If I must die, you must live to tell my story to sell my things to buy a piece of cloth and some strings, (make it white with a long tail) so that a child, somewhere in Gaza while looking heaven in the eye awaiting his dad who left in a blaze — and bid no one farewell not even to his flesh not even to himself — sees the kite, my kite you made, flying up above, and thinks for a moment an angel is there bringing back love. If I must die let it bring hope, let it be a story.
Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer was killed in Gaza by an Israeli airstrike on December 6, 2023 along with his brother, nephew, sister, and three of her children.
That man, Prytherch, with the torn cap, I saw him often, framed in the gap Between two hazels with his sharp eyes, Bright as thorns, watching the sunrise Filling the valley with its pale yellow Light, where the sheep and the lambs went haloed With grey mist lifting from the dew. Or was it a likeness that the twigs drew With bold pencilling upon that bare Piece of sky? For he’s still there At early morning, when the light is right And I look up suddenly at a bird’s flight.
By Ralph Dutli (Translated from German by Ben Fowkes)
When in 1960 I first came across Osip Mandelstam’s poetry, nobody in the USSR had enjoyed access to his work since the early 1930s and few even knew of his existence, let alone of his death, as he had predicted, in Stalin’s Gulag. His books had been removed from libraries and bookshops. Only braver readers kept them, sometimes hidden in saucepans at their dachas. From 1958, supported by the CIA, émigré scholars collected what they could from Russian publications of the writings of banned Russian authors; the works were so in demand that students like myself copied them out by hand. Impressionable readers were stunned by the hypnotic musicality of Mandelstam’s early poems, by the penetrating appreciation of the disaster that unfolded – the ‘ship of time going to the bottom’ – during the First World War and the Russian Revolution, by the fine love poems and by the use of biology to elucidate his times.
For a student of Russian literature, Mandelstam is a godsend. Every poem has memorable lines that could be quoted in many imaginable situations. Some are frivolous – ‘Eternal is the taste of fresh whipped cream,/As is the smell of orange peel’ – and others gnomic: ‘Everything has been. Everything will be repeated/And only the moment of recognition is sweet.’ Mandelstam absorbed into his poetics a whole century of Russian lyrical poetry, including Pushkin, Lermontov and Tyutchev, as well as Derzhavin, Batyushkov and Baratynsky, so that his poetry seems to be a conversation with the dead. The influence of classical Greek and Latin poets, German Romantics and French symbolists can be discerned too. Yet you also feel the presence of an acutely nervous, highly reactive personality, steeling itself to face forces that threaten him with destruction.
Once a madman told me there was machinery in the mountains a hidden complex of cogs and wheels turning eternally under the world. “Mark my words,” he babbled “the hills will open one day like the backs of watches in a judgment of wonder baring the teeth and the truth of it. You will see.”
There was a cockeyed logic to his lunacy in guileless boyhood I almost believed him till the years eroded my innocence and his crazed talk drummed into memory.
But every so often, the fancy returns that myth of the millennial clockwork clicking forever behind the façade. Sometimes I stand on mountains and I swear I can hear those ghostly wheels turning faint as a whisper grinding away like the engines of God in the secret guts of the peaks.
We, too, had known golden hours When body and soul were in tune, Had danced with our true loves By the light of a full moon, And sat with the wise and good As tongues grew witty and gay Over some noble dish Out of Escoffier; Had felt the intrusive glory Which tears reserve apart, And would in the old grand manner Have sung from a resonant heart. But, pawed-at and gossiped-over By the promiscuous crowd, Concocted by editors Into spells to befuddle the crowd, All words like Peace and Love, All sane affirmative speech, Had been soiled, profaned, debased To a horrid mechanical screech. No civil style survived That pandaemonioum But the wry, the sotto-voce, Ironic and monochrome: And where should we find shelter For joy or mere content When little was left standing
Meticulous bees stitch honeytrails through the raspberries; car dreams camouflaged in the Scotch broom’s yellow shadow; carpenters woodpecker walls two tapping houses away.
Summer grey as a fogged glas full of gull complaints; distant heartbeat of boast setting the metre of mornings; clouds have clapped their hands over the mouth of the sun.
Last summer’s ghost hides around the house corner holding a piebald cat I gave to the garden earth. Friends I drank to the days with, girls who have slipped their moorings.
We’re all another year closer to our comeuppances – the carpenters the cat the gulls the bees the ghosts and me – riding with time through the carousel seasons as long as the wheel turns us.
You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on. Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers. Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting — over and over announcing your place in the family of things.
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