I love poetry. It is the quiet passion of my life. When I was a child my mother read me old nursery rhymes at bedtime and they had the lilt of poetry in them which stayed with me forever. And in our home there were shelves filled with books, including wonderfully illustrated verse anthologies in which I began to read my first poems and became entranced. When I was a teenager a great teacher, John Hodge of Queens Royal College in Port-of-Spain, delighted in departing from the syllabus books to tell us about strange poets we had never heard of and urge us to expand our minds with their beauty and insights – Gerard Manley Hopkins, Emily Dickinson, WB Yeats, Sappho, Ezra Pound, Robert Frost. John Hodge changed the angle of how I saw the world. “The complex value of the word was born/…. And language took ecstatic wing.”
There is not a day goes past I do not read poetry. And every now and then in a sudden epiphany of discovery in the space of a day or two I happen to come across poems one after the other in which I especially delight and which I therefore want to share. So here filling my column this week are three poems I found in a single afternoon this past week which I had never read before and loved.
I have just bought The Collected Poems of Zbigniew Herbert. He is one of my favourite poets so I am likely to adorn these columns every now and then with his poetry. But this week I discovered a poem by a countryman of Herbert’s which I liked very much. The poet is Adam Zagajewski and the poem is translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh.
Blake
I watch William Blake, who spotted angels
every day in treetops
and met God on the staircase
of his little house and found light in grimy alleys –
Blake, who died
singing gleefully
in a London thronged
with streetwalkers, admirals, and miracles,
William Blake, engraver, who labored
and lived in poverty but not despair,
who received burning signs
from the sea and the starry sky,
who never lost hope, since hope
was always born anew like breath,
I see those who walked like him on graying streets,
headed toward the dawn’s rosy orchid.
Langston Hughes was one of the poets not on our syllabus which John Hodge told us schoolboys about. He often read from his Weary Blues. But I had never read this poem by Hughes.
Mother to Son
Well, son, I’ll tell you:
Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.
It’s had tacks in it,
And splinters,
And boards torn up,
And places with no carpet on the floor –
Bare.
But all the time
I’se been a-climbin’ on,
And reachin’ landin’s
And turnin’ corners,
And sometimes goin’ in the dark
Where there ain’t been no light.
So boy, don’t you turn back.
Don’t you set down on the steps
’Cause you finds it’s kinder hard.
Don’t you fall now –
For I’se still goin’, honey,
I’se still climbin’,
And life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.
The Arabs have one of the very greatest poetic traditions. I realize how much I miss by hardly knowing anything of this great tradition. This week I discovered a beautiful poem by Mahmoud Darwish.
Remainder Of A Life
If I were told:
By evening you will die,
so what will you do until then?
I would look at my wristwatch,
I’d drink a glass of juice,
bite an apple,
contemplate at length an ant that has found its food,
then look at my wristwatch.
There’d be time left to shave my beard
and dive in a bath, obsess:
“There must be an adornment for writing,
so let it be a blue garment.”
I’d sit until noon alive at my desk
but wouldn’t see the trace of color in the words,
white, white, white….
I’d prepare my last lunch,
pour wine in two glasses: one for me
and one for the one who will come without appointment,
then I’d take a nap between two dreams.
But my snoring would wake me….
so I’d look at my wristwatch:
and there’d be time left for reading.
I’d read a chapter in Dante and half of a mu’allaqah
and see how my life goes from me
to the others, but I wouldn’t ask who
would fill what’s missing in it.
That’s it, then?
That’s it, that’s it.
Then what?
Then I’d comb my hair and throw away the poem…
this poem, in the trash,
and put on the latest fashion in Italian shirts,
parade myself in an entourage of Spanish violins,
and walk to the grave!
Let me assure readers – great poetry will be remembered and influence lives long, long after the momentous events in today’s headlines have faded completely into oblivion.
