by Anthony
Like sundered lute-strings
Reverberate no more
True that time, this dark mirror
Has also turned its back on you forever
Leaving only stars and drifting clouds behind
I look for you
In every dream
Every foggy night or morning
I look for spring and apple trees
Every wisp of breeze stirred up by honey bees
I look for the seashore’s ebb and flow
The seagulls formed from sunlight on the waves
I look for the stories built into the wall
Your forgotten name and mine
If fresh blood could make you fertile
The ripened fruit
On tomorrow’s branches
Would bear my colour
I must admit
That I trembled
In the death-white chilly light
Who wants to be a meteorite
Or a martyr’s ice-cold statue
Watching the unextinguished fire of youth
Pass into another’s hand
Even if doves alight on its shoulder
It can’t feel their bodies’ warmth and breath
They preen their wings
And quickly fly away
I am a man
I need love
I long to pass each tranquil dusk
Under my love’s eyes
Waiting in the cradle’s rocking
For the child’s first cry
On the grass and fallen leaves
On every sincere gaze
I write poems of life
This universal longing
Has now become the whole cost of being a man
I have lied many times
In my life
But I have always honestly kept to
The promise I made as a child
So that the world which cannot tolerate
A child’s heart
Has still not forgiven me
Here I stand
Replacing another, who has been murdered
I have no other choice
And where I fall
Another will stand
A wind rests on my shoulders
Stars glimmer in the wind
Perhaps one day
The sun will become a withered wreath
To hand before
The growing forest of gravestones
Of each unsubmitting fighter
Black crows the night’s tatters
Flock thick around
(1986)
TRANSLATION BY BONNIE S. MCDOUGALL
Wuer Kaixi (b. 1968) was the Chinese student of Uyghur ethnicity who led the human rights protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989. After publicly confronting Premier Li Peng on national television, he was put on China’s ‘most wanted’ list and fled through Hong Kong to France and the United States, where he studied at Harvard University. He now lives in Taiwan, where he works as a political commentator, and continues his endeavours for freedom in China.
A Call
SEAMUS HEANEY (1939–2013)
RICHARD CURTIS
As my father grew older, I noticed that he rarely came close to shedding tears about the sad and serious things in our lives. But if ever telling a tale of something good, some gracious or loving piece of behaviour, tears would always come into his eyes. And I feel myself going that way as I too get older. Sadness somehow I expect. Kindness and love take me by surprise. So I love this poem with its bold and unexpected simple statement of love in the final line.
It also moves me because I have always presumed it is a poem about a friend – and I have failed my friends, mainly, and failed to fulfil the potential of my friendships, allowing the other big things in my life to edge them out. So it’s also very much a poem about my life – and the fact that the author almost says I love you, but doesn’t – well, there’s the sadness in it, after all . . .
A Call
‘Hold on,’ she said, ‘I’ll just run out and get him.
The weather here’s so good, he took the chance
To do a bit of weeding.’
So I saw him
Down on his hands and knees beside the leek rig,
Touching, inspecting, separating one
Stalk from the other, gently pulling up
Everything not tapered, frail and leafless,
Pleased to feel each little weed-root break,
But rueful also . . .
Then found myself listening to
The amplified grave ticking of hall clocks
Where the phone lay unattended in a calm
Of mirror glass and sunstruck pendulums . . .
And found myself then thinking: if it were nowadays,
This is how Death would summon Everyman.
Next thing he spoke and I nearly said I loved him.
(c. 1987)
The screenwriter and director Richard Curtis (b. 1956) is best known for such romantic comedy films as Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994), Notting Hill (1999), Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001), Love Actually (2003) and About Time (2013), as well as the TV series Blackadder and Mr. Bean. He is also the cofounder of the British charity Comic Relief.
Extract from ‘Eastern War Time’
ADRIENNE RICH (1929–2012)
ANISH KAPOOR
This poem describes the atrocities of war from the position of an American girl who remains ‘ignorantly Jewish’. Rich tangles the reader between identification and innocence, and suggests that memory, even our sense of humanity, can be confused by trauma, ‘Memory says: want to do right? Don’t count on me.’ Reading this poem jogs a sense of the indirect guilt we feel when we are faced with the plight of humanity and our own inability or unwillingness to act. In an extraordinary political description of empathy and compassion, Rich imagines ‘I’m a field with corners left for the landless.’
We are called to stand alongside the poet and dream of ‘world revolution’, and invited to ‘stand on the road to Ramallah with naked face.’ The incantation ‘I’m a corpse dredged from a canal in Berlin’ makes me and my body the field of action. I can’t read these lines without tears in my eyes. What do I sell when ‘I’m the woman who sells for a boat ticket’, when ‘I’m a woman bargaining for a chicken’? The fragility of the individual is present as victim and perpetrator – what is right and wrong in the midst of desperation, when ‘I’m accused of child – death’? Rich makes us fully present – ‘I am standing here in your poem’. Each one of us is not innocent but ‘unsatisfied / lifting my smoky mirror’. This most political of poems is deeply intimate and gives us no escape from the humanity of suffering and loss.
Eastern War Time
10
Memory says: Want to do right? Don’t count on me.
I’m a canal in Europe where bodies are floating
I’m a mass grave I’m the life that returns
I’m a table set with room for the Stranger
I’m a field with corners left for the landless
I’m accused of child-death of drinking blood
I’m a man-child praising God he’s a man
I’m a woman bargaining for a chicken
I’m a woman who sells for a boat ticket
I’m a family dispersed between night and fog
I’m an immigrant tailor who says A coat
is not a piece of cloth only I sway
in the learnings of the master-mystics
I have dreamed of Zion. I’ve dreamed of world revolution
I have dreamed my children could live at last like others
I have walked the children of others through ranks of hatred
I’m a corpse dredged from a canal in Berlin
a river in Mississippi. I’m a woman standing
with other women dressed in black
on the streets of Haifa, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem
there is spit on my sleeve there are phonecalls in the night
I am
a woman standing in line for gasmasks
I stand on a road in Ramallah with naked face listening
I am standing here in your poem unsatisfied
lifting my smoky mirror
(1989–1990)
The Indian-born British sculptor Anish Kapoor (b. 1954) represented Britain at the 1990 Venice Biennale and won the Turner Prize the following year. His work is now represented in major collections all over the world. Major public works include Cloud Gate in Chicago’s Millennium Park, Sky Mirror (New York 2006, London 2010), Orbit (2012 London Olympic Games) and a granite monument in New York’s Hanover Square to commemorate the British victims of 11 September 2001.
It Is Here (for A)
HAROLD PINTER (1930–2008)
NEIL LABUTE
When you think of ‘warm and fuzzy’, I can’t imagine that Harold Pinter would be the first writer to come to mind (and I don’t suppose that I would be in the top ten, either), but that might’ve been before reading a few of the poems he wrote to his beloved Antonia Fraser.
In his lovely and deceptively simple verses that make up ‘It Is Here (for A)’, Pinter reveals yearning, fear and desire in a way that would make his more romantic predecessors tear up and blubber away (if you can read the line ‘it was the breath we took when we first met’ without your eyes misting over, then you’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din).
I admire the strength, the muscle, the menace of Pinter’s language in his plays and screenplays but a poem like this – written as a memory about the time when he and Lady Antonia first met (and her own favourite poem of his) – makes me love him as the very human creature that he was. Flawed, brilliant, irascible, but gifted with a huge and feeling heart.
This poem makes me cry and makes me want to be a better man – it also moves me for very special reasons as well, and that is all you can ever ask of a few words artfully arranged on an empty slip of paper.
It Is Here (for A)
What sound was that?
I turn away, into the shaking room.
What was that sound that came in on the dark?
What is this maze of light it leaves us in?
What is this stance we take,
To turn away and then turn back?
What did we hear?
It was the breath
we took when we first met.
Listen. It is here.
(1990)
The film director, screenwriter and playwright Neil LaBute (b. 1963) first came to prominence with In the Company of Men (1997). His subsequent credits include writing and directing Your Friends and Neighbors (1998), The Shape of Things (2003) and Some Velvet Morning (2013) as well as such plays as The Mercy Seat (2002), Fat Pig (2005), reasons to be pretty (2008) and In a Forest Dark and Deep (2011). He is also the author of the short story collection Seconds of Pleasure (2004).
For Andrew Wood
JAMES FENTON (1949– )
DAVID REMNICK
When I was younger I used to read a great deal of contemporary American and English poetry. I still do. But I also used to go to readings, which I no longer have as much time for. Ginsberg, Snyder, Levertov, Robert Hass, Louise Glück . . . The best was Joseph Brodsky, a cross between Akhmatova and the Kol Nidre. Years went by without going to hear more, which is a foolish self-deprivation. I had an excuse, I told myself. Too often poets read in a fashionable lament, humourless or blandly incantatory. But then, about fifteen years ago, I went to hear James Fenton, a favourite of mine, at Columbia University. He was extraordinary. In the Russian way, he knew his work by heart and, as he paced the stage like the caged beast in the Kafka story, he seemed to radiate that language, to exude it rather than read or perform it; the language came up from inside his deepest self. Years went by. Then, on 20 April 2012, I went to a memorial service for Christopher Hitchens at Cooper Union. And, because Hitchens was Hitchens, there were wonderfully ribald anecdotes of two-thirds-true journalistic escapades, well-lubricated evenings of talk and friendship. And then there was Fenton, who stepped to the microphone, all business, but clearly shaken, and recited this poem, a poem that had been published years before in The New York Review of Books. It was not written for Christopher, but it was revived and recited for him, the perfect lament for the lost friend. I think of it, and am shaken by its rhythms, by James’s inimitable voice, every time a friend of mine is lost or in danger of being lost to the thing that consumes us all sooner or later. I couldn’t be more grateful for a work of art, for a sustaining, insistent voice.
For Andrew Wood
What would the dead want from us
Watching from their cave?
Would they have us forever howling?
Would they have us rave
Or disfigure ourselves, or be strangled
Like some ancient emperor’s slave?
None of my dead friends were emperors
With such exorbitant tastes
And none of them were so vengeful
As to have all their friends waste
Waste quite away in sorrow
Disfigured and defaced.
I think the dead would want us
To weep for what they have lost.
I think that our luck in continuing
Is what would affect them most.
But time would find them generous
And less self-engrossed.
And time would find them generous
As they used to be
And what else would they want from us
But an honored place in our memory,
A favorite room, a hallowed chair,
Privilege and celebrity?
And so the dead might cease to grieve
And we might make amends
And there might be a pact between
Dead friends and living friends.
What our dead friends would want from us
Would be such living friends.
(1993)
Formerly Moscow correspondent of the Washington Post, David Remnick (b. 1958) has been editor of The New Yorker since 1998. His six books include the Pulitzer Prize-winning Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire (1993) and The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama (2010).
Not Cancelled Yet
JOHN UPDIKE (1932–2009)
JOSEPH O’NEILL
I first read this poem in the days following the news of John Updike’s death in January 2009, and I had the confused idea that it belonged to the brief, light snowfall of verse that came from him during his final hospitalisation. In fact, he wrote the poem some fifteen years before, at around the age of sixty. He could equally have written it at age twenty or thirty: Updike seems never to have been free of either mortal dread or, to flip the coin, of an intense love of being alive – a love that extends, in this poem, to the bittersweet taste of a postage stamp on the tongue that licks it. Updike’s poems usually bounce off a hard spot in my sensibility – they’re a touch trifling, as he would have happily admitted – but this one is wonderful and terrifying.
Not Cancelled Yet
Some honorary day
if I play my cards right
I might be a postage stamp
but I won’t be there to lick me
and licking is what I liked,
in tasty anticipation of
the long dark slither from the mailbox,
from box to pouch to hand
to bag to box to slot to hand:
that box is best
whose lid slams open as well as shut,
admitting a parcel of daylight,
the green top of a tree,
and a flickering of fingers, letting go.
(1993)
A qualified barrister, who practised in London for ten years while writing his first two novels, the Irish-born, New York-resident Joseph O’Neill (b. 1964) is the author of Netherland, which was named as one of the New York Times’ Ten Best Books of 2008 and won the 2009 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. He has also written a work of nonfiction, Bloo
d-Dark Track: A Family History, as well as literary and cultural criticism, and teaches at Bard College in New York.
Armada
BRIAN PATTEN (1946– )
PAUL BETTANY
I was introduced to Brian Patten’s work at the age of twenty and since then his poems have kept me company. In real life we are twenty-five years apart, but I always meet him in a place where we are both the same age. The love poems he wrote forty years ago saw me through my twenties, and now the poems he wrote in his forties speak to me with an equal resonance.
‘Armada’ is a poem about the death of his mother, but it’s also about the importance of time and the insignificance of the days and weeks and years with which we measure it.
When I read it I usually start crying at the line ‘I kneel beside your bed’ and continue howling until its perfect end. It’s then that I think of my own childhood and my own children, and how ironic and awful it is – and yet right and proper – that they should take my love for granted. That sort of love can only be fully understood in hindsight.
Reading Brian Patten’s poetry does that trick that art should do, which is to sort of adhere you to the surface of the planet, just long enough that you don’t go spinning off into the loneliness of space – ‘somebody else has felt this too,’ you think. And you breathe a little easier.
Armada
Long, long ago
when everything I was told was believable
and the little I knew was less limited than now,
I stretched belly down on the grass beside a pond
and to the far bank launched a child’s armada.
A broken fortress of twigs,
the paper-tissue sails of galleons,
the waterlogged branches of submarines –
all came to ruin and were on flame
in that dusk-red pond.
And you, mother, stood behind me,
impatient to be going,