. The sky
flares up in the bleached
glare of
comets. |
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