Words That Burn

The Two Artists, by Constance Naden (1858-1889)

“Edith is fair,” the painter said,

“Her cheek so richly glows,

My palette ne’er could match the red

Of that pure damask rose.

 

“Perchance, the evening rain‐drops light,

Soft sprinkling from above,

Have caught the sunset’s colour bright,

And borne it to my love.

 

“In distant regions I must seek

For tints before unknown,

Ere I can paint the brilliant cheek

That blooms for me alone.”

 

All this his little sister heard,

Who frolicked by his side;

To check such theories absurd,

That gay young sprite replied:

 

“Oh, I can tell you where to get

That pretty crimson bloom,

For in a bottle it is set

In Cousin Edith’s room.

 

“I’m sure that I could find the place,

If you want some to keep;

I watched her put it on her face—

She didn’t see me peep!

“So nicely she laid on the pink,

As well as you could do,

And really, I almost think

She is an artist, too.”

 

The maddened painter tore his hair,

And vowed he ne’er would wed,

And never since, to maiden fair,

A tender word has said.

 

Bright ruby cheeks, and skin of pearl,

He knows a shower may spoil,

And when he wants a blooming girl

Paints one himself in oil.

To My Father, by Wing Tek  Lum (1946-)

In our store that day

they gathered together

my grandfather among them

each in his turn

to cut off their queues:

the end of subservience.

They could have returned

the Republic soon established

or, or on the safe side,

waited a year

to grow back that braid.

No matter, they stayed.

Your father was young

and shrewd: the store flourished,

then the crops, the lands.

 

Out of your share

you sent us to the best schools;

we were to follow the dynasty

set by the Old Man.

But he had died

Before I was born, his grave

all I could pay homage to.

I was freed from those old ways.

Today, unbraided,

my hair has grown long

because and in spite of those haircuts

you and he took.

Recession, by Sydney Lea (1942-)

A grotesquerie for so long we all ignored it:
The mammoth plastic Santa lighting up
On the Quik-Stop's roof, presiding over pumps
That gleamed and gushed in the tarmac lot below it.

Out back, with pumps of their own, the muttering diesels.
And we, for the most part ordinary folks,
Took all for granted: the idling semis' smoke,
The fuel that streamed into our tanks, above all

Our livelihoods. We stepped indoors to talk
With friends, shared coffee, read the local paper,
Heavy with news of hard times now. We shiver.
Our afternoons are gone. At five o'clock

—Once we gave the matter little thought—
Our Santa Claus no longer flares with light.

The Story, by Michael Ondaatje (1943-)

1.

For his first forty days a child

is given dreams of previous lives.

Journeys, winding paths,

a hundred small lessons

and then the past is erased.

 

Some are born screaming,

some full of introspective wandering

into the past — that bus ride in winter,

the sudden arrival within

a new city in the dark.

And those departures from the family bonds

leaving what was lost and needed.

So the child’s face is a lake

of fast moving clouds and emotions.

 

A last chance for the clear history of the self.

All our mothers and grandparents here,

our dismantled childhoods

in the buildings of the past.

 

Some great forty-day daydream

before we bury the maps.

 

2.

There will be a war, the king told his pregnant wife.

In the last phase seven of us will cross

the river to the east and disguise ourselves

through the farmlands.

We will approach the markets

and befriend the rope-makers.  Remember this.

 

She nods and strokes the baby in her belly.

 

After a month we will enter

the halls of that king.

There is dim light from small high windows.

We have entered with no weapons,

just rope in the baskets.

We have trained for years

to move in silence, invisible,

not one creak of bone,

not one breath,

even in lit rooms,

in order to disappear into this building

where the guards live in half-light.

 

When a certain night falls

the seven must enter the horizontal door

remember this, face down,

as in birth.

 

Then (he tells his wife)

there is the corridor of dripping water,

a noisy rain, a sense

of creatures at your feet.

And we enter halls of further darkness,

cold and wet among the enemy warriors.

To overcome them we douse the last light.

 

After battle we must leave another way

avoiding all doors to the north…

 

(The king looks down

and sees his wife is asleep

in the middle of the adventure.

 

He bends down and kisses through the skin

the child in the body of his wife.

Both of them in dreams.  He lies there,

watches her face as it catches a breath.

He pulls back a wisp across her eye

and bites it off. Braids it

into his own hair, then sleeps beside them.)

 

3.

With all the swerves of history

I cannot imagine your future.

Would wish to dream it, see you

in your teens, as I saw my son,

your already philosophical air

rubbing against the speed of the city.

I no longer guess a future.

And do not know how we end

nor where.

 

Though I know a story about maps, for you.

 

4.

After the death of his father,

the prince leads his warriors

into another country.

four men and three women.

They disguise themselves and travel

through farms, fields of turnip.

They are private and shy

in an unknown, uncaught way.

 

In the hemp markets

they court friends.

They are dancers who tumble

with lightness as they move,

their long hair wild in the air.

Their shyness slips away.

 

They are charming with desire in them.

It is the dancing they are known for.

 

One night they leave their beds.

Four men, three women.

They cross open fields where nothing grows

and swim across the cold rivers

into the city.

 

Silent, invisible among the guards,

they enter the horizontal door

face down so the blades of poision

do not touch them. Then

into the rain of the tunnels.

 

It is an old story — that one of them

remembers the path in.

They enter the last room of faint light

and douse the lamp.  They move

within the darkness like dancers

at the centre of a maze

seeing the enemy before them

with the unlit habit of their journey.

 

There is no way to behave after victory.

 

 

And what should occur now is unremembered.

 

The seven stand there.

One among them, who was that baby,

cannot recall the rest of the story

— the story his father knew, unfinished

that night, his mother sleeping.

 

We remember it as a tender story,

though perhaps they perish.

The father’s lean arm across

the child’s shape, the taste

of the wisp of hair in his mouth…

 

The seven embrace in the destroyed room

where they will die without

the dream of exit.

We do not know what happened.

From the high windows the ropes

are not long enough to reach the ground.

They take up the knives of the enemy

and cut their long hair and braid it

onto one rope and they descend

hoping it will be long enough

into the darkness of the night.

The Wind Blows Through the Doors of My Heart, by Deborah Digges (1950-2009)

The wind blows
through the doors of my heart.
It scatters my sheet music
that climbs like waves from the piano, free of the keys.
Now the notes stripped, black butterflies,
flattened against the screens.
The wind through my heart
blows all my candles out.
In my heart and its rooms is dark and windy.
From the mantle smashes birds' nests, teacups
full of stars as the wind winds round,
a mist of sorts that rises and bends and blows
or is blown through the rooms of my heart
that shatters the windows,
rakes the bedsheets as though someone
had just made love. And my dresses
they are lifted like brides come to rest
on the bedstead, crucifixes,
dresses tangled in trees in the rooms
of my heart. To save them
I've thrown flowers to fields,
so that someone would pick them up
and know where they came from.
Come the bees now clinging to flowered curtains.
Off with the clothesline pinning anything, my mother's trousseau.
It is not for me to say what is this wind
or how it came to blow through the rooms of my heart.
Wing after wing, through the rooms of the dead
the wind does not blow. Nor the basement, no wheezing,
no wind choking the cobwebs in our hair.
It is cool here, quiet, a quilt spread on soil.
But we will never lie down again.

After Fifty Years, by William Faulkner (1897-1962)

Taking Time to Grow, by Mary Mapes Dodge (1831-1905)

 

 

The Eternal, by Eugenio Florit (1903-1999)

You didn’t know that the sea with its colors
–green, yellow, blue, gray, black,lunar —
would come to possess you forever.
Its rocky shore
so much yesterday, so far away,
saw you enter into its love when it was tame
enclosed in its circle of harsh mountains,
and saw you upon it headed west.
Like blood it was going with you.  Intimate voices
of conch shells sounded
in your ears and then fell silent.
The sea of sands was arriving later
under the terrible light of the tropics.  Terrible
light, and so gentle in the evening. Fearsome at night
when the dark seems ghostly.
Forever. Until now where once it passed
it remains in absence
as a memory, a flying albatross
coming and going on breezes and distances.
A single memory and the exact presence
of its being, existing, living, beating where it always had.
Unmoored, you had to return to it;
absent, to go back in memory;
dead, when you may be, on an eternal voyage,
and be, yes, to be above all like the light that slips away
and in waves of color catches its kiss.

 

The Avenues, by David St. John (1949-)

Some nights when you’re off

Painting in your studio above the laundromat,

I get bored about two or three A. M.

And go out walking down one of the avenues

Until I can see along some desolate sidestreet

The glare of an all-night cafeteria.

I sit at the counter,

In front of those glass racks with the long,

Narrow mirrors tilted above them like every

French bedroom you’ve ever read

About.  I stare at all those lonely pies,

Homely wedges lifted

From their moons.  The charred crusts and limp

Meringues reflected so shamelessly —

Their shapely fruits and creams all spilling

From the flat pyramids, the isosceles spokes

Of dough.  This late at night,

So few souls left

In the place, even the cheesecake

Looks a little blue.  With my sour coffee

I wander back out, past a sullen boy

In leather beneath the whining neon,

Along those streets we used to walk at night,

Those endless shops of spells:  the love philtres*

Or lotions, 20th century voodoo.  Once,

Over your bath, I poured

One called Mystery of the Spies,

Orange powders sizzling all around your hips.

Tonight, I’ll drink alone as these streets haze

To a pale gray.   I know you’re out somewhere —

Walking the avenues, shadowboxing the rising

Smoke as the trucks leave their alleys and loading

Chutes — looking for breakfast or a little peace.

 

*potions

Reluctant Whispers of Kissed Lips, by Jaroslav Seifert (1901-1986)

Reluctant whispers of kissed lips

which are smiling Yes —

I’ve long since ceased to hear them.

Nor do they belong to me.

But I’d still love to find words

kneaded from

bread dough

or the fragrance of lime trees.

Yet the bread’s become mouldy

and the fragrance bitter.

 

And all around me the words sneak on tiptoe

and stifle me when I try to catch them

I cannot kill them but they’re killing me.

And blows of curses crash against my door.

If I forced them to dance for me

they’d stay mute.  And they hobble.

 

Yet I know very well

that a poet must always say more

than is hidden in the roar of words.

And that is poetry.

Else he could not with his verses lever out

a bud from honeyed veils

or force a shiver to run down your spine

as he strips down the truth.

 

(Trans. Ewald Osers)