Fallen Leaves

Mary Cornelia Hartshorne

An Indian Grandmother’s Parable

Many times in my life I have heard the white sages, Who are learned in the knowledge and lore of past ages, Speak of my people with pity, say, “Gone is their hour Of dominion. By the strong wind of progress their power, Like a rose past its brief time of blooming, lies shattered; Like the leaves of the oak tree its people are scattered.” This is the eighty-first autumn since I can remember. Again fall the leaves, born in April and dead by December; Riding the whimsied breeze, zigzagging and whirling, Coming to earth at last and slowly upcurling, Withered and sapless and brown, into discarded fragments, Of what once was life; dry, chattering parchments That crackle and rustle like old women’s laughter When the merciless wind with swift feet coming after Will drive them before him with unsparing lashes ’Til they are crumbled and crushed into forgotten ashes; Crumbled and crushed, and piled deep in the gulches and hollows, Soft bed for the yet softer snow that in winter fast follows But when in the spring the light falling Patter of raindrops persuading, insistently calling, Wakens to life again forces that long months have slumbered, There will come whispering movement, and green things unnumbered Will pierce through the mould with their yellow-green, sun-searching fingers, Fingers—or spear-tips, grown tall, will bud at another year’s breaking, One day when the brooks, manumitted by sunshine, are making Music like gold in the spring of some far generation. And up from the long-withered leaves, from the musty stagnation, Life will climb high to the furthermost leaflets. The bursting of catkins asunder with greed for the sunlight; the thirsting Of twisted brown roots for earth-water; the gradual unfolding Of brilliance and strength in the future, earth’s bosom is holding Today in those scurrying leaves, soon to be crumpled and broken. Let those who have ears hear my word and be still. I have spoken.

From ‘Photograms’

Ahmed Bouanani - translated from French by Emma Ramadan

Our country has no more warriors only timeworn fig trees beaten thoroughly by the thousand winds of our plight. The barefooted angels with pathetic faces at the bottom of our ramparts die with each new light. The scent of childhood is now nowhere to be found no chance of nursery rhymes or sunshowers what happened to the hours of ancient romance our dreamy obsession with Al-Buraq’s powers? Oh that horse-woman with the mane flowing longer than the clouds over our houses crumbling endlessly under our meagre adventures! What days will open hereafter onto our prisons dense plastered with stars and a hundred miles of silence?

I want to convey the blood that is still pooled in the realm of childhood and the thousand seasons cracked stacked with the flesh colour of pale dawns and of images where we endlessly shatter ourselves And cross the threshold of memory through the louvered shutters one sole time one last time in order to keep intact the inhuman eternity where we were those little poorly dressed kings the cruel cowboys and the Comanche without mustangs and unleash the dark storms of androgynous princesses with hands of faded satin all along our white lanes all along our famed legends deprived of impossible fruits and drown in the seven oceans our distress with this damned galaxy that no longer knows how to dream . . .

I want to convey the last poem’s blood with Casablanca’s pinkish blueness with those old photographs that I love the battles we fought seemingly endless

And eradicate the wrinkles on all the faces

And repopulate the rainbows with our laughter

And liberate our children from this middle age our nursery rhymes too once the colour of honey

But I now have no more words and my vocabulary has barely oh barely in my two hands remained

Can we one day name the fruits of the earth

live at home with a human face?

and I compose the poem a silence broken like the tooth of a dog drips in baroque words dressed in the blood of hyenas the night traces the leaves dead on our walls and on our walls shivers a skeletal dream to which are fastened the dead of our Atlantic sea

For us our dead no longer call Our language is kneaded into other woes with stars rancid an offering much too small and false kingdoms rich in violent blows

My coffin awaits me somewhere at the horizon I want it in sandalwood with dreams pinned down like butterflies in the sermon of an adolescence of eternity so brief May my skeleton blossom with the seasons my blood euphoric will flow freely up to the very heart of your solid house and to the shelter of love to devour your Eves wreathed in incurable religions I will be the old earth of Babylon with its gods its satyrs and its legions I will spread in your beds my pallid cyclones and far very far in your shivering regions I will paint my death on a canvas of autumn

It’s an old kingdom of wreckage that can no longer laugh or dream Does it remember the flower turned savage and the poets no longer able to see?

Its minarets like a scar its ageless soldiers dead on their feet and our cries are only murmurs since our god reigns on his knees

With sky and too much silence words like a fire of seed hence we choose for ourselves a different adolescence

It’s a primordial kingdom of gradual death Draped in days we sleep there full of the empty Full indeed?

I am condemned to survive in the midst of a muggy glade where dismally drunk flowers strive for a blissful middle age

My heart sways on the dead branches of trees of a song cruel and so melancholic . . .

May my thoughts far from you carry me toward the city where my future exists

I smooth the unseen new moons a merry-go-round where I wander ceaselessly

I hate the hypocrite paradises you spew your angels have killed all memory

The house of memory has left with the current dead memory will dress me in cinders tamed nights sad like a convent nurture the empty smile of salamanders My ancestors extinguished in a coat of fire have grown tired of opening the doors to our dreams and our dreams locked up in distant cemeteries of a too-brief eternity tear down to the blood their chests we will have to burn the mountains of incense to erase the sky at the root of our rage and our lips sealed with mirages of a former age will spit as they please on the bygone days of a thousand louvered shutters with a wounded gaze

You should buy this because it’s glorious.

Listen/purchase: Shadow by Adam LeBlanc

The Wild Iris

Louise Gluck

At the end of my suffering there was a door.

Hear me out: that which you call death I remember.

Overhead, noises, branches of the pine shifting. Then nothing. The weak sun flickered over the dry surface.

It is terrible to survive as consciousness buried in the dark earth.

Then it was over: that which you fear, being a soul and unable to speak, ending abruptly, the stiff earth bending a little. And what I took to be birds darting in low shrubs.

You who do not remember passage from the other world I tell you I could speak again: whatever returns from oblivion returns to find a voice:

from the centre of my life came a great fountain, deep blue shadows on azure seawater.

Monte Cassino

the cambridge student

The Roman theatre crouches in the mount’s looming shadow: It has stood the test of time. If only the same could be said for Cassino. The abbey stands aloft on the great mountain; I never would have believed its youth.

A shrapnel town, each utility box of a building standing precipitously on the blasted stone terraces That once supported their ancestors. The houses limber up the steep slopes, trying frantically to reach the top. Their movement is frantic, like the array of the men that defended that place.

The men whose names are inscribed on limestone epitaphs Just a few metres from the booming autostrada, In a field that deserves more peace than it has. They say they shall not grow old; yet There is more of the Roman town than the original Cassino.

In my aimless wandering away from the cemetery I am bombarded with solicitudes. Yet I am astonished to discover the river that gushes keenly through the Cassino of today; Its clear blue waters sparkle, caught against emerald thorns of hydrilla. I wince as I dip my hand into the river; it comes straight from the mountain; The Italian high summer never felt so cold. The water is as verdant as nature itself; Nature heals all. If only all could heal nature.

* the men who ‘defended’ that place are not the same men who lie in the Commonwealth War Cemetery. The men in the cemetery were the attackers in the Battle of Monte Cassino.