SPIRITUAL CHICKENS

SPIRITUAL CHICKENS - Vid



-by Stephen Dobyns

A man eats a chicken every day for lunch,
and each day the ghost of another chicken
joins the crowd in the dining room. If he could
only see them! Hundreds and hundreds of spiritual
chickens, siting on chairs, tables, covering
the floor, jammed shoulder to shoulder. At last
there is no more space and one of the chickens
is popped back across the spiritual plane to the earthly.

The man is in the process of picking his teeth.
Suddenly there’s a chicken at the end of the table,
Strutting back and forth, not looking at the man
but knowing he is there, as is the way with chickens.
The man makes a grab for the chicken but his hand
Passes right through her. He tries to hit the chicken
with a chair and the chair passes right through her.

He calls his wife but she can see nothing.
This is his own private chicken, even if he
fails to recognize her. How is he to know
this is the chicken he are seven years ago
on a hot and steamy Wednesday in July,
with a little tarragon, a little sour cream?

The man grows afraid. He runs out of his house
flapping his arms and making peculiar hops
until the authorities take him away for a cure.
Faced with the choice between something odd
In the world or something broken in his head,
he opts for the broken head. Certainly,
this is safer than putting his opinions
in jeopardy. Much better to think he had
imagined it, that he had made it happen.

Meanwhile, the chicken struts back and forth
at the end of the table. Here she was, jammed in
with the ghosts of six thousand dead hens, when
suddenly she has the whole place to herself.

Even the nervous man has disappeared. If she
had a brain, she would think she had caused it.
She would grow vain, egotistical, she would
look for someone to fight, but being a chicken
she can just enjoy it and make little squawks,
silent to all except the man who ate her,

who is far off banging his head against a wall
like someone trying to repair a leaky vessel,
making certain that nothing unpleasant gets in
or nothing of value falls out. How happy
he would have been to be born a chicken,
to be of good use to his fellow creatures
and rich in companionship after death.

As it is he is constantly being squeezed
between the world and his idea of the world.
Better to have a broken head – why surrender
his corner on truth? – better just to go crazy.

* * *
-Stephen Dobyns – b.1941 Orange, New Jersey, USA

Soon as you're done with doing dishes

one for a time of much talk of liberty


SOON AS YOU'RE DONE DOING THE DISHES

by Dmitri Aleksandrovich Prigov

Soon as you’re done with doing dishes
Look — new dishes stacking up.
May I ask, what sort of liberty is this,
If one can barely just keep up?

Sure, you could leave the dishes dirty,
But here, from God knows where, they come
Complaining the dishes haven’t been done.
So where, then, is there room for liberty?

* * *
translated from Russian by Matvei Yankelevich

Worse Than A Broken Heart

A THING WORSE THAN A BROKEN HEART

“I’m sorry about your husband.’ I said.
She didn’t answer right away. She nodded. After a moment she leaned forward in her chair, putting her elbows on her knees and looking down at the floor.
“It broke my heart,” she said. “He was the best man I ever knew or ever expect to know, and I miss him every day and our boy misses him.”
“Yeah… sure,” I said.
“No, I mean, really. Look at me Charlie.”
I looked at here, the last piece of bread lifted halfway to my lips.
She said, “A broken heart is not the worst thing in the world. And neither, when it comes to that, is death. You can’t get through a good, strong life without coming upon both of them, one way or another, without looking them both straight in the eye. But if I could go back in time and protect myself from my broken heart by living my life in fear, by saying yes to every bully and slave driver who cam along, by scuttling away from my duty and from my country and from the things I love and believe in, I wouldn’t do it, and my husband wouldn’t have done it, and he wouldn’t want me to do it. You understand what I am telling you, Charlie?”

-
Veteran’s widow, Margaret in ‘The Truth Of The Matter’ – book three of the Homelander series – by Andrew Klavan, pp.250-251

Australian Sunrise

AUSTRALIAN SUNRISE -


The Morning Star paled slowly, The Cross hung low to the sea,
And down the shadowy reaches the tide came swirling free,
The lustrous purple blackness of the soft Australian night
Waned in the grey awakening that heralded the light

Still in the dying darkness, still in the forest dim
The pearly dew of the dawning clung to each giant limb,
Till the sun came up from ocean, red with the cold sea mist,
And smote on the limestone ridges, and the shining tree-tops kissed;

Then the fiery Scorpion vanished, the magpie's note was heard,
And the wind in the she-oak wavered, and the honeysuckles stirred,
The airy golden vapour rose from the river breast,
The kingfisher came darting out of his crannied nest,

And the bulrushes and reed-beds put off their sallow gray
And burnt with cloudy crimson at dawning of the day.

- James Lister Cuthbertson (1851-1920)-

Waiting For The Barbarians

WAITING FOR THE BARBARIANS

- Constantine P Cafavy (1863 ~ 1933)

What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?

- The barbarians are due here today.

Why isn’t anything happening in the senate?
Why do the senators sit there without legislating?

- Because the barbarians are coming today.
- What laws can the senators make now?

- Once the barbarians are here, they’ll do the legislating.

Why did our emperor get up so early,
and why is he sitting at the city’s main gate
on his throne, in state, wearing the crown?

- Because the barbarians are coming today
- and the emperor is waiting to receive their leader.
- He has even prepared a scroll to give him,
- replete with titles, with imposing names.

Why have our two consuls and praetors come out today
wearing their embroidered, their scarlet togas?
Why have they put on bracelets with so many amethysts,
and rings sparkling with magnificent emeralds?
Why are they carrying elegant canes
beautifully worked in silver and gold?

- Because the barbarians are coming today
- and things like that dazzle the barbarians.

Why don’t our distinguished orators come forward as usual
to make their speeches, say what they have to say?

- Because the barbarians are coming today
- and they’re bored by rhetoric and public speaking.

Why this sudden restlessness, this confusion?
(How serious people’s faces have become.)
Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,
everyone going home so lost in thought?

- Because night has fallen and the barbarians have not come.
- And some who have just returned from the border say
- there are no barbarians any longer.

And now, what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?
They were, those people, a kind of solution.


* * *

- Translated from the Greek by Edmund Keeley & Philip Sherrard

Champagne and Fireworks After Juvenal

CHAMPAGNE & FIREWORKS - or BREAD & CIRCUSES

" Already long ago, from when
we sold our vote to no man,
the People have abdicated our duties;
for the People who once upon a time
handed out military command,
high civil office, legions
— everything, now restrains itself
and anxiously hopes for just
two things: bread and circuses..."

- translated from the Latin of Decimus Iunius Iuvenalis (Juvenal),
Roman poet active in the late 1st and early 2nd century AD, author of the Satires. Born: Aquino, Italy. Died: 130 AD

or, In the original LATIN

"iam pridem, ex quo suffragia nulli
uendimus, effudit curas; nam qui dabat olim
imperium, fasces, legiones, omnia, nunc se
continet atque duas tantum res anxius optat,
panem et circenses. "

- (Juvenal, Satire 10.77–81)

PATHETIC AND INFANTILE

" I HAVE two words for the ABC’s New Year’s Eve broadcast
— pathetic and infantile. With the usual luvvies in top form,
the reliable ABC could not resist turning it into
a paid political announcement when they injected
a splash of Fran Kelly and her last word on the Sydney siege.
Her summary pronounced the gunman just a nut case.
Thanks Fran, I know I should be relieved and thankful
for your perspective on the past year."

Keith Mouatt, Casuarina, NSW
Last Post, Letters, The Australian,January 02, 2015

OF THE JEWS (A.D. 50)

- by Constantine P Cafavy (1863 ~ 1933)

Painter and poet, runner and discus-thrower,
Ianthes, son of Antonios, as handsome as Endymion.
From a family close to the Synagogue.

“My most cherished days are those
when I abandon the pursuit of sensual pleasure,
put behind me Hellenism’s hard beauty
and its consuming obsession with those
white, ephemeral, perfectly formed limbs,
and become the man I would always wish to be:
a son of the Jews, of the holy Jews”.

Quite passionate, this statement of his: “I would always
wish to be a son of the Jews, of the holy Jews”.

But he didn’t, in the end, remain anything of the sort.
The lure of hedonism and the art of Alexandria
took care that he remained their devoted son.

* * *

(C.P. Cavafy, The Canon. Translated from the Greek by Stratis Haviaras, Hermes Publishing, 2004)

In The Church / Agape Ekklesia

IN THE CHURCH

- by C. P. Cafavy (1863 ~ 1933)

I love the church —her standards,
her silver vessels, her candelabras,
her lights, her icons, her pulpit.
When I enter the Greek church:
with the fragrance of the incense,
with the liturgic chants,
with the majestic presences of the priests
and the solemn rhythm of all their movements—
they are magnificently robed in the holy vestments—
my thoughts go back to a great splendour of our race,
to our glorious Byzantine age.

* * *
Translated from the Greek of Constantinos P Cafavy by George Valassopoulo