Birth of the Foal

 Birth of the Foal

By Ferenc Juhász 

translated from the Hungarian by David Wevill


As May was opening the rosebuds,
elder and lilac beginning to bloom,
it was time for the mare to foal.
She’d rest herself, or hobble lazily

after the boy who sang as he led her
to pasture, wading through the meadowflowers.
They wandered back at dusk, bone-tired,
the moon perched on a blue shoulder of sky.

Then the mare lay down,
sweating and trembling, on her straw in the stable.
The drowsy, heavy-bellied cows
surrounded her, waiting, watching, snuffing.

Later, when even the hay slept
and the shaft of the Plough pointed south,
the foal was born. Hours the mare
spent licking the foal with its glue-blind eyes.

And the foal slept at her side,
a heap of feathers ripped from a bed.
Straw never spread as soft as this.
Milk or snow never slept like a foal.

Dawn bounced up in a bright red hat,
waved at the world and skipped away.
Up staggered the foal,
its hooves were jelly-knots of foam.

Then day sniffed its blue nose
through the open stable window, and found them –
the foal nuzzling its mother,
velvet fumbling for her milk.

Then all the trees were talking at once,
chickens scrabbled in the yard,
like golden flowers
envy withered the last stars.


This poem, written by Ferenc Juhász, one of the greatest Hungarian poets, narrates tenderly , yet powerfully, the story of the birth of a foal. Juhasz contextualizes it in such a way that  the birth of the foal achieves a sort of cosmic dimension. The very heavens bless the moment of the foal's birth and dawn celebrates it by gamboling about and waving. The strength of this context is in such details, within a metaphorical framework, which bestow a human kind of consciousness  onto the inanimate. 

The poetic language is challengingly rich and sensuous, yet  at the same time accessible and witty.  Ferenc Juhász transforms a common event-the birth of an animal-into a glorious affirmation of life and thus imparting universal appeal.


Source : Sandor Weores and Ferenc Juhasz - Selected Poems (Penguin Modern European Poets series)

To My Mother

To My Mother

by Mahmoud Darwish

I long for my mother’s bread

My mother’s coffee

Her touch

Childhood memories grow up in me

Day after day

I must be worth my life

At the hour of my death

Worth the tears of my mother.

And if I come back one day

Take me as a veil to your eyelashes

Cover my bones with the grass

Blessed by your footsteps

Bind us together

With a lock of your hair

With a thread that trails from the back of your dress

I might become immortal

Become a God

If I touch the depths of your heart.

If I come back

Use me as wood to feed your fire

As the clothesline on the roof of your house

Without your blessing

I am too weak to stand.

I am old

Give me back the star maps of childhood

So that I

Along with the swallows

Can chart the path

Back to your waiting nest

Happy Mother's day to all the mothers who drive this world burning the fuel of love.

The above one is an utterly beautiful and heart wrenching poem written by the great Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish who died in 2008. His transition was mourned widely in the Arab world.

Darwish was the first Palestinian to receive a state funeral since Yasser Arafat in 2004. “He was the master of the word and wisdom, the symbol who expressed our national feeling, our human constitution, our declaration of independence,” said President Mahmoud Abbas in the funeral speech. His fellow Palestinians embraced his poetry as the voice of their suffering.

Darwish famously penned Arafat’s speech to the United Nations in 1974 when the late Palestinian leader said, “I have come bearing an olive branch and a freedom fighter’s gun. Do not let the olive branch fall from my hand.”

The above poem has been set to music by many singers and has almost become a national anthem of Palestine.

“I must be worth my life
At the hour of my death
Worth the tears of my mother”

That’s what most of us strive to achieve in a deeply subconscious way.

The last stanza (‘give me back the star maps of childhood’) conveys an intense yearning to return to mother's lap and childhood.
The above poem can be interpreted as symbolic address to the homeland also, speaking to a woman but at the same time , in a symbolic subcontext, referring to Palestine, imagined not only as the beloved, but also as the mother to whom all Palestinians want to return.

(Painting : Mother and Child by Picasso)

Great Springtime

Great Springtime 
by Ko Un

Translated by Translations by Brother Anthony of Taizé, David R. McCann and Kevin O’Rourke

Warm east winds blow,
the earth is melting.
It’s a sight to open
the eyes of the blind
Kids are clustering
close like chicks, underground insects
are wriggling restless too.
Just look! The fish rising
from deeper water
are using their backs
to break the ice!
How on earth
Can heaven keep silent?
The wild goose fathers
are leading their broods
away towards the Sungari River.
Now in this land
wonders are happening.
One great springtime is coming!

Born in Kunsan, North Chplla Province, Ko Un is without question the most prolific writer of twentieth-century Korea. He has published numerous collections of poems, gatherings of poems on various subjects, as well as fifteen—or more—volumes in the series Maninbo (Ten thousand lives), dedicated to making a record of every person he has ever met. His novels, notably including Hwapm kypng (The Garland Sutra; 1991), have been best sellers. He has been publishing a long narrative poem on the Korean War and has  published two books of poems about his journeys to North Korea. His translated collection of Zen poems, Mupnya (Whaaat?), was published with an appreciative forward by Allen Ginsberg. Ko Un has also published essays, newspaper columns, and articles at a rate quite impossible to keep up with.

Formerly a Buddhist monk, then an activist leader of Korea’s democratization movement, and then imprisoned for his efforts, Ko Un has worked ceaselessly in bearing witness to the lives of individuals, to Korea’s political and cultural life, and in bringing the realm of literature to its necessary, direct engagement with all that life demands and imposes.

This is a beautiful, celebratory poem heralding the arrival of spring and the zillion seen and unseen flurry of activities taking place in nature. 

ON MY DAUGHTER'S FIRST BIRTHDAY

ON MY DAUGHTER'S FIRST BIRTHDAY

by Po Chu-I

Translated by David Hinton

Finally, after almost forty years of life,
I have a girl. We named her Golden-Bells,

and its been a year since she was born.
Saying nothing, she studies sitting now,

but it seems I'm no sage-master at heart.
I can't get free of this trifling affection:

I know it's only a tangle of appearance,
but however empty, it's bliss to see her.

I'll worry about her dying. Spared that,
I'll worry about finding a good husband.

All those plans to find a mountain home:
I guess they'll wait another fifteen years.

Generally acclaimed as one of China's greatest poets, Po Ch-i (772-846 C.E.) practiced a poetry of everyday human concerns and clear plain-spoken language. His poems are famous for its spiritual depths and reflect both his life-long devotion to Taoist and Ch'an (Zen) Buddhist practice.

This simple poem reflects the mindset of parents. All parents constantly worry about their children, irrespective of their age and gender, and I was pleasantly surprised to note this unease and anxiety, steeped in love, beautifully reflected in this ancient poem of Po Chu-I .

In real life, his only daughter later passed away at the age of three , ominously manifesting his worries.

I do not mind the embrace

I do not mind the embrace

By Taban lo Liyong (Ugandan Poet)

I do not mind the embrace

I do not mind the kiss.

You can in fact do anything with me.

I am already weak-

        the veil is gone

        the hair has tumbled in disarray

        my nipple is turgid

        my private part is already wet—

In fact to leave me in midstream is bad enough.

But it is afterwards—

         when you’ve squeezed your last drop

         when you’re snoring your satisfied head off

         when, as Aristotle says, you've purged your emotion

That my hell begins:

          my curling up like a centipede

          my vulva squeezing and yawning…

          my refusal to see your face again

          my detestation of man for prevailing over me

          my self-hatred for having let myself go

          my self-hatred for having failed myself yet again…

It is after that my torture begins.

Taban Lo Liyong, one of the most stimulating figures in East African writing, was born in Uganda in 1938. He was the first African to receive a Master of Fine Arts degree from the famous Writers Workshop of the University of Iowa. Taban Lo Liyong's poetry bounces with insulting agility across one's prejudices. It doesn't all have to be taken seriously, but the wit stings when it hits.

This segment from a longer poem takes imaginative leap and presents the poet as a woman, sexually unfulfilled, angry with her husband or lover for his deeply unconscious sense of privilege and superiority. Does the male poet recognize himself in the woman’s description of how men are? Perhaps, it reflects the sentiments  and  bottled-up emotions of obedient women in many parts of the world too.

after

after

By Octavio Paz 

Translated by Eliot Weinberger

after chopping off all the arms that reached out to me;
after boarding up all the windows and doors;

after filling all the pits with poisoned water;
after building my house on the rock of no,
inaccessible to flattery and fear;

after cutting off my tongue and eating it;
after hurling handfuls of silence
and monosyllable of scorn at my loves;

after forgetting my name;
and the name of my birthplace;
and the name of my race;

after judging and sentencing myself
to perpetual waiting,
and perpetual loneliness, I heard
against the stones of my dungeon of syllogisms,

the humid, tender, insistent
onset of spring.


Octavio Paz is considered as one of the greatest Latin American Poets of Twentieth Century. A Mexican poet, he was the former Ambassador to India and Nobel Prize Winner for Literature.

The imageries in this poem are guttural, and the violence highlights the lengths we will go to in isolating ourselves. It could be read as a kind of confession and late realization of someone who has inflicted many inner lacerations in life. Our adamancy, unwillingness to accept faults, negation of all hands of help, neglect of one's own voice, wallowing in toxic waters can finally lead to our own perpetual confinement and desolation.

This poem depicts the state of those of us who invite misery and alienation due to our own actions. Very often the sense of humiliation, hurt, shame we experience may be our own doing: the judging and sentencing, the perpetual waiting and lowliness that criticism inflicts. But even after we have forgotten our names and the places of birth, the heart still has the capacity to open again to love.  

When these things occur, when people square off against one another in angry debate, when someone closes down in hurt or discloses a trauma too horrible to imagine, reading this poem can be a restorative act.  Even if we abandon ourselves, lose our hope, and push others away, there is still, within us and around us, the formidable persistence of “spirit”.

The winter has been long and cold. Where are the cracks that you can widen in yourself, to let in the spring? You belong in the sunlight, it insists. The image of spring at the end points to hope, optimism , salvation and possibility to redeem ourselves .

A Wonderful, inspiring  poem!

Autumn Night, Sitting Alone

Autumn Night, Sitting Alone

By Wang Wei

Translated from Chinese by David Hinton

Lamenting this hair of mine, I sit alone
in empty rooms, the second watch close

Mountain fruits falls out there in the rain.
and here in lamplight, field crickets sing.

No one’s ever changed white hair back:
might as well try conjuring yellow gold.

If you want to elude the old-age disease,
There’s only one way: study unborn life.

Alone at night, sitting in an empty hall, the great Chinese poet of Tang Dynasty (701-761) reflects on his state of isolation in the darkness of night, and on his aging marked by the universal, unavoidable life change-black hair turning white. As the temporal emptiness progresses towards the darkest part of the night (In Chinese, the second watch is 9-11 PM) , the poet can sense the decline of his life, He is conscious that what awaits him is death. Ageing, the cycle of life, are inevitable and irreversible; his white hair will never again turn black, just as gold cannot be created, and no elixir will bring back his youth. He has to submit to the ‘law of nature’. This ‘naturalness’ of the cycle of life is heard through the thud of autumn fruit falling from the tree in the silence of the night in the rain, and through the wailing of the crickets under lamp, whose imminent death approaches with every passage of time.

The outdoors and indoors become a continuum that surrounds and forms a dynamic contrast with the sitting poet. Unlike Wang, neither the grasshopper nor the tree nor the fallen fruit are concerned with their own mortality. The grasshopper doesn’t have the time or intelligence to question if it will live through the fall and winter and thus can chirp happily as it moves ever closer to death. Man’s intelligence has lengthened and improved his life, but has also made more evident that our mortality is always beyond our control. The fifth and sixth lines connect man’s inability to reverse the aging process with the inability to perform alchemy; it simply cannot be done.

Rather than being depressed by the inevitable passage of time, Wang Wei asks people to triumph over time’s tyranny. The last line of the poem provides the Buddhist solution to the irreversible process of aging; the only way to triumph over aging and death is to learn and reach non-rebirth.