Tuesday 29 November 2016

News Report


NEWS REPORT - (a found poem out of prose)

~ by John le Carré

'He turned on the
BBC World News
and switched
it off again.

Half truths.
Quarter truths.

What that world
really knows
about itself, it
doesn't dare say."


* John le Carré, in 'Our Kind Of Traitor' (2010)

The Unknown Bird


THE UNKNOWN BIRD

~ by Edward Thomas (1878-1917) Welsh Poet

Three lovely notes he whistled, too soft to be heard
If others sang; but others never sang
In the great beech-wood all that May and June.

No one saw him: I alone could hear him
Though many listened. Was it but four years
Ago? or five? He never came again.

Oftenest when I heard him I was alone,
Nor could I ever make another hear.
La-la-la! he called, seeming far-off —
As if a cock crowed past the edge of the world,
As if the bird or I were in a dream.

Yet that he travelled through the trees and sometimes
Neared me, was plain, though somehow distant still
He sounded. All the proof is — I told men
What I had heard.

* * *
I never knew a voice,
Man, beast, or bird, better than this. I told
The naturalists; but neither had they heard
Anything like the notes that did so haunt me,
I had them clear by heart and have them still.

Four years, or five, have made no difference. Then
As now that La-la-la! was bodiless sweet:
Sad more than joyful it was, if I must say
That it was one or other, but if sad
‘Twas sad only with joy too, too far off
For me to taste it. But I cannot tell
If truly never anything but fair
The days were when he sang, as now they seem.

This surely I know, that I who listened then,
Happy sometimes, sometimes suffering
A heavy body and a heavy heart,
Now straightway, if I think of it, become
Light as that bird wandering beyond my shore.


* * *


Thursday 17 November 2016

Tourists -by Yehuda Amichai




TOURISTS

-


Tourists

- by Yehuda Amichai (1924-2000)

Visits of condolence is all
we get from them.
They squat at the Holocaust Memorial,
They put on grave faces at the Wailing Wall
And they laugh behind heavy curtains
In their hotels.

They have their pictures taken
Together with our famous dead
At Rachel's Tomb
And Herzl Tomb
And on the top of Ammunition Hill.

They weep over our sweet boys
And lust over our tough girls
And hang up their underwear
To dry quickly
In cool blue bathrooms.

Once I sat on the steps by a gate
At David's Tower, I placed my
Two heavy baskets at my side.
A group of tourists was standing around
Their guide and I became their target marker.

"You see that man with the baskets?
Just right of his head there's an arch from
The Roman Period. Just right of his head."
'But he's moving!' I said to myself, redemption
Will come only if their guide tells them,

"You see the arch
from the Roman period?
It's not important; but next to it,
Left and down a bit, there sits
a man who's bought fruit and
vegetables for his family."


- translated from the Hebrew of Yehuda Amichai by Glenda Abramson & Tudor Parfitt