Poems

Poetry, as I see it, is one of the few treasures that man was left with
after being kicked of paradise.
The richness, the verbal eroticism, the glowing beauty -
these qualities can be found nowhere else.
It's even rare to find them in prose.
The power of poetry, although it unfurtonatly belongs to a small amount of people, is unbeatable.
I hope that these poems will delight you as they've delighted me...

THE POEMS

IF/Rudiard Kipling

A CLEAR MIDNIGHT/Walt Whitman

TO THEM THAT DREAM/Rupert Brooke

THE WAY THAT LOVERS USE/Rupert Brooke

THE ALBATROSS/Charles Baudelaire

THE STAIN WAS LEFT ON THE WALL/David Avidan

UNCONQUERABLE/William Ernest Henly

TULIPS/Sylvia Plath
May 16, 1973/Wislawa Szymborska
HITLER'S FIRST PHOTOGRAPH/Wislawa Szymborska

IF/Rudiard Kipling

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too:
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise;

If you can dream---and not make dreams your master;
If you can think---and not make thoughts your aim,

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same:.
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build'em up with worn-out tools;

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings,
And never breathe a word about your loss:

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on!"

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings---nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much:
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,

Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And---which is more---you'll be a Man, my son!

BACK TO TOP

A CLEAR MIDNIGHT/ Walt Whitman

This is thy hour O Soul, thy free flight into the wordless,
Away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson done,
Thee fully forth emerging, silent, gazing, pondering the themes
thou lovest best,
Night, sleep, death and the stars.

BACK TO TOP

TO THEM THAT DREAM/Rupert Brooke

            O Brothers, we are Comrades on the way,
                         We dreamers, we who have given our hearts to
                    gain
                     Some glorious Hope, and wake to find it vain.
               Heed not the shame, the bitter things men say
                In wrath and hatred; Though your souls be grey
               And all your lives a failure, yet take heart;
                     Remember, we have chosen the better part;
                Leave them in darkness, ours to seek the day.

                  Onward, though Faith grown tired has died, and
        Hope
               Breathed out her pitiful life beneath the rod
                               Of wan Despair, - though Love's last golden
spark
           Flickered and ceased; we feebly, dimly grope,
               Seeking a light to lead us through the dark,
                Seeking the Unknown, stretching unto God.

BACK TO TOP

THE WAY THAT LOVERS USE/Rupert Brooke

The way that lovers use is this;
They bow, catch hands, with never a word,
And their lips meet, and they do kiss,
- So I have heard

They queerly find some healing so,
And strange attainment in the touch;
There is a secret lovers know,
- I have read as much.

And theirs no longer joy nor smart,
Changing or ending, night or day;
But mouth to mouth, and heart to heart,
- So lovers say.

BACK TO TOP

THE ALBATROSS/Charles Baudelaire

Often, to pass the time on board, the crew
Will catch an albatross, one of those big birds
Which nonchalantly chaperone a ship
Across the biter fathoms of the sea.

Tied to the deck, this sovereign of space,
As if embarrassed by its clumsiness,
Pitiably lets its great white wings
Drag at its sides like a pair of unshipped oars.

How weak and awkward, even comical
This traveler but lately so adroit-
One deckhand sticks a pipe stem in its beak,
Another mock the cripple that once flew!

The Poet is like this monarch of the clouds
Riding the storm above the marksman's range;
Exiled on the ground, hooted and jeered,
He cannot walk because of his great wings.

THE STAIN WAS LEFT ON THE WALL / David Avidan

Translaion from Hebrew: Roy Samana

Someone tried to scratch the stain off the wall.
But the stain was too dark (or perhaps too bright).
Either way - the stain was left on the wall.

So I called the painter, to paint the wall in green.
But the stain was too bright.
And I hired the white-washer, to white-wash the wall.
But the stain was too dark.
Either way - the stain was left on the wall.

So I took a kitchen knife and tried to scrape the stain out of the wall.
And the knife was painfully sharp.
It was sharpened only yesterday.
Even though.
And I took an axe and pounded the wall, but I stopped in time.
I don't know why it suddenly occurred to me,
that the wall might fall but the stain will still be left.
Either way - the stain was left on the wall.

And when they put me against the wall, I asked stand close to it.
And I covered it with a wide chest (who knows, maybe).
And when my back was splashed, a lot of blood was spilled, but only from the back's side.
Shots. And I believed with all my heart, that the blood would cover the stain.
Another set of shots.
And I believed with all my heart, that the blood would cover the stain.
Either way - the stain was left on the wall.

UNCONQUERABLE / William Ernest Henly

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced or cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

BACK TO TOP

TULIPS/Sylvia Plath

The tulips are too excitable, it is winter here.
Look how white everything is, how quiet, how snowed-in
I am learning peacefulness, lying by myself quietly
As the light lies on these white walls, this bed, these hands.
I am nobody; I have nothing to do with explosions.
I have given my name and my day-clothes up to the nurses
And my history to the anaesthetist and my body to surgeons.

They have propped my head between the pillow and the sheet-cuff
Like an eye between two white lids that will not shut.
Stupid pupil, it has to take everything in.
The nurses pass and pass, they are no trouble,
They pass the way gulls pass inland in their white caps,
Doing things with their hands, one just the same as another,
So it is impossible to tell how many there are.

My body is a pebble to them, they tend it as water
Tends to the pebbles it must run over, smoothing them gently.
They bring me numbness in their bright needles, they bring me sleep.
Now I have lost myself I am sick of baggage -
My patent leather overnight case like a black pillbox,
My husband and child smiling out of the family photo;
Their smiles catch onto my skin, little smiling hooks.

I have let things slip, a thirty-year-old cargo boat
Stubbornly hanging on to my name and address.
They have swabbed me clear of my loving associations.
Scared and bare on the green plastic-pillowed trolley
I watched my teaset, my bureaus of linen, my books
Sink out of sight, and the water went over my head.
I am a nun now, I have never been so pure.

I didn't want any flowers, I only wanted
To lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty.
How free it is, you have no idea how free -
The peacefulness is so big it dazes you,
And it asks nothing, a name tag, a few trinkets.
It is what the dead close on, finally; I imagine them
Shutting their mouths on it, like a Communion tablet.

The tulips are too red in the first place, they hurt me.
Even through the gift paper I could hear them breathe
Lightly, through their white swaddlings, like an awful baby.
Their redness talks to my wound, it corresponds.
They are subtle: they seem to float, though they weigh me down,
Upsetting me with their sudden tongues and their colour,
A dozen red lead sinkers round my neck.

Nobody watched me before, now I am watched.
The tulips turn to me, and the window behind me
Where once a day the light slowly widens and slowly thins,
And I see myself, flat, ridiculous, a cut-paper shadow
Between the eye of the sun and the eyes of the tulips,
And I hve no face, I have wanted to efface myself.
The vivid tulips eat my oxygen.

Before they came the air was calm enough,
Coming and going, breath by breath, without any fuss.
Then the tulips filled it up like a loud noise.
Now the air snags and eddies round them the way a river
Snags and eddies round a sunken rust-red engine.
They concentrate my attention, that was happy
Playing and resting without committing itself.

The walls, also, seem to be warming themselves.
The tulips should be behind bars like dangerous animals;
They are opening like the mouth of some great African cat,
And I am aware of my heart: it opens and closes
Its bowl of red blooms out of sheer love of me.
The water I taste is warm and salt, like the sea,
And comes from a country far away as health.

BACK TO TOP

May 16,1973/Wislawa Szymborska

One of those many dates
that no longer ring a bell.

Where I was going that day,
what I was doing - I don't know.

Whom I met, what we talked about,
I can't recall.

If a crime had been committed nearby,
I wouldn't have had an alibi.

The sun flared and died
beyond my horizons.
The earth rotated
unnoted in my notebooks.

I'd rather think
that I'd temporarily died
than that I kept on living
and can't remember a thing.

I wasn't a ghost, after all.
I breathed, I ate,
I walked.

My steps were audible,
my fingers surely left
their prints on doorknobs.
Mirrors caught my reflection.
I wore something or other in such-and-such a color.
Somebody must have seen me.

Maybe I found something that day
that had been lost.
Maybe I lost something that turned up later.

I was filled with feelings and sensations.
Now all that's like
a line of dots in parantheses.

Where was I hiding out,
where did I bury myself?
Not a bad trick
to vanish before my own eyes.

I shake my memory.
Maybe something in its branches
that has been asleep for years
will start up with a flutter.

No.
Clearly I'm asking too much.
Nothing less than one whole second

BACK TO TOP

HITLER'S FIRST PHOTOGRAPH/Wislawa Szymborska

AND WHO'S this little fellow in his itty-bitty robe?
That's tiny baby Adolf, the Hitler's little boy!
Will he grow up to be an LL.D.?
Or a tenor in Vienna's Opera House?
Whose teensy hand is this, whose little ear and eye and nose?
Whose tummy full of milk, we just don't know:
printer's, doctor's, merchant's, priest's?
Where will those tootsy-wootsies finally wander?
To garden, to school, to an office, to a bride,
maybe to the Burgermeister's daughter?

Precious little angel, mommy's sunshine, honeybun,
while he was being born a year ago,
there was no death of signs on the earth and in the sky:
spring sun, geraniums in windows,
the organ-grinder's music in the yard,
a lucky fortune wrapped in rosy paper,
then just before the labor his mother's fateful dream:
a dove seen in dream means joyful news,
if it is caught, a long-awaited guest will come.
Knock knock, who's there, it's Adolf's heartchen knocking.

A little pacifier, diaper, rattle, bib,
our bouncing boy, thank God and knock on wood, is well,
looks just like his folks, like a kitten in a basket,
like the tots in every other family album.
Shush, let's not start crying, sugar,
the camera will click from under that black hood.

The Klinger Atelier, Grabenstrasse, Braunau,
and Braunau is small but worthy town,
honest businesses, obliging neighbors, smell of yeast dough, of gray soap.
No one hears howling dogs, or fate's footsteps.
A history teacher loosens his collar
and yawns over homework.

BACK TO TOP