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Jane Hirshfield’s Handout on Revision

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Jane H

In their book, The Poet’s Companion, Kim Addonizio and Dorianne Laux share a worksheet Jane Hirshfield created for a Napa Valley Writers’ Conference she taught.

Can you imagine? Being surrounded by both the poet Jane Hirshfield and hundreds of wineries? Sounds inspiring to me (and rated 90-plus by the Poetry Advocate), but I have yet to attend any writers’ conference, much less one in California with Jane Hirshfield, which I mean to change some year soon. (As Shakespeare wrote: “My kingdom for a bucket list!”)

Addonizio and Laux (sounds like a good law firm) claim Hirshfield’s list tackles “the more existential aspects of revision,” so it gets better and better: Hirshfield + wine + Camus. Pass the baguette and ghazals!

But enough word play. Let’s take a look at Hirshfield’s revisionary wisdom for poets and see if the Buddha doesn’t sneak in:

SOME POSSIBLE QUESTIONS TO ASK OF YOUR POEM IN REVISION

  • What is being said?
  • Is there joy, depth, muscle, in the music of its saying?
  • Is there more that wants to be said?
  • Does it want a more deeply living body of sound?
  • Is it true?
  • Is it ethical?
  • Does it feel?
  • Does it follow its own deepest impulses, not necessarily the initial idea?
  • Does it know more than you did when you started it?
  • Are there things in it that don’t belong?
  • Are whatever digressions it takes in its own best service?
  • Are there things in it that are confusing?
  • Are there things in it that are clichéd or sentimental?
  • Is it self-satisfied?
  • Is it predictable?
  • Does it go deep enough? far enough?
  • Is it particular?
  • Is the grammar correct?
  • If the syntax is unusual, is it for a purpose?
  • Are the transitions accurate?
  • Is it in the right voice?
  • Is it in the right order?
  • Does the diction fit?
  • Could any of its words be more interesting? more surprising? more alive?
  • Do its rhythms work? (i.e. both seem right and accomplish meaning and feeling)
  • Does the music work?
  • Does the shape/form work? (line breaks, stanzas, etc.)
  • Does each image work? each statement?
  • Does it allow strangeness?
  • Does each of its moments actively move the poem toward its full realization?
  • Should it go out into the world?
  • Is it a seed for something else?
  • Is it finished?
  • Six months later, is it still finished?
  • Six years later, is it still finished?

 

Maybe the Buddhist leanings of Hirshfield are in there, maybe not, but change is inevitable and personification is apparent. I especially like the finishing flourish. Should your precious child go out in the world? Remember now, as the author, you are blinded by love. Sometimes the answer is a decided no.

And what about that seed of something else bit? A terrific way of reminding ourselves that we often start writing a poem with one goal and accidentally achieve something entirely different. Celebrate! Then start revising.

And the last two points on the list. Sing them loud, sing them clear: Wait, wait, wait! Be patient! Let your poems age in their oak barrels a bit, gain character and fruity notes of currants and blackberries. Look at them again after a few flips of the calendar page. Chances are you’ll see a very different poem: one that requires revision, especially if you initially allowed strangeness that you thought was good strangeness but it turned out to be just weird strangeness.

Time helps you recognize that, kind of like the morning after too much wine brings recognition, too. In that sense, good poems revealed as bad are like the epiphany of Sunday morning headaches. You learn and revise….

Digging Seamus Heaney

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I visited the library and picked up a first-edition paperback of Seamus Heaney’s debut collection of poems, Death of a Naturalist, which included in its title (Kismet!) Henry David Thoreau’s favorite word.

It was an auspicious day. One in which I not only started, but finished this British paperback (Faber and Faber, sold for 1.25 pounds in 1966) of 57 pages in one sitting. That’s 34 Seamus Heaney poems with an old-school library card in the back showing it was signed out for the first time on June 15, 1977, and only three more times after that, the last being Dec. 22, 1995.

Gentle aside to poets: If you’re wondering why your poetry books aren’t selling better, you need look no further than this Irish giant’s first foray, which apparently got little play as well. Small comfort, that, I realize, but still….

Now some people are intimidated by the likes of men named Seamus Heaney. He did, after all, develop a style to be reckoned with over time. Have no fear here, however. Seamus’s first outing is mostly one-page poems (a particular favorite length of mine) filled with memories of farm life and boyhood back in the days of yore in Ireland. Sod. Cows. Cuds. Potatoes. Barns. Drowning kittens. Irish wakes. Young love. The usual and the un-, in other words.

Leading off, a familiar poem. The only one I knew from this collection, turns out. See if you know it, too:

 

Digging
by Seamus Heaney

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

Under my window, a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked,
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man.

My grandfather cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner’s bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, going down and down
For the good turf. Digging.

The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.

 

And dig he did, rooting out many a poem in his day. And it all started here. First. For him when it was published. For me, when I checked it out of the library 58 years later.

 

How To Review a Poetry Collection

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5star

There are many reasons your average bibliophile gives no “phile” to poetry collections. One, maybe the reader is intimidated. Two, maybe the reader has a conditioned response thanks to a thankless high school English teacher. And three, maybe the reader wouldn’t know where to begin with a poetry book review.

As the first two are out of my control, let me address the third. You don’t have to be a professor or wear black turtleneck and beret to review poetry. You don’t even have to know the difference between dactyls and ducks, blank verse and bearcats, pentameter and porcupines. Writing from the basic bastion of your position as average reader works just fine, thank you. Here’s how:

  • First of all, forget the myth that poetry collections cannot be read wall-to-wall (or, shall we say, cover-to-cover). Though some poems may be chewier than others, meriting a reread, confine your chewing 100 times before swallowing to poems you actually enjoy before continuing to the next. If you get a “Huh?” reaction, move on unless something in the poem compels you to try again.
  • When you finish, ask yourself how much you liked the collection and why. Be honest. It’s a basic start for any review. “I enjoyed this collection because…” or “I had mixed feelings about this book because…” or even “No poetry collection can contain equally strong poems, start to finish. That said, I found….” You get the idea. Subjective starts get you out of the blocks.
  • Does this poet remind you of another you’ve read and enjoyed? Who is it? What are the similarities? Or perhaps you want to explain why this collection stands alone, unique as a unicorn’s forehead.
  • What are a few major themes you noticed in the book? Possible readers will be interested in this. And, if you can find a specific poem or two that illustrates the theme, quote from it and offer a few thoughts on its effectiveness.
  • Quoting poetry need not be scarier than a week-long visit from the mother-in-law. For three lines or less, simply use quotation marks and type them into the body of your sentences exactly as is, adding a space, a backward slash, and a space to signify line breaks.
  • If you want to quote four lines or more, skip a line, indent, and type the lines exactly as they appear in the poem. When you’re done, skip a line again and resume your review. No quotation marks are necessary, as the indented quote serves notice that these are the poet’s words as they appeared.
  • If you found a few turns of phrase, examples of figurative language, or unusual word pairings that got your heart beating faster, share them as examples of what the poet is capable of.
  • Don’t confuse a poem’s speaker with its poet. The pronoun “I” can dupe readers into thinking the poet is speaking from direct experience. More likely the “I” is a speaker created by the poet.
  • Finish with overall thoughts as you leave the book. Might you read it again some year? What type of reader might like it? And, if you seldom review poetry collections, how did it feel to prove the big bad wolf was actually a Dalmatian pup?

A final word about authors of poetry collection–and this is strictly my opinion, which some might justifiably disagree with. I don’t think you should hold beginning poets to the same bar as well-known ones. That is, if you’re reviewing on a site like Amazon or Goodreads, both of which employ a 5-star rating system, you don’t want to criticize Suzy Starter for not being Emily Dickinson, or Freddie First-time for not being Robert Frost. Emily and Rob had to start somewhere, too.

Be gentle, then. Find their strengths, for their strengths may well be the roots of better things to come as they continue to develop as a poet.

That said, the worst you can do is not read poetry or read and then not review a poetry collection at all. Reviews are the lifeblood that sustain poetry collections, which are living on thin air as it is. They need readers and reactions. They need support lauding the things they do well.

So don’t hold back because you want to read another same ole, same ole (Paulo Coelho, Joyce Carol Oates, Jo Nesbo). Get outside your comfort zone now and then—review poetry with ease because, let’s face it, you don’t need a poetic license to do so. Your high school English teacher is not watching. The scanning and analyses are over.

Class dismissed!

 

 

 

 

 

The Paradoxical Poetry of Tao Te Ching

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The Tao is the way. Too bad Machiavelli never heard of it. Or got to read it. If he had, The Prince might have been a different fellow. An unrecognizable one, in fact.

I like to read Lao Tzu’s paradoxical pages every now and then, and when I do, I reach for my copy of Tao Te Ching.  The wisdom here is unsettlingly logical. So un-Western. And in this day and age, sadly, so un-Eastern, too.

Here is one entry I particularly enjoyed. Like rivers and streams, the metaphor is simple yet deep. If only a few politicians who resemble the Duke and the Dauphin Huck meets (their weaknesses exposed the minute they open their well-snakeoiled mouths) would read it. But that won’t happen unless it is read aloud to said politicians . On Fox Channel story time, maybe. Which gives the fox—an otherwise fine animal—a bad name.

 

From Tao Te Ching:

The reason the river and sea can be regarded as
The rulers of all the valley streams
Is because of their being below them.
Therefore they can be their rulers.
So if you want to be over people
You must speak humbly to them.
If you want to lead them
You must place yourself behind them.

Thus the sage is positioned above
And the people do not feel oppressed.
He is in front and they feel nothing wrong.
Therefore they like to push him front and never resent him.

Since he does not contend

No one can contend with him.

 

The moral of our story: Lead from behind. Get on top from below. Be humble! In our time, most wannabe leaders have lost their way (reminder: “The Tao is the way”).

Poems Inspired by (American) Football

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Did you know that Super Bowl Monday—the day following the N.F.L.’s championship game—is the most called-in sick day in the United States? Talk about the tail (football) wagging the dog (country)!

As for those going to work, they will no doubt burn some water-cooler time discussing the merits of Super Bowl commercials, even to the point of grading them. This culmination of the National Football League’s schedule is final proof that football is king of the hill here in the states. In college sports, football is the money-driver. And in the professional realm, it is the most watched sports entertainment on television and in-person.

For me, though, football is more a reminder of two things — the fall season and the season of my youth. Apparently I’m not alone. Here are three football-inspired poems, the last by me, and the first by people more famous than me. (For me it’s 4th and 20 with a minute on the clock—but hope, and apparently Tom Brady, are eternal!):

 

Football Dreams
by Jacqueline Woodson

No one was faster
than my father on the football field.
No one could keep him
from crossing the line. Then
touching down again.
Coaches were watching the way he moved,
his easy stride, his long arms reaching
up, snatching the ball from its soft pockets
of air.

My father dreamed football dreams,
and woke up to a scholarship
at Ohio State University.
Grown now
living the big-city life
in Columbus
just sixty miles
from Nelsonville
and from there
Interstate 70 could get you
on your way west to Chicago
Interstate 77 could take you south
but my father said
no colored Buckeye in his right mind
would ever want to go there.

From Columbus, my father said,
you could go just about
anywhere.

 

First Practice
by Gary Gildner

After the doctor checked to see
we weren’t ruptured,
the man with the short cigar took us
under the grade school,
where we went in case of attack
or storm, and said
he was Clifford Hill, he was
a man who believed dogs
ate dogs, he had once killed
for his country, and if
there were any girls present
for them to leave now.
No one
left. OK, he said, he said I take
that to mean you are hungry
men who hate to lose as much
as I do. OK. Then
he made two lines of us
facing each other,
and across the way, he said,
is the man you hate most
in the world,
and if we are to win
that title I want to see how.
But I don’t want to see
any marks, when you’re dressed,
he said. He said, Now.

 

And finally, my own entry, from my second book Lost Sherpa of Happiness:

Trip, Memory
Ken Craft

It starts with the sound of a whistle.
The smell of cigar smoke
riding bareback on October air.
The cheerleaders’ “We got the T-E-AYY-M,”
the dry prayer of their pom-poms.
Me and the boys, uniformly cool—brave
in our home whites and eye black,
our grass-scarred helmets,
our nonfunctional mouthguards,
throwing Hail Mary’s and dropping f-bombs,
our bodies bolting
and dangerous with weedy want.

That’s all it takes—a somewhere referee’s
somehow whistle. I’m 13 again.
I haven’t even begun to think about thinking.
The smell of tobacco is a promise,
nothing foreboding.
And the sight of fallen, windblown leaves
rolling toward my cleats is just that
because my veins breathe and bulge as Coach yells
and my blood hits hard to feel the bruise of pleasure
and there’s no such thing as symbolism
because death is only something cowboys
and Indians do on black and white TV.

 

NOTE: Want to read a fourth football-themed poem? Jump to this post, which includes a football poem by Al Ortolani.

Meghan McCain Makes Good (and Uses Some Time-Honored Writers’ Tools)

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Just over six years ago, watching Meghan McCain’s eulogy for her father, John McCain, I felt refreshed in an unexpected manner —as a writer, as an American, and as a man. I’ll say this: When we are dust, ash, or worm motel, may we all have children who can sing our praises so well before a gathering of family, friends, and well-wishers.

The word “eulogy” is often confused with “elegy,” a word poets are familiar with. A check with my good friends Merriam and Webster clears this up:

“Both elegy and eulogy may be used about writing or speech in remembrance of a person who has passed away, and this semantic overlap creates the potential for confusion. Elegy (which may be traced to the Greek word elegos, “song of mourning”) commonly refers to a song or poem lamenting one who is dead; the word may also refer somewhat figuratively to a nostalgic poem, or to a kind of musical composition. While eulogy is also commonly found referring to words about the deceased, its basic meaning, both in English and in the Greek language from which it was borrowed, is “praise.” Formed from the Greek roots eu “good” and logos “speech,” a eulogy is an encomium given for one who is either living or dead. If you are praising your partner’s unsurpassed beauty or commending the virtues of the deceased at a funeral, you are delivering a eulogy; if you are composing a lamenting reminiscence about a person who has long since passed, you are writing an elegy.”

Meghan’s 17-minute eulogy managed to be both eloquent and emotional, mixing elements from the speech writer’s (and poet’s) toolbox and techniques of persuasion espoused by Aristotle so long ago. As writers reading the full text of her words here, we can see that she has learned the value of anaphora especially—the effective use of repetition coming at listeners in waves. As for the persuasion, both ethos (her character as well as her father’s) and pathos (the leavening of biography with rising emotion) are seen in abundance.

Also on display here is the power of anecdote. Nothing illustrates an abstract point better than a concrete example. Note the story of the horse, especially—how Meghan broke her collarbone falling off of one, how her father took her to the hospital, and how he then took her home and put her back on that horse’s back.

The contrasting technique of antithesis was highlighted, too, when Meghan McCain said, “We gather to mourn the passing of American greatness, the real thing, not cheap rhetoric from men who will never come near the sacrifice, those that live lives of comfort and privilege while he suffered and served.”

And, of course, by the line this eulogy will most be remembered for: “The America of John McCain has no need to be made great again because America was always great.”

To be honest, I was never much impressed with John McCain’s politics and didn’t vote for him when he ran for president. As an American, though, I was much impressed with the example he set once in the grip of terminal cancer. McCain, the former prisoner, was captive again, this time by the take-no-prisoners brain cancer called glioblastoma (the same that took down his friend across the aisle, Ted Kennedy). But he fought, not only the disease, but the disease he perceived to be spreading across America.

For that, McCain gained my respect. Thus, I found myself inexplicably teary-eyed watching Meghan’s eulogy. What was the source, I wondered? Obviously the man’s death and the family’s loss played into it, but a little self-searching brought up more.

I was mourning the passing of another America, one I’m not sure will return, given the goings on not only here but across the world where authoritarian regimes are popping up like poisonous mushrooms. At the time of this speech, the electoral college-elected president was absent by design. The McCain family, citing the need for dignity, asked him to stay away (though I doubt he’d have attended anyway). In any event, thanks to the eulogy, I inhaled a little fresh air at a time when the air was claustrophobic with a certain someone’s narcissism. It returned a sense of sanity and patriotism that I hadn’t breathed in two years.

That’s something, and it bears reconsidering as we approach one last chance to rid ourselves of this pestilence. And that’s proof that a eulogy—like any piece of good writing—can have effects beyond their stated purpose.

 

 

When the World Slaps You, Poetry…

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One of the themes running through Gregory Orr’s book,  Poetry as Survival, is the role of trauma and adversity in the creative process. The “survival” in Orr’s title speaks to the lyric poet’s need to make sense of past difficulty, hardship, and pain.

One poet who Orr quotes is Stanley Kunitz. In the first, more famous poem—“The Portrait”—an unfortunate family dynamic, a fateful triangle, is the topic, as Kunitz recalls discovering a portrait of his father, who committed suicide, in the attic. When his mother discovers her son’s find, her reaction is unexpectedly brutal:

 

“The Portrait”
by Stanley Kunitz

My mother never forgave my father
for killing himself,
especially at such an awkward time
and in a public park,
that spring
when I was waiting to be born.
She locked his name
in her deepest cabinet
and would not let him out,
though I could hear him thumping.
When I came down from the attic
with the pastel portrait in my hand
of a long-lipped stranger
with a brave moustache
and deep brown level eyes,
she ripped it into shreds
without a single word
and slapped me hard.
In my sixty-fourth year
I can feel my cheek
still burning.

 

The poem’s dramatic moment comes at the end where son, like the father, absorbs the sting of living with his mother, though certainly in less permanent fashion.

Kunitz also wrote about the pain of anti-Semitism. In the first line of “An Old Cracked Tune,” he lifts a line used in a taunting jingle he often endured as a youth. Here we have a sting of another sort, a cheek still burning from the slap of prejudice. A cheek burning with anger, resentment, and yes, determination:

 

“An Old Cracked Tune”
by Stanley Kunitz

My name is Solomon Levi,
the desert is my home,
my mother’s breast was thorny,
and father I had none.

The sands whispered, Be separate,
the stones taught me, Be hard.
I dance, for the joy of surviving,
on the edge of the road.

 

Here is a video of Kunitz reading this brief poem. It is easy to see the Muse’s role in survival. Pounding the disorder of pain into the order of a lyric poem can be powerful medicine. Consider it, as you look to the thickets of your own past….

The Sheer Poetry of Dullness

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eater

Quotidian. Mundane. For most of us, it’s the relentless repetition and ordinariness of the sun also rising and setting. But make no mistake, it once started in the fertile soil of dreams. And, somehow, a tendril of hope remains in the ground beneath our feet, no matter how scorched it has become by the cycling sun.

I think of this each time I feel empty of ideas and inspiration. I think of it when I hear students say the same upon being assigned memoir writing: “I can’t write because nothing ever happens in my life.”

Dull. Life is dull. The assignment changes on the fly. The assignment, then, is to write about dull. Find beauty in dull. Find heartache in dull. Sniff out hope and acknowledge despair–odd but constant bedfellows–in dull.

I think of this because we all have such ample material when it comes to making music from such ordinary chords. I think of this when I read about Gwendolyn Brooks’ bean eaters in their rented back room full of beads and receipts and dolls and cloths and tobacco crumbs and vases and fringes. A polysyndeton of purposefulness, day in and day out, putting on their clothes and putting things away because life demands it of them.

Consider it, next time you’re feeling down. Consider it, too, next time you think you and you alone are denied of ideas–ideas which humbly lie all around you, hidden by a cloak woven of ordinariness.

“The Bean Eaters” by Gwendolyn Brooks

They eat beans mostly, this old yellow pair.
Dinner is a casual affair.
Plain chipware on a plain and creaking wood, 
Tin flatware.

Two who are Mostly Good.
Two who have lived their day,
But keep on putting on their clothes
And putting things away.

And remembering . . .
Remembering, with twinklings and twinges,
As they lean over the beans in their rented back room that
          is full of beads and receipts and dolls and cloths,
          tobacco crumbs, vases and fringes.

Dillard and Chee: Writing Teacher and Student

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In his essay, “The Writing Life,” Alexander Chee shares wisdom that should interest writers of any genre. Certainly it intrigued me — not because I profess to live a writing life (though I do live a reasonable semblance of one), but because the essay focuses on Chee’s instructor at Wesleyan (circa 1989), Annie Dillard, an icon of some stature among the writing crowd and, as you might have guessed, me.

Though it cannot possibly be the same, reading the essay gives you a feel for what it would be like to sit in Annie’s class. Chee graciously shares nuggets of wisdom passed along by Dillard to his class. For your viewing pleasure, here are but a few of them:

  • “Don’t ever use the word ‘soul,’ if possible.”
  • “Never quote dialogue you can summarize.”
  • “Avoid describing crowd scenes, especially party scenes.”
  • “Latinates [are] polysyllabic, and Anglo-Saxon words [are] short, with perhaps two syllables at best. A good writer [makes] use of both to vary sentence rhythms.”
  • “You want vivid writing. How do we get vivid writing? Verbs, first. Precise verbs. All of the action on the page, everything that happens, happens in the verbs. The passive voice needs gerunds to make anything happen. But too many gerunds together on the page makes for tinnitus: running, sitting, speaking, laughing, inginginginging. No. Don’t do it. The verbs tell the reader whether something happened once or continually, what is in motion, what is at rest. Gerunds are lazy, you don’t have to make a decision and soon, everything is happening at the same time, pell-mell, chaos. Don’t do that. Also, bad verb choices mean adverbs. More often that not, you don’t need them. Did he run quickly or did he sprint? Did he walk slowly or did he stroll or saunter?”
  • “Narrative writing sets down details in an order that evokes the writer’s experience for the reader.”
  • “If you’re doing your job, the reader feels what you felt. You don’t have to tell the reader how to feel. No one likes to be told how to feel about something. And if you doubt that, just go ahead. Try and tell someone how to feel.”
  • “…avoid emotional language. The line goes gray when you do that…. Don’t tell the reader that someone was happy or sad. When you do that, the reader has nothing to see. She isn’t angry… She throws his clothes out the window. Be specific.”
  • “…the first three pages of a draft are usually where you clear your throat…the place your draft begins is around page four. …if the beginning isn’t there, sometimes it’s at the end…you’ve spent the whole time getting to your beginning…if you switch the first and last pages you might have a better result than if you leave them where they were.”
  • Chee: “After the lecture on verbs, we counted the verbs on the page, circled them, tallied the count for each page to the side, and averaged them. Can you increase the average number of verbs per page? she asked. I got this exercise from Samuel Johnson, she told us, who believed in a lively page and used to count his verbs.”
  • “You can invent the details that don’t matter…. You cannot invent the details that matter.”
  • “Talent isn’t enough… Writing is work. Anyone can do this, anyone can learn to do this. It’s not rocket science; it’s habits of mind and habits of work. I started with people much more talented than me…and they’re dead or in jail or not writing. The difference between me and them is that I’m writing.”
  • “Go up to the place in the bookstore where your books will go…. Walk right up and find your place on the shelf. Put your finger there, and then go every time.”
  • “In the long run, we only ever hit what we aim at.”

Is it any wonder Chee wound up wanting to be Dillard? And now, no doubt, some of his writing students want to be him.

Sic semper, as they say in the not-dead-yet language…

Czeslaw Milosz on the Indifferent World

poetry The Indifferent World

index

Many words–even simple ones–hold multiple meanings. Add connotative undertones to their pedigree and they grow even more fascinating. The word “indifferent” is such a word. Seemingly simple, there’s more to it than meets the eye. That’s one reason why I chose to name my first book The Indifferent World and placed the word itself in many of the collection’s poems.

First, a more conventional look at the word’s meaning, as seen through a beautiful poem written and translated (with the help of Robert Haas) by Czeslaw Milosz. This poem appeared in my copy of All of Us: The Collected Poems by Raymond Carver. It gains momentum and strength as you read it–a trait I admire in poems.

 

Return to Kraków in 1880
Czeslaw Milosz

So I returned here from the big capitals,
To a town in a narrow valley under the cathedral hill
With royal tombs. To a square under the tower
And the shrill trumpet sounding noon, breaking
Its note in half because of the Tartar arrow
Has once again struck the trumpeter.
And pigeons. And the garish kerchiefs of women selling flowers.
And groups chattering under the Gothic portico of the church.
My trunk of books arrived, this time for good.
What I know of my laborious life: it was lived.
Faces are paler in memory than on daguerreotypes.
I don’t need to write memos and letters every morning.
Others will take over, always with the same hope,
The one we know is senseless and devote our lives to.
My country will remain what it is, the backyard of empires,
Nursing its humiliation with provincial daydreams.
I leave for a morning walk tapping with my cane:
The places of old people are taken by new old people
And where the girls once strolled in their rustling skirts,
New ones are strolling, proud of their beauty.
And children trundle hoops for more than half a century.
In a basement a cobbler looks up from his bench,
A hunchback passes by with his inner lament,
Then a fashionable lady, a fat image of the deadly sins.
So the Earth endures, in every petty matter
And in the lives of men, irreversible.
And it seems a relief. To win? To lose?
What for, if the world will forget us anyway.