Poems for our times
The first two of the poems below were contributed in comments by my friend and reader Gal. Wislawa Szymborska, with whom I was unfamiliar, won the Nobel Prize in Literature 1996. Naomi Shihab Nye is an American poet of Arab descent. Thanks again, Gal.
The third inclusion is the epigraph to an essay by my great compatriot Jens Bjørneboe, best known for his novel trilogy The History of Bestiality. This year is the 30-year anniversary of his untimely death by suicide.
After every war
someone has to clean up.
Things won’t
straighten themselves up, after all.
Someone has to push the rubble
to the sides of the road,
so the corpse-laden wagons
can pass.
Someone has to get mired
in scum and ashes,
sofa springs,
splintered glass,
and bloody rags.
Someone must drag in a girder
to prop up a wall.
Someone must glaze a window,
rehang a door.
Photogenic it’s not,
and takes years.
All the cameras have left
for another war.
Again we’ll need bridges
and new railway stations.
Sleeves will go ragged
from rolling them up.
Someone, broom in hand,
still recalls how it was.
Someone listens
and nods with unsevered head.
Yet others milling about
already find it dull.
From behind the bush
sometimes someone still unearths
rust-eaten arguments
and carries them to the garbage pile.
Those who knew
what was going on here
must give way to
those who know little.
And less than little.
And finally as little as nothing.
In the grass which has overgrown
causes and effects,
someone must be stretched out,
blade of grass in his mouth,
gazing at the clouds.
Wislawa Szymborska
(translated from the Polish by Joanna Trzeciak)
“A true Arab knows how to catch a fly in his hands,”
my father would say. And he’d prove it,
cupping the buzzer instantly
while the host with the swatter stared.
In the spring our palms peeled like snakes.
True Arabs believed watermelon could heal fifty ways.
I changed these to fit the occasion.
Years before, a girl knocked,
wanted to see the Arab.
I said we didn’t have one.
After that, my father told me who he was,
“Shihab”–”shooting star”–
a good name, borrowed from the sky.
Once I said, “When we die, we give it back?”
He said that’s what a true Arab would say.
Today the headlines clot in my blood.
A little Palestinian dangles a truck on the front page.
Homeless fig, this tragedy with a terrible root
is too big for us. What flag can we wave?
I wave the flag of stone and seed,
table mat stitched in blue.
I call my father, we talk around the news.
It is too much for him,
neither of his two languages can reach it.
I drive into the country to find sheep, cows,
to plead with the air:
Who calls anyone civilized?
Where can the crying heart graze?
What does a true Arab do now?
Naomi Shihab Nye
What is the sense of complaining
in a time
when tragedies are only sold in cartloads?
Who asks
about the child’s doll in the grass
where this morning the parents were shot against a wall?
Who asks about details
of procedure
when the arrested are numbered in the millions?
Who asks for proof, or
whether the judges were qualified
when the condemned are executed and burned
whole nations at a time?
Who asks: right or left
when the question is:
do you stand among the murderers or the victims,
among the judges or the judged?
What is the meaning of justice
in days
when folk are simply waiting for the moment?
what does it signify that
surviving children too should have parents
in a time
when all revolves around landing
a Russian or an American idiot
on the moon?
Jens Bjørneboe
(translated from the Norwegian by Esther Greenleaf Mürer)
Finally, I highly recommend going to this indymedia site and listen to a reading of ‘From Beirut’ by Mahmoud Darwish, the most esteemed living Arab poet. The Palestinian Darwish wrote this poem during the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon.
Darwish’s long, essayistic stream-of-consciousness poem ‘Memory for Forgetfulness’ (Dhakira lil-Nisyan) is available here. Published in August 1982, it is a remarkable work of art that affords a strong sense of déjà vu.
