Image: János Pilinszky (1921 – 1981 Budapest )

EXTRACT FROM A DIARY

- by János Pilinszky

What day is today?
The way I live
I keep on confusing
time's timetable.

"Like thieves" -
in Simone Weil's wonderful words
"on the cross of space and time
we human beings are nailed."

I drift off,
and the splinters
shock me
awake.

At such times I
see the world with piercing
sharpness, try to turn my
head in your direction.

* * *
-Translated from the Hungarian of János Pilinszky by Peter Jay.
)

Our Epoch

EPOCH

by Vladimir Holan

By the image of things
we are still in time.

But today, before
the sower has taken

a step, the reaper
is already there.

It seems there will be
neither dead nor living.

* * *
-translated from the Czech
of Vladimir Holan (1905-1980)
by Ian & Jarmila Milner

An Amazon of Wattle Flows To Christmas

An Amazon of Wattle Flows To Christmas

"It's the Wattle River -no,
river is too small a term, unless
you say Amazon, and imagine
an Amazon a continent wide.

Well, the Wattle River rises
in Queensland about, say May every
year, and it flows in foaming golden crest
on crest through June and New South Wales,
and July and Riverina, and August and September
and Victoria, trickling through every valley
and every day, and lapping every mountain side,
and disregarding even the sea, plashes and tumbles,
and leaps and rolls over October and Tasmania and
November and December, until it reaches Christmas
and the Pacific and sends back over its course
such an echo of its memory, that we long
and linger for the promise of the echo,
that its rising time will soon return.


* * *

- Bernard O'Dowd (1866-1953) Australian white-collar poet, radical parliamentary draughtsman, educator and activist bureaucrat, journalist and author of several books of law and poetry - from 'Fantasies' (Melbourne, 1942) p.7

Nativity

Nativity

- by James McAuley

The thin distraction of a spider’s web
collects the clear cold drops of night.
Seeds falling on the water spread
a rippling target for the light.

The rumour in the ear now murmurs less,
the snail draws in its tender horn,
the heart becomes a bare attentiveness,
and in that bareness light is born.

Pilgrim Moses, Odysseus & The Wise Men

Pilgrim Moses, Odysseus & The Wise Men

"Journey Of The Magi"

- by Frank Turner

Moses was old, a chill in his bones.
Falling apart, he knew in his heart that his time had come.
As he lay in his tent in the hot desert sands,
he smiled at how he would never see his promised land.

He sang "I could have lived and died an Egyptian prince,
I could have played safe,
but in the end the journey's brought joys that outweigh the pain."

Odysseus sat tired and alone.
He'd always held out against all the doubts that he would come home.
But now he was here, his soul felt estranged.
His wife and his dog, his son and his Gods, everything changed.

He sang "I could have stayed and ruled as an Ithican prince,
I could've played safe.
But in the end the journey's brought joys that outweigh the pain."

Balthazar rode for seven long years, eastwards and far,
he followed his star, and it brought him here.
To a stable in ruins in some backwater town,
to a virgin defiled, no king but a child, too small for a crown.

He sang "I could have lived with my Gods as a Persian prince,
I could've played safe,
but in the end the journey's brought joys that outweigh the pain."

Paupers and kings, princes and thieves,
singers of songs, righters of wrongs, be what you believe.
So saddle your horse and shoulder your load,
burst at the seams, be what you dream, and take to the road.

PALISADE

-lyrics by Parker Millsap

Sometimes I don't fit in my own skin'
'I am uncomfortable, for after all'
I'm just a carbon ball housing a soul

'And every time I try to pray
A memory gets in the way
And I forget what it was I was supposed to say
Hidin' in my palisade

* * *

'PALISADE' -lyrics by Parker Millsap

Personal

PERSONAL

by Anfisa Osinnik

My hemispherical world,
feminine,
left-handed,
between complexes of filth
and queen.
And your right-handed world,
and your global
oedipal mind ...

***

With Eve's putrefaction,
with Eve's depravity
Eve's apple becomes
the sapphire-colored
hermaphrodite flower,
the impossible
flower ...

* * *
translated from the Russian of Anfisa Osinnik (b.1957) by Johannes Beilharz

Dualism

DUALISM

- by Anfisa Osinnik

I say bird
You say song
I say sea
You say anchor
I say road
you interrupt me: road home.
Your body is surface,
surface without secrets, without tides
my body is secret,
shipwreck to all your ships
you say bird
I say bullet
You say sea
I tear down the word with the wave.
You say road.
The sea has no roads.

* * *

translated from the Russian of Anfisa Osinnik (b.1957) by Johannes Beilharz

Anfisa Osinnik was born in Siberia, Russia, and studied at the Maxim Gorki Institute for Literature in Moscow. She has been living in Rancho Viejo, Veracruz (Mexico) for fourteen years. Her first poetry collection in Spanish, Dialectos del Fuego, was published in Mexico in 2003.

High-Altitude Flight Via Olympus

'Up in the sky we are inescapably tied to the earth.'

High-Altitude Flight Via Olympus

- by Hellmut Seiler

Immersed in
shredded ray bundles
of an evening in May

- the Olympus, bald,
godless. At least when
viewed from above.

The seat of the immortals below. Above
the heads Mickey Mouse, flickering.
The sea glistens from far away, the surf

is in one's ear. "Would anybody care to
make a purchase?" Up in the sky we are
inescapably tied to the earth.

Web of clouds, words scurry
along, the only fixed point
between heaven & earth.

Deeds follow
close behind
in thought.

* * *

- English translation from the German of Hellmut Seiler by Johannes Beilharz