THE JOY OF WRITING

Where is a written deer running through a written forest?

Whether to drink from written water

which will reflect its mouth like a carbon?

Why is it raising its head, does it hear something?

Propped on four legs borrowed from the truth

it pricks up its ears from under my fingers.

Silence  -  that word, too, is rustling on paper

and parts the branches caused by the word 'forest'.

Over a white page letters are ready to jump

and they may take a bad turn.

Sentences capable of bringing to bay,

and against which there is no help.

In a drop of ink there are quite a few

hunters squinting one eye,

ready to rush down a vertical pen,

to encircle the deer, to take aim.

They forget that this is not life here.

Other laws rule here, in black and white.

An instant will last as long as I desire.

It will allow a division into small eternities

each full of buckshot stopped in its flight.

If I command, nothing here will happen ever.

Not even a leaf will fall without my accord,

or a blade of grass bend under a dot of a hoof.

And so there is such a world

on which I impose my autonomous Fate?

A time which I bind with fetters of signs?

A life that at my command is perpetual?

The joy of writing.

A chance to make things stay.

A revenge of a mortal hand.

Wislawa Szymborska

1923

Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996

translated from the Polish by Czeslaw Milosz

REMBRANDT'S LATE SELF-PORTRAITS

Rembrandt

Dutch Painter

1606-1669

You are confronted with yourself. Each year

The pouches fill, the skin is uglier.

You give it all unflinchingly. You stare

Into yourself, beyond. Your brush's care

Runs with self-knowledge. Here

Is a humility at one with craft.

There is no arrogance. Pride is apart

From this self-scrutiny. You make light drift

The way you want. Your face is bruised and hurt

But there is still love left.

Love of the art and others. To the last

Experiment went on. You stared beyond 

your age, the times. You also plucked the past

And tempered it. Self-portraits understand,

And old age can divest,

With truthful changes, us of fear of death.

Look, a new anguish. There, the bloated nose,

The sadness and the joy. To paint's to breathe,

And all the darknesses are dared. You chose

What each must reckon with.

Elizabeth Jennings

1926-2001

THE WORLD IS TOO MUCH WITH US

The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;

Little we see in nature that is ours;

We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;

The Winds that will be howling at all hours,

And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;

For this, for everything, we are out of tune;

It moves us not. - Great God I'd rather be

A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;

So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,

Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;

Have sight of Proteus coming from the sea;

Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

William Wordsworth

1770-1850

BRIEF REFLECTION ON ACCURACY

Fish

always accurately know where to move and when,

and likewise

birds have an accurate built-in time sense

and orientation.

Humanity, however,

lacking such instincts resorts to scientific

research. Its nature is illustrated by the following

occurrence.

A certain soldier

had to fire a cannon at six o'clock sharp every evening.

Being a soldier, he did so. when his accuracy was 

investigated he explained:

I go by

the absolutely accurate chronometer in the window

of the clockmaker down in the city. Every day at seventeen

forty-five I set my watch by it and

climb the hill where my cannon stands ready.

At seventeen-fifty-nine precisely I step up to the cannon

and at eighteen hours sharp I fire.

And it was clear

that this method of firing was absolutely accurate.

All that was left was to check that chronometer. So

the clockmaker down in the city was questioned about

his instrument's accuracy.

Oh, said the clockmaker,

this is one of the most accurate instruments ever. Just imagine,

for many years now a cannon has been fired at six o'clock sharp.

And every day I look at this chronometer

and always it shows exactly six.

So much for accuracy.

And fish move in the water, and from the skies

comes a rushing of wings while

Chronometers tick and cannon boom.

Miroslav Holub

1923-98

translated from the Czech by Ewald Osers

FORGETFULNESS

Auguste Rodin  -  The Thinker

The name of the author is the first to go

followed obediently by the title, the plot,

the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel

which suddenly becomes one you have never read, never even heard of.

It is as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor

decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,

to a little fishing village where there are no phones.

Long ago you kissed the names of the nine Muses goodbye

and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,

and even now as you memorise the order of the planets,

something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,

the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.

Whatever it is you are struggling to remember

it is not poised on the tip of your tongue,

not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.

It has floated away down a dark mythological river

whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall,

well on your own way to oblivion, where you will join those

who have even forgotten to swim and how to ride a bicycle.

No wonder you rise in the middle of the night

to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.

No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted

out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.

Billy Collins

b. New York 1941

FROM JOY'S LOVELIEST OCEAN

Foto Konrad Hartter

From joy's loveliest ocean

there's a flood springing.

Embark all, and set to -

to the oar your strength bringing.

No matter its burden,

our boat sorrow-laden

(if death comes, so let it)

moves through the waves winging.

From joy's loveliest ocean

there's a flood springing.

Who cries from behind us

of doubt or of danger?

Who harps on their fear now,

where fear is no stranger?

What curse, or star's showing

has frowned on our going?

Hoist a sail to the wind now

and we'll move on singing.

From joy's loveliest ocean

there's a flood springing.

Rabindranath Tagore

1861-1941

translated by Joe Winter

This is song 9 from Tagore's Gitanjali (Song offerings), a collection first published in England in 1912, with Tagore's own English translations.

Tagore later said that his poems came to him like wild swans "with a rush of sound and a flutter of wings".