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.


* * *

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

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

When The Rooms -by Johannes Bobrowski

WHEN THE ROOMS

-by Johannes Bobrowski

when
the rooms are deserted
in which answers are given,

when
the walls,
and narrow passes fall,

shadows
fly out of
the trees,

when
the grass
beneath the feet
is abandoned,

white soles
tread
the wind

the bush of thorn flames,
I hear its voice
where no question was,

the waters
move
but I do not
thirst.


-translated from the German of Johannes Bobrowski (1917-1965) by Ruth and Matthew Mead

Can You Imagine - by Artur Międzyrzecki

CAN YOU IMAGINE

- by Artur Międzyrzecki (1922- 1996)

Absence
Can you imagine
Absence

Not as the the opposite
Of something that is
and breathes

Or a gap
in the universal
presence of things

Or a catchword
that calls for symbol's mediation
Or for dialectic quibbles

But as infinite
transparence
When no images

take root
A colourless
invisible monochromy

Absence
Something that's
not there

That's
not there
anymore.

* * *

- translated from the Polish of Artur Międzyrzecki by Stanislaw Baranczak & and Clare Cavanagh

Japanese Maple - by Clive James

Clive James, dynamic Australian poet, writer & media-host, who is now dying of cancer in England, (and a wordsmith with a grace and appreciativeness for life, though not a man of faith in any afterlife) writes: "Usually you're looking for ideas. This idea was looking for me. When the thing was put in the earth it wasn't in leaf yet. It was a long way to autumn. My daughter told me that come autumn the whole thing would be bright brilliant red. She showed me photographs of what it would look like and I got the idea straight away.
The genius of the poem is in the half-line of every stanza, Put together, these half-lines sound like a man desperately short of breath, waiting for the autumn of his death, watching his daughter's planted tree fill with life while losing time, losing air. Breath growing short - wheeze - it never ends - wheeze - what must I do - wheeze- as my mind dies." - 'But Clive's autumn came, the tree bloomed and he lived. So every day is extra time. He's already gone beyond the beyond left him here..."
So here is his latest fine appreciation of his last earthly things. "The void is coming," he says, "It really is going to be a void. There isn't anything out there. There's no heaven, no hell. Heaven and hell are here with us now. There's nothing in there. You really are going nowhere. ". Clive makes no mention of a soul, As if he sees nothing else but mind. But he still seeks to be fulfilled in truth, seeks yet for redemption, maybe even for sanctification, for he admits illness has brought him to be shed of wrongs and conceits. Yet I find him still conceited in that he has such an assured view of what cannot be materially known, still so sure of what cannot be assured. I pray for him, please pray with me.

* * *


JAPANESE MAPLE

- by Clive James, Australian poet

Your death, near now, is of an easy sort.

So slow a fading out brings no real pain.
Breath grows short
Is just uncomfortable. You feel the drain
Of energy, but thought and sight remain:

Enhanced, in fact. When did you ever see
So much sweet beauty as when fine rain falls
On that small tree

And saturates you brick back garden walls,
So many Amber Rooms and mirror halls?
Ever more lavish as the dusk descends
This glistening illuminates the air.
It never ends.

Whenever the rain comes it will be there,
Beyond my time, but now I take my share.

My daughter's choice, the maple tree is new.
Come autumn and its leaves will turn to flame.

What I must do
Is live to see that. That will end the game
For me, though life continues all the same:
Filling the double doors to bathe my eyes,
A final flood of colours will live on
As my mind dies,
Burned by my vision of a world that shone
So brightly at the last, and then was gone.

-As published in the Weekend Australian Magazine, 28 March 2015

WORLD'S DESIRE - by C S Lewis

WORLD'S DESIRE

- by C S Lewis

Love, there is a castle built in
a country desolate,
On a rock above a forest where the trees
are grim and great,
Blasted with the lightning sharp-giant boulders
strewn between,
And the mountains rise above,
and the cold ravine

Echoes to the crushing roar and thunder
of a mighty river
Raging down a cataract. Very tower
and forest quiver
And the grey wolves are afraid and the call
of birds is drowned,
And the thought and speech of man in
the boiling water's sound.

But upon the further side of the barren,
sharp ravine
With the sunlight on its turrets is
the castle seen,
Calm and very wonderful, white
above the green
Of the wet and waving forest,
slanted all away,

Because the driving Northern wind will not
rest by night or day.
Yet the towers are sure above, very
mighty is the stead,
The gates are made of ivory, the roofs
of copper red.

Round and round the warders grave walk
upon the walls for ever
And the wakeful dragons couch in
the ports of ivory,
Nothing is can trouble it, hate of the gods
nor man's endeavour,
And it shall be a resting-place, dear heart,
for you and me.

Through the wet and waving forest with an
age-old sorrow laden
Singing of the world's regret wanders wild
the faerie maiden,
Through the thistle and the brier, through
the tangles of the thorn,
Till her eyes be dim with weeping and her
homeless feet are torn.

Often to the castle gate up she looks
with vain endeavour,
For her soulless loveliness to the castle
winneth never.
But within the sacred court, hidden high
upon the mountain,
Wandering in the castle gardens lovely folk
enough there be,
Breathing in another air, drinking
of a purer fountain
And among that folk, beloved, there's a place
for you and me

* * *

- Clive Staples 'Jack' Lewis

Propoganda - by Eric Hoffer

PROPAGANDA

- Eric Hoffer

" Propaganda
does not deceive
 people;

it merely helps
them to deceive
themselves. "

Blackberry Picking - by Seamus Heaney

Wild Blackberries ripen late January & February in South-Eastern Australia

BLACKBERRY PICKING

- by Seamus Heaney (Ireland)

Late August, given heavy rain and sun
For a full week, the blackberries would ripen.
At first, just one, a glossy purple clot
Among others, red, green, hard as a knot.

You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet
Like thickened wine: summer's blood was in it
Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for
Picking. Then red ones inked up and that hunger

Sent us out with milk cans, pea tins, jam-pots
Where briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots.
Round hayfields, cornfields and potato-drills
We trekked and picked until the cans were full

Until the tinkling bottom had been covered
With green ones, and on top big dark blobs burned
Like a plate of eyes. Our hands were peppered
With thorn pricks, our palms sticky as Bluebeard's.

We hoarded the fresh berries in the byre.
But when the bath was filled we found a fur,
A rat-grey fungus, glutting on our cache.
The juice was stinking too. Once off the bush

The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour.
I always felt like crying. It wasn't fair
That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot.
Each year I hoped they'd keep, knew they would not.

As The Ruin Falls - by C S Lewis

- the way of precious pain -

AS THE RUIN FALLS

- by C S Lewis.

All this is flashy rhetoric about
loving you.
I never had a selfless thought
since I was born.

I am mercenary and self-seeking
through and through:
I want God, you, all friends, merely
to serve my turn.

Peace, re-assurance, pleasure,
are the goals I seek,
I cannot crawl one inch outside
my proper skin:

I talk of love --a scholar's parrot
may talk Greek--
But, self-imprisoned, always end
where I begin.

Only that now you have taught me
(but how late) my lack.
I see the chasm. And everything
you are was making

my heart into a bridge by which I
might get back
from exile, and grow man. And now
the bridge is breaking.

For this I bless you as the ruin falls.
The pains
you give me are more precious than
all other gains

- Clive Staples Lewis.

Our passionate preoccupation - by Eric Hoffer

" Our passionate preoccupation
with the sky, the stars, and a
God somewhere in outer space is
a homing impulse. We are drawn
back to where we came from."

- Eric Hoffer