Jerome Rothenberg: A Poem for the Cruel Minority

 
[Written during the Reagan administration as �A Poem for the Cruel Majority� & a counter to talk then about �the silent majority� & its rising place in our national politics. The result of the recent election, in which a minority of the electorate brought Donald J. Trump into office, caused me to rethink & to reword the earlier designation. If further changes are needed (& they will be), I�ll think about it more. (J.R.)]

     The cruel minority emerges!

     Hail to the cruel minority!

                                                                                                                                                                       They will punish the poor for being poor.

They will punish the dead for having died.

     Nothing can make the dark turn into light

for the cruel minority.
Nothing can make them feel hunger or terror.

     If the cruel minority would only cup their ears

the sea would wash over them.
The sea would help them forget their wayward children.
It would weave a lullaby for young & old.

    (See the cruel minority with hands cupped to their ears,

one foot is in the water, one foot is on the clouds.)

    One man of them is large enough to hold a cloud

between his thumb & middle finger,
to squeeze a drop of sweat from it before he sleeps.

    He is a little god but not a poet.

(See how his body heaves.)

    The cruel minority love crowds & picnics.

The cruel minority fill up their parks with little flags.
The cruel minority celebrate their birthday.

    Hail to the cruel minority again!

    The cruel minority weep for their unborn children,

they weep for the children that they will never bear.
The cruel minority are overwhelmed by sorrow.

    (Then why are the cruel minority always laughing?

Is it because night has covered up the city's walls?
Because the poor lie hidden in the darkness?
The maimed no longer come to show their wounds?)

    Today the cruel minority vote to enlarge the darkness.

    They vote for shadows to take the place of ponds

Whatever they vote for they can bring to pass.
The mountains skip like lambs for the cruel minority.

    Hail to the cruel minority!

Hail! hail! to the cruel minority!

    The mountains skip like lambs, the hills like rams.

    The cruel minority tear up the earth for the cruel minority.

Then the cruel minority line up to be buried.

    Those who love death will love the cruel minority.

   Those who know themselves will know the fear

the cruel minority feel when they look in the mirror.

    The cruel minority order the poor to stay poor.

They order the sun to shine only on weekdays.

    The god of the cruel minority is hanging from a tree.

Their god's voice is the tree screaming as it bends.
The tree's voice is as quick as lightning as it streaks across the sky.

    (If the cruel minority go to sleep inside their shadows,

they will wake to find their beds filled up with glass.)

    Hail to the god of the cruel minority!                                                                                                   Hail to the eyes in the head of their screaming god!

   Hail to his face in the mirror!

   Hail to their faces as they float around him!

   Hail to their blood & to his!

    Hail to the blood of the poor they need to feed them!                                                                           Hail to their world & their god!

    Hail & farewell!

 

Hail & farewell!

Hail & farewell!

Michael Palmer: �Tomb of Aim� C�saire� and �Light Moves (1-6), for Jackson Mac Low�

Editor�s Note  I�m using today�s Poems and Poetics to celebrate the publication of Michael Palmer�s new poetry collection, The Laugher of the Sphinx, just out from New Directions.  A great & thoroughly distinctive poet in his own right, Palmer in these poems shows his affinity & regard for two of the great ones who came just before him, & in �Light Moves� especially, the work �pointedly echoes and evolves from Mac Low�s 22 Light Poems� published several decades earlier. Along with this sense of contemporary & historical kinship, the lyric force of Palmer�s own later poetry is a turning that illuminates the power of the work (his & theirs) that came before & the work still to come.  The presence here of the attendant linkages is surely one of his greatest resources: �that company I always hear as I work, and for whom I write, and to whom I write.� (J.R.) 

Tomb of Aim� C�saire 

I mourned a person who turned out

not to be dead

Of that what is to be said 

Surgical noise of the city

Sentence and song under earth 

I wept for something lost

a dawn or a dusk or a thought

a thing that couldn�t be bought 

Sun throat cut

Woman removing a glove 

And the body at once naked

and veiled

waiting and waiting for what 

Coma Berenices above the bay

sea wrack beneath 

Speech of the bone

and of the polychrome wing

speech of the leaf descending 

and of the rubble in a ruined field

Words have their lives apart 

I mourned a person who turned out

not to have died

between a feral sky 

and a flooded shore where

a wave was frozen in mid-air

Light Moves 1 

Mineral light and whale light,

light of memory, light of the eye,
memory�s eye, shaded amber light
coating the page, fretted
light of anarchy, flare of bent
time, firelight and first light,
lake light and forest light,
arcing harbor light,
spirit light and light of the blaze,
enveloping blaze,
century�s fading light,
light of cello, voice, drum,
figures billowing along
horizon, aligned, outline.

Light Moves 2

Bright light of sleep, its

shortness of breath, its
thousand sexual suns, curved
and fretted light, lies of that light,
dark, inner light, its
whispered words:
Now beyond, now below,
this to left, this to right,
scarecrow in stubble field,
nighthawk on wire,
these to cleanse your sight.

Light Moves 3

Light through the Paper House

rippling across floors and walls,
across the words of the walls,
its paper tables, paper chairs,
its corners,
pale light by which it reads itself,
fills and empties itself,
and speaks.

Light Moves 4

Watcher on the cliff-head

in afternoon light, aqueous light,
watcher being watched
in the salt-silver light
amidst the darting of terns,
beach swallows and gulls,
between the snow of sand
and the transit of clouds,
keeper of thought or prisoner of thought,
watcher being watched,
snowman of sand,
anonymous man.

Light Moves 5

Night-sun and day-sun

twinned and intertwined,
light by a bedside,
cat�s eye by night,
owl light and crystal light,
endless motion of the light,
the rise and the fall,
the splintered flare,
churning northern lights,
phosphor, tip of iris,
gunmetal moon�s
far, reflected light,
oil sheen
on pelican�s wing.

Light Moves 6

And yet what have we done

where have we gone
sometimes in light sometimes not
traveling
we say the great world the small world
the fields
patched with yellow the sudden crows
the city�s streets
alone among others
the billowing streets
bodies crowding past
outlined by light.
What have we done
among the roads and fields
in the theater�s shadows and the theater�s light
so bright you cannot see
those watching beyond
in perfect rows in the dark.

(in homage to Jackson MacLow)

Gerry Loose: Eight Further Poems in Ogham Script with a Note on Poetics & Translation

 

Church of the 3 Brethren     Lochgoilhead

 

little saint of whitethorn

little quencher of wolf spark

welcome to the burial mounds

 

dear confessor of blood-red berries

sweet dweller of beehive cell

oaks make good gallow-trees

 

meagre

my heart

 

 

Blackwaterfoot, Arran, King�s Cave #1

 

son: to leave                                                                                                                                       
friend: to stroll among trees                                                                                                        
work: to ride horses                                                                                                                       
killing: to be swift                                                                                                                          
father: to shelter the hunted

 

Blackwaterfoot, Arran, King�s Cave #2

 

skinsilver birch                                                                                                                                    
rowan of pillage                                                                                                                                  
heather the udder brusher                                                                                                     
poplar the horse trembler                                                                                                            
oak of hill & adze                                                                        
answer
song

 

Scoonie, Fife

 

no name for        them

they grow deep within

tree proud bush proud

urgent    they   �re allies

though    they     groan

shrivel        in the hunt

still bigger than a horse

 

Abernethy

 

coltsfoot the apple that suckles                                                                                                      
sun hoof the vine that strangles                                                                                                  
sun horse the yew that sickens

 

Pool

 

manifold the wheel

honey bees dancing

blush of the dying

breath of horses

wood brands burning

warriors at the breast

trees green leafing

world wheel whirling

 

 

Inchyra

begin with honey
& fellowship of trees
one third of a spear
& a shroud

return salmon
return sun
return spring well
bees are dying

 

Mains of Afforsk

 

beauty�s a boast

& kinship with saplings

 

with a glow of anger

& warriors� gear

 

cherished hazel

& grace disappear

 

cypher unknown

& wisdom undone

 

 

NOTE.

 

Writes Gerry Loose, qua translator:

 

     �Ogham is the [rune-like] script used for inscriptions on stone during the 4th�8 th  centuries CE, in the earliest known form of Gaelic. It comprises strokes across or to either side of a central stem line and is found on monoliths mainly in Ireland, with a few in Scotland, mostly in Gaelic but some in conjunction with Pictish symbols, which may be in that language. ...

     �Ogham is also called the tree alphabet, since the name of a tree (or plant) has been ascribed to each Gaelic letter thus: beith, luis, nin � birch, herb, ash . . . & so on. An alphabet v�g�tal. ...

     �Whatever the method of reading this script, it is steeped in the secrecy of the literate over the non literate; it�s always regarded as the property of the high poets, the early medieval fili of Ireland, who would spend many years memorizing 150 varieties of ogham. With the above, it�s possible to see the poetic possibilities, whatever ogham script is used. ...

     �Because the letters on the inscribed stones are sometimes doubled up, I have used this for emphasis.  Because, also, not all words in Gaelic have precise English equivalents (for example seanachas has overtones of biography and of tradition and of genealogy and of history and of language) I have moved between phrase oghams to use words I think best work in a given poem. Where these will not do, I have used other, appropriate translations of the Gaelic, the stone and the landscape itself to make a viable English poem from the ogham.�

 

N.B.  Three additional Ogham poems can be found on Poems and Poetics for February 5, 2015.  Loose also notes that the titles of the poems posted above are all place names.

Mohsen Emadi: YAMSA, A Tribute to Absence (from �Standing on Earth�)

in memory of Farzad Kamangar

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Translation from Persian by Lyn Coffin

[Farzad Kamangar was a 32-year-old Iranian teacher, poet, journalist, human rights activist and social worker who was hung on May 9, 2010. At his execution, he offered chocolates to all the observers.] 

I 

I'm sitting at the end of the world

in Yamsa
on a small island
you can walk around
in an hour--
a sufficient time for you to know
the date you are waiting for
is not coming.
fifty years ago, it was bought.
they built some wooden cottages,
a fireplace and an oven
and I arrived there by boat.
it is rainy
at the end of the world.
swans and boats are floating on the water
death does not come here.
I was sitting on the boat
when she, with her green eyes,
was speaking to me about the age of soldier's boots,
which last more than fifty years in her land,
the fact that she misses me
and loves fire
and blue flames.
the end of the world will not come again
always, there is only one end
and nobody can interpret it.
 

II

In Yamsa

nobody speaks his own language
in winter when the lakes are frozen
wolves and humans come here walking
this place was never uninhabited
everything which came here came in its perfection,
your beauty, my impossibility,
and in intensity
language always disappears
one can only point to objects.
people come to Yamsa with abstract nouns
but in the first fire
abstractions and wood burn together
and the taste of chocolate
turns to ash in the mouth
when the chair is pushed away from under the feet of a
hanging man and
absurdity and meaning
both refer to the chocolate wrapper
at the same time the stage is emptied
of the killer and the killed, the viewer and the viewed,
and the cleaner sweeps up the chocolate remains.
sitting at the end of the world
the wind crawls into the fire and all the flames are blue.

III

Absence is when you can point out

all the attributes of someone
her green eyes
her moonlight skin and her lips which are
red
but you cannot point at her
or when the woman who lies beside you
does not have a nightmare
that makes the caress of your hands a necessity
this is the reason God is always absent,
whether the chair is pushed out from under my feet
or I sit in Yamsa on a chair
and the you of my poems changes.
In all the world wars
no bomb ever fell at the end of the world
it has never been occupied
no savior ever fit there.
At the end of the world
I am burning papers
where the skin of women and my hands
mingle with decorations
boats row in nothingness
the wind crawls into empty houses
and all the flames are blue.

IV

in Yamsa

time transubstantiates to experience
a day is the distance in feet between newly-arrived boats
and never-arriving boats
a year is the distance
measured in hands
it takes my hands to reach your hair
and eternity is taller than the height of a human
the height of a pushed away chair
when the feet no longer move
and the doctor-in-charge determines
the rope can be taken away
the rope is taken away
and I get empty in the transubstantiation of boat to boat
hand to hair
and body to memory
I transmute to a place in Yamsa,
a grave, a cradle
where blue flames
are the only burning metaphor which flickers there
just like a date
at the end of the world.

V

I'm sitting here

in Yamsa
in shadow and reflection
song and the river
tears and the breath of infinity
in a boat which brings me back
to you and my Palestine
to me and your Kurdistan.
arsenic burns blue
lead burns green.
arsenic and lead,
poison and bullet
burn in us
we miss each other
and both are indebted to absence
it is rainy.
the trains are delayed.
In the last station
with a blue umbrella
I'm searching for a woman
with a red umbrella
and green eyes.

 [Reprinted from M. Emadi, Standing on Earth, recently published by Phoneme Media, Los Angeles.]

 Born in Iran, Mohsen Emadi is the award-winning author of four collections of poetry published in Iranand Spain. He has also translate numerous collections of poetry. Emadi studied Computer Engineering in Sharif University of Technology in Iranand Digital Culture at the Universityof Jyvaskyla in Finland. He is the founder and manager of Ahmad Shamlou's official website, and The House of World Poets, a Persian anthology of world poetry featuring more than 500 poets from around the world. He was awarded the Premio de Poesia de Miedo in 2010 and IV Beca de Antonio Machado in 2011. Emadi has lived in Iran, Finland, the Czech Republic, and Spain, and is now based in Mexico City.