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.
In Praise of Feeling Bad About Yourself
by Wislawa Szymborska
The buzzard never says it is to blame.
The panther wouldn’t know what scruples mean.
When the piranha strikes, it feels no shame.
If snakes had hands, they’d claim their hands were clean.
A jackal doesn’t understand remorse.
Lions and lice don’t waver in their course.
Why should they, when they know they’re right?
Though hearts of killer whales may weigh a ton,
In every other way they’re light.
On this third planet of the sun,
among the signs of bestiality
A clear conscience is Number One.
And now to poke fun a little at myself:
The Century’s Decline
by Wislawa Szymborska
Our twentieth century was going to improve on the others.
It will never prove it now,
now that its years are numbered,
its gait is shaky,
its breath is short.
Too many things have happened
that weren’t supposed to happen,
and what was supposed to come about
has not.
Happiness and spring, among other things,
were supposed to be getting closer.
Fear was expected to leave the mountains and the valleys.
Truth was supposed to hit home
before a lie.
A couple of problems weren’t going
to come up anymore:
hunger, for example,
and war, and so forth.
There was going to be respect
for helpless people’s helplessness,
trust, that kind of stuff.
Anyone who planned to enjoy the world
is now faced
with a hopeless task.
Stupidity isn’t funny.
Wisdom isn’t gay.
Hope
isn’t that young girl anymore,
et cetera, alas.
God was finally going to believe
in a man both good and strong,
but good and strong
are still two different men.
“How should we live?” someone asked me in a letter.
I had meant to ask him
the same question.
Again, and as ever,
as may be seen above,
the most pressing questions
are naive ones.
Comment by Gal — August 15, 2006 @ 1:02 am
ABD El-Hadi Fights A Superpower
In his life
he neither wrote nor read.
In his life he
didn’t cut down a single tree.
In his life he
didn’t slit the throat
of a single calf.
In his life he did not speak
of the New York Times
behind its back,
didn’t raise
his voice to a soul
except in his saying:
“Come in, please,
by God, you can’t refuse.
*
Nonetheless —
his case is hopeless
his situation
desperate
His God given rights are a grain of salt
tossed into the sea
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury:
about his enemies
my client knows not a thing.
And I can assure you,
were he to encounter
the entire crew
of the aircraft carrier Enterprise
he’d serve them eggs
sunny side up
and labneh
fresh from the bag.
Comment by xanthe — August 20, 2006 @ 9:09 pm
Gal,
Another great one!
xanthe,
Thanks for the poem. That’s by Taha Muhammad Ali, right?
Comment by Sirocco — August 20, 2006 @ 9:32 pm
Yes, sorry I neglected to put his name up. I saw him and his traveling poet companion, the Israeli poet — I can’t remember his name now. They were wonderful but Taha is a gentle poet — and a nice man. I spoke with him (thru his interpreter tho he speaks a little English (or one could say I don’t speak his language). The Israeli poet is — well, muscular/acerbic comes to mind. They travel together. I saw them at DePaul University in Chicago when I was at university last year. Have you read the American poet, Yusef Komanyaaka? I’ll post one of his poems — he teaches at Princeton.
Comment by xanthe — August 21, 2006 @ 4:23 am
Xanthe, Thank you for sharing that powerful poem. I heard Naomi Shihab Nye read last fall, and she, too, was a gentle poet and a nice woman. Afterwards I said to the friends I was with, “She’s the kind of person you’d like to know and have as a friend,” and they agreed. I’m not familiar with Yusef K (but I have heard of him). I look forward to reading your selection of his work.
Comment by Gal — August 24, 2006 @ 11:51 pm
The poems inspire us to rethink about lifes in semblance where people will find the true meaning of living in their own way.
Comment by ROY SANJIBAN — April 26, 2007 @ 11:56 am