The Sighs of St Helena (11)

Bhusana Nanda Bidhu

Today I remember the feelings what my hands painted for you.

I am waiting for you; * I am wholly filled with you; Your picture and the intoxicating evening leave my senses no peace.

Sweet, incomparable Josephine, What have you done to my heart? Are you angry with me? Do you look sad? Are you ill at ease? But I find calm when I give myself up to my passion, that on your lips, at your heart, I may fan the flames which burn me.

How plain it was to me last night that your picture can never replace the real you. At noon you will start; in three hours I shall see you; till then, mio dolce amor, a thousand kisses! But you must not give me kisses, for they burn my blood! *

Since I left you, * I have been sad, I can only be happy when I am near you. I spend my whole time thinking of your kisses, your tears, your bewitching jealousy.

The charm of the incomparable Josephine is perpetually rekindling the flames of my heart and my senses. When shall I be free, at length, free from cares and duties, free to devote all my time to you, with nothing in the world but to you…

Since I have known you, I have come to respect you more day by day, which shows how wrong La Bruyere was when he said that loves come suddenly.

Everything in nature runs its course, and increases by degrees…

Be less beautiful, less tender, and above all less jealous. Your tears inflame my blood…

Join me quickly, so that, before we die, we may be able to say: We have had so many happy days! A million kisses, even for your horrid fortune. *

*The words of Napoleon

At the Mid Hour of Night

Thomas Moore

At the mid hour of night, when stars are weeping, I fly To the lone vale we loved, when life shone warm in thine eye; And I think oft, if spirits can steal from the regions of air, To revisit past scenes of delight, thou wilt come to me there, And tell me our love is remembered, even in the sky.

Then I sing the wild song ’twas once such pleasure to hear! When our voices commingling breathed, like one, on the ear; And, as Echo far off through the vale my sad orison rolls, I think, oh my love! ’tis thy voice from the Kingdom of Souls, Faintly answering still the notes that once were so dear.

The Steps of Montmartre

Alex Grant

      – after Brassai’s 1936 photograph

On the steps of Sacre Coeur    Cathedral, in that same winter       when junge leute filled Bavarian

beer-gardens, ten years before    Adorno proclaimed that there       could be no art after Auschwitz,

Brassai captured his flawless    image. Through the tunnel       formed by the parting trees,

battalions of lamp-posts advance    and retreat in the morning mizzle,       clamp chain-link handrails hard into sunwashed cobbles. In less    than a year, the corpseless heads       on Nanking’s walls will coalesce

with Guernica’s ruined heart, mal    du siècle will become Weltschmerz,       and the irresistible symmetry of a million clacking bootheels    will deafen half a continent.       The red brush never dries - adagio leads finally to fugue,    haiku to satori, and the image       fixed in silver to remembering.

The House of Atreus

Bella Li

In the parlour

the shades are drawn.

There is dust on the furniture,

heavy ticking of a grandfather clock,

and in some corner of the house—

a recurring, persistent terror.

We sip our brandy on

green velvet couches

quietly, respectfully,

in the hope that

the malice of the dead

might yet be stirred.

And why not? There is something

hidden in the darkness

that recalls those distant

afternoons—the heat,

the breathless windless waters

sun-stunned to a dead calm.

That fitful summer

we saw the Aegean blossom

with corpses and shattered wrecks—

beautifully still, unbroken blue—

then swallow them whole,

leaving only the scent

of disaster in the air.

What earth breeds is appalling—

the ships that sailed for Troy

brought back dim memories of feasts;

dull sheen of a family curse

consigned to their hulls.

Crewless, drifting,

we sank them one by one.

It would have been easy

to descend into madness

but here the sea

teems thick with crimson—

who will ever drain it dry?

Better to forget treachery,

bury the rest—

these vaults will hold them all.

Only sometimes we hear

the faint cry of a mother

trapped in the walls.

She moves

clutching her fistful of Kings

from basement to first floor

in search of lost children.

While upstairs we sit

in perfect silence—

polite, well-bred puppets

watching for that

promised glint of steel,

that subtle poison

brooding in the blood.

Whoever survives the night

dies at first light.

Hercules Strangles the Nemean Lion

Max Mitchell

Parallel geometric planes, each plane a hologram of an ocean’s surface, the holographic slices of ocean stacked vertically like the storeys of a building, in infinite series. All motion here is frictionless, inarticulate: you can glide over the surface of a plane until the shadowed horizon recedes or pass through each hologram to the ocean above or the one below. The oceans have a cloudy translucence in which phosphorescent filaments of blue, white, gold, red, orange, and violet glint like the scales of fish. Often the iridescence synchronises across whole tracts of water and you can make out proto-forms in the glimmering churn. But look now yonder: islanded by the fluxing swell, a membrane of water is lighting the rude outlines of a landscape, an encoded mathematical memory of events from eons past: irregular spits of pitchy rock forked in the gritty, weedy soil of an olive-hued scrubland beneath a bleached, cancelling sky. Extruding ribcages of mauled oxen sticky with congealed blood and swarming with blue-green flies lie between tufts of wild grass, and a shepherd’s dog is barking dementedly, and bubbles of blood inflate and deflate on the lips of a shepherd boy who is still alive, his eyeballs, brow, and the bridge of his nose torn from his face, and something is loping in the periphery, its mane and head dark umber and slick with blood, and it has been chased twice on horseback and pelted with arrows and stones back to its cave a league distant from the nearest settlement, but it smells the sweat of the livestock on the breeze. His greaves jag into the flesh of his ankles as he pounds uphill, the loose chalky topsoil giving way underfoot and scattering backwards in dusty cones. In his right hand is a truculent wooden club honeycombed with dull nails, the weighted end pointing downwards like a third leg or a pendulum, which he periodically drives into the earth whilst climbing to keep his footing. Nearing the crescent lips of the cave mouth he relaxes his pace, uncords his vast shield from his back, and rights his club. The entranceway is hooded like a monk’s cowl, and he sidles through it while his eyes adjust to the grainy darkness inside. Amid the black organs of the chamber he sees two golden zeroes hanging in mid-air, and with its long, shadowed, rutted face it is as though the luminescent eyes of some minor rustic deity are peering from behind a carved wooden mask. He rushes it with his shield, hoping to lame its front legs with his club before it can react, but it is lying atop a flat-topped, chest-high rock, and as he raises his club it throws itself at his head and lands on his shield and clings to his shield’s top edge with one paw and with the other paw swipes at the arm holding the club, and ribbons of flesh open on his forearm and he drops the club, and its claws lacerate his bowed neck and shoulders as he carries it clinging to his shield like some monstrous baby and slams its back against the cave wall. With its limbs pinned and splayed under the bronze oval, he starts thumping its head with the bottom of his fist like a shipwright nailing planks into a ship’s hull. After twenty blows it writhes free and with its bloodied head makes for the white pool of the cave mouth. He throws aside his shield and jumps on its back. He reaches around the soft underside of its huge neck with his right arm and with his left hand palming the back of his right hand grapples it into a chokehold, and it struggles demonically, but null its face and claws it is nothing but blind, striated ropes of muscle pulling on rods of bone, and his face is pressed into its matted mane and he breathes the hot musk of its body as its life ebbs away.

Xanthos

funerary plaque

We made our houses graves. And our graves are homes to us Our houses burned down And our graves were looted We climbed to the summits We went deep into the earth We were drenched in water They came and got us They burned and destroyed us They plundered us And we, For the sake of our mothers, Our women, And for the sake of our dead, And we, In the name of our honour, And our freedom, We, the people of this land, Who sought mass suicide We left a fire behind us, Never to die out.

Twice in its history, the city & its citizens immolated themselves rather than submit to the conqueror. Firstly, when the Persians invaded, and then again when Brutus besieged the city, in 42 BCE.

Today's poem:

The Portrait

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Where the rocks of Ardnamurchan meet the rolling Gaelic Sea

Mairi bheag

Where the rocks of Ardnamurchan meet the rolling Gaelic Sea,

Where the reef-jawed whirlpools gnash their teeth and roar,

There’s a lass whose gaze is seaward, standing in the menhir’s lee

On fair Alba’s ever-westward-facing shore.

She is patient in the gloaming, through the tempests and the gales,

For the mists to lift and Barra to be seen,

For the beating of the galley-oars, the slapping of the sails,

And the sight of Somerled’s royal barquentine.

For her lover is a sailor in the service of the Laird

Whose demesne runs from St Kilda to Goat Fell;

And her memory’s a wishing-store of youthful days they shared,

Of the many yesteryears since their farewell.

On the days when sunshine strokes the shore and calm sea mirrors sky,

She may shade her eyes and touch her beating breast,

For the white wings of a fulmar turn to ship-sails in her eye,

And for one brief moment she is heaven-blessed.

She will wait and wait forever, for the lassie does not know

That the Island Chieftain’s galley’s gilded side

By Atlantic squalls was shattered, and in Cape Wrath’s undertow

Roll her lover's bones, in that relentless tide.

Where the cliffs of Ardnamurchan brave the Minches’ treachery

And the machair grasses whisper we have sinned,

Where the selkies’ siren voices and the wail of the banshee

Sound a distant, sullen pibroch in the wind,

There’s a grey-clad shade a-keening as she joins their ghostly song

With a counterpoint of sigh, and sob, and moan;

And the neebours pull their blankets close, awake the whole night long,

While Sionad Ni’Choinnich walks the cliffs alone.

Oh, the rubha of Ardnamurchan is a finger pointing west,

It’s a lonely place of rock, and sea, and cloud;

There I cross my heart and pray that lonely spirit finds her rest,

May the mist and dewfall be her gentle shroud.

By the fire, in Tobermory, we may drink a warming dram,

And toast all who live in Mull-of-Many-Trees,

But we leave the rubha to Sionad, to the wedder and the ram,

To the selkie-song and its forlorn reprise.

Oh, beware the heart, avoid the love for men who sail away

To the oil-rigs or the ocean fishing-ground;

For the years are short, the sunshine cheap, all wealth spent in a day,

And our death at last all pleasures will confound

Today's poem, by Wislawa Szymborska

“Soldier from the wars returning”

A. E. Housman

Soldier from the wars returning,

Spoiler of the taken town,

Here is ease that asks not earning;

Turn you in and sit you down.

Peace is come and wars are over,

Welcome you and welcome all,

While the charger crops the clover

And his bridle hangs in stall.

Now no more of winters biting,

Filth in trench from fall to spring,

Summers full of sweat and fighting

For the Kesar or the King.

Rest you, charger, rust you, bridle;

Kings and kesars, keep your pay;

Soldier, sit you down and idle

At the inn of night for aye.

Avignon

John Buchan

Hearts to break but nane to sell, Gear to tine but nane to hain;— We maun dree a weary spell Ere our lad comes back again. I walk abroad on winter days, When storms have stripped the wide champaign, For northern winds have norland ways, And scents of Badenoch haunt the rain. And by the lipping river path, When in the fog the Rhone runs grey, I see the heather of the Strath, And watch the salmon leap in Spey. The hills are feathered with young trees, I set them for my children's boys. I made a garden deep in ease, A pleasance for my lady's joys. Strangers have heired them. Long ago She died,—kind fortune thus to die; And my one son by Beauly flow Gave up the soul that could not lie. Old, elbow-worn, and pinched I bide The final toll the gods may take. The laggard years have quenched my pride; They cannot kill the ache, the ache. Weep not the dead, for they have sleep Who lie at home: but ah, for me In the deep grave my heart will weep With longing for my lost countrie. Hearts to break but nane to sell, Gear to tine but nane to hain;— We maun dree a weary spell Ere our lad comes back again.

The Eve of Waterloo

Byron

There was a sound of revelry by night, And Belgium’s Capital had gathered then Her Beauty and her Chivalry, and bright The lamps shone o’er fair women and brave men ; A thousand hearts beat happily; and when Music arose with its voluptuous swell, Soft eyes looked love to eyes which spake again, And all went merry as a marriage bell; But hush! hark! a deep sound strikes like a rising knell!

Did ye not hear it?—No; ’twas but the wind, Or the car rattling o’er the stony street ; On with the dance! let joy be unconfined ; No sleep till morn, when Youth and Pleasure meet To chase the glowing Hours with flying feet— But hark!—that heavy sound breaks in once more, As if the clouds its echo would repeat; And nearer, clearer, deadlier than before! Arm! Arm! it is—it is—the cannon’s opening roar!

Within a windowed niche of that high hall Sate Brunswick’s fated chieftain; he did hear That sound the first amidst the festival, And caught its tone with Death’s prophetic ear; And when they smiled because he deemed it near, His heart more truly knew that peal too well Which stretched his father on a bloody bier, And roused the vengeance blood alone could quell; He rushed into the field, and, foremost fighting, fell.

Ah! then and there was hurrying to and fro, And gathering tears, and tremblings of distress, And cheeks all pale, which but an hour ago Blushed at the praise of their own loveliness; And there were sudden partings, such as press The life from out young hearts, and choking sighs Which ne’er might be repeated; who could guess If ever more should meet those mutual eyes, Since upon night so sweet such awful morn could rise!

And there was mounting in hot haste: the steed, The mustering squadron, and the clattering car, Went pouring forward with impetuous speed, And swiftly forming in the ranks of war; And the deep thunder peal on peal afar; And near, the beat of the alarming drum Roused up the soldier ere the morning star; While thronged the citizens with terror dumb, Or whispering, with white lips—‘The foe! They come! they come!’

And wild and high the ‘Cameron’s Gathering’ rose! The war-note of Lochiel, which Albyn’s hills Have heard, and heard, too, have her Saxon foes:— How in the noon of night that pibroch thrills, Savage and shrill! But with the breath which fills Their mountain-pipe, so fill the mountaineers With the fierce native daring which instils The stirring memory of a thousand years, And Evan’s, Donald’s fame rings in each clansman’s ears!

And Ardennes waves above them her green leaves, Dewy with nature’s tear-drops, as they pass, Grieving, if aught inanimate e’er grieves, Over the unreturning brave,—alas! Ere evening to be trodden like the grass Which now beneath them, but above shall grow In its next verdure, when this fiery mass Of living valour, rolling on the foe And burning with high hope, shall moulder cold and low.

Last noon beheld them full of lusty life, Last eve in Beauty’s circle proudly gay, The midnight brought the signal-sound of strife, The morn the marshalling in arms,—the day Battle’s magnificently-stern array! The thunder-clouds close o’er it, which when rent The earth is covered thick with other clay Which her own clay shall cover, heaped and pent, Rider and horse,—friend, foe,—in one red burial blent!

Lot's Wife

Anna Akhmatova

And the just man trailed God's shining agent, over a black mountain, in his giant track, while a restless voice kept harrying his woman: "It's not too late, you can still look back

at the red towers of your native Sodom, the square where once you sang, the spinning-shed, at the empty windows set in the tall house where sons and daughters blessed your marriage-bed."

A single glance: a sudden dart of pain stitching her eyes before she made a sound . . . Her body flaked into transparent salt, and her swift legs rooted to the ground.

Who will grieve for this woman? Does she not seem too insignificant for our concern? Yet in my heart I never will deny her, who suffered death because she chose to turn.

Translated by Stanley Kunitz (with Max Hayward)

In The Whistling Rooms

Şükrü Erbaş

So not to leave you alone even from your grave I rush back home.

In the whistling rooms I talk I talk I talk.

I came from afar, morning dew on my lips Saying don’t be childish you draw back your lips.

Then I raise my eyes, the window’s not there Dead children like eye lashes lined up.

Can you grow ashamed of your sorrow I’m poisoned by the tears I’ve spilled.

it’s too late for us you said once, how will all these children live in this country, the womb of death.

In a village near Antakya, our hearts full of love Surrounded by such blessings who would think of death.

Come, let us go down to the sea In her arms the blue will rock our fears to sleep.

I’m a loneliness for two before your photos One, the one you take with you, the other, the one you leave.

John Anderson, my jo

Robert Burns

John Anderson my jo, John, When we were first acquent; Your locks were like the raven, Your bony brow was brent; But now your brow is beld, John, Your locks are like the snaw; But blessings on your frosty pow, John Anderson my Jo.

John Anderson my jo, John, We clamb the hill the gither; And mony a canty day, John, We’ve had wi’ ane anither: Now we maun totter down, John, And hand in hand we’ll go; And sleep the gither at the foot, John Anderson my Jo.

Today's poem:

The Sarcophagi in Rome

Don Paterson

Love Stronger than Death

Agnes Mary Frances Duclaux

I dreamed my Lady and I were dead

And dust was either heart;

Our bodies in one grave were laid,

Our souls went far apart,

Hers with the saints for aye to dwell

And mine to lie and pine in Hell.

But when my Lady looked for me

And found her quest in vain,

For all that blessed company

She knew nothing but pain.

She cried: “How feigned your praising is!

Your God is love, and love I miss.”

The hills whereon her tear-drops fell

Were white with lily-flowers.

They made the burning caves of Hell

As green as Eden-bowers,

Unloosed my tongue, my fetters broke,

“Praised be love,” I cried and woke.