SPAIN AND A MODERNIST JAPAN: KOTARO TAKAMURA & FEDERICO GARCIA LORCA
********************************************************************************

FEDERICO GARCIA LORCA

Sonnet of the sweet complaint 

Don’t let me lose the wondrous sight
of your sculpted eyes, or the way you have
of placing on my cheek at night
the solitary rose of your breath.

I fear being left like a limbless tree
on the shoreline; and even worse
not having for my worm of agony
wood pulp or potter’s clay or flowers.

If you are my buried treasure,
if you are my cross and wet tears,
if I am your dog and you my master,

then don’t let me lose what I’ve won
and adorn the branches of your river
with the leaves of my estranged autumn.

____________

TPB's notes: translated by Paul Archer from Lorca's Soneto de la dulce queja (Sonnets of Dark Love). "The sequence of poems were written in 1935, inspired by Lorca's love affair with Rafael Rodriguez Rapún." - PA

KOTARO TAKAMURA
Late At Night

The moon on this July night,

Look!, shivers with fever among the poplars.

The wafted scent of cyclamen

Whimpers on your lips,
T
he wood, the path, the grass, even the distant streets

Are troubled by a deep sadness

And breathe out a faint white mist like a long sigh.

A young couple walk side by side

Holding hands as they tramp over the black mud,

Invisible devils drinking saké

And the reverberations of the last train thundering into the hills

Seem to jeer at the fate of man.

Quietly your soul begins to spasm,

Your sash of Indian cotton becomes moist with sweat,

Like a Parsi you will yourself to suffer in silence.

Oh my heart, wake up!

Your heart too, wake up!

What's happening to us?

It seems so inexorable, excruciating,

We want to escape and yet

It seems so sweet, hard to leave, unbearable...

If only my heart

Could rise from its sickbed,

Break free from this hashish-like trance!

But everything I see is madly confused,

Even the moon on this July night,

Look!, shivers with fever among the poplars.

It's like an interminable disease!

My heart lies on the grass in a hot-house

Tortured by beautiful poisonous insects,

Oh my heart
Who can you cry out to?

Now that the midnight is in the thrall of silence.

_____________

TPB's notes: translated by Paul Archer from The Chieko Poems by Kotaro Takamura, published in 1941. "The Chieko Poems by Kotaro Takamura, published in 1941, have historical significance as they are regarded as some of the first Japanese poems to successfully break free from the conventional moulds of the haiku or tanka forms and embrace a free verse form where neither the content, vocabulary and expressions or syllabic count was fixed and formalised. " - Paul Archer

 JOHN PEPPER CLARK, ABU-L-QASIM Al-SHABBI
**************************************************************


J. P. Clark

Ibadan
  Ibadan
running splash of rust
and gold-flung and scattered
among seven hills like broken
china in the sun.

__________

TPB's notes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._P._Clark

ABU-L-QASIM Al-SHABBI 

Beautiful Tunisia
  

I do not weep because night
is a tyrant
nor because destruction reigns
in the countryside.
I weep instead for the heavy calamity
now afflicting us
without relief.
Whenever a leader rises in the country,
vigorous with reform,
yearning to awaken his people,
they garb him in a shirt that curbs his intent.
They stifle his heavenly voice
and murder his music.
Never receptive, they prefer to follow
the ways of tyranny and coercion,
because those are the roads they know.
This is what happens to ones who are sincere!
Death shots are aimed at them easily.
Lo! Calamities have taken hold of us,
they have annihilated our land.

Beautiful Tunisia! I ride the crest of the waves
in my love for you,
My love for you is my covenant -
I have known its bittersweet taste
I'll never yield to the wayward winds
even if I should die,
even if I lose my youth.
I'll never yield, even if they spill
my blood.
The blood of lovers is always game for spilling.
The days, no matter how long,
will show you how true my love is,
will speel out my loyalty in a clear voice.
This is the age of darkness, but I've seen
morning rising behind it.
No matter what time has done to my people's
glory, life will spread your glorious
mantle once again.

__________

TPB's notes: Author: Abu-L-Qasim Al-Shabbi | Songs of Life | 1909-1934. Translated by Lena Jayyusi and Naomi Shihab Nye

TWO POEMS ON EVIDENCE AND DOUBT

************************************************** 

ODIA OFEIMUN
I am a writer

(Exactly ten years after the British High Commission denied me a visa to enjoy a facility provided by the British Council to see the London Book Fair, and then relented, only for General Abacha's goons to seize my passport, my visa application was rejected again, this time, with a sticker on my passport, which says "he claims to be a writer"…)

I do not claim to be, I am a writer
as my passport insists
across decades, and still counting,
drawing humus from Year Twelve
when school bells added my name
to the throng gambolling along
with the Pied Piper of Hamelin
and, the Ancient Mariner
whose magic, and the bamboo flutes
of Martin Carter in Guyana jail,
took me by hand to know Ogun,
when Okigbo's road was famished.

I do not claim to be, I am a writer
as the crow flies, thrillingly sure
though the syllabus of errors
at the British High Commission
may set no column for my stripe
after mourned deaths of the mother
my waify poems at eighteen
elevate siblings at the WAEC
stocking ten-legged thesis
on muses who bring the unborn
to quaking life before stamps
hit the pad at the Passport Office.

I do not claim to be, I am a writer
whose trip under African skies
took Sun-dance to Sadler's Well,
queen Elizabeth hall by the Thames,
and fleet street of glancing nods
with poesy of the body's rhythm
rounding the Cape of Good Hope
and toasting five hundred years
above visa-gripe and truth's fibre,
as art for life vouchsafes it,
setting navel closer to navel
to keep fellow-feeling in grace.

I do not claim to be, I am a writer
guerrilla-happy in unhappy times
pacing the common morality
of truth tougher than fear
and blood oaths segmenting worlds
and stalling the muse of spines
whose fist, raised in salute
to commonsense of hearts
to defeat spite and lucre
and the division of spoils
encumbering the earth with visas

I do not claim to be, I am a writer
beyond the prisonhouse of English
in which I wrest my djinns
I've crossed borders into Urdu,
and fished in the dialects of Rilke
world-round to tip my lagoon
in homage to Neruda's Spanish
I've returned gifts to Montale
wherever my English envy
denies a tongue its entry,
I'm happy, beyond mere fashion
For trips that visas can't deny

________ 

TPB's notes: Listen to poet reading poem here: http://badilishapoetry.com/radio/odia-ofeimun/ Top note is poet's own note provided on the badilisha page: (Exactly ten years after the British High Commission denied me a visa to enjoy a facility provided by the British Council to see the London Book Fair, and then relented, only for General Abachaís goons to seize my passport, my visa application was rejected again, this time, with a sticker on my passport, which says "he claims to be a writer"…) To order Odia Ofeimun's book: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3879732-the-poet-lied-and-other-poems

FERNANDOA PESSOA
The Uncollected Poems of Alberto Caeiro

All theories, all poems
Last longer than this flower.
But that's like mist, which is uncomfortable and damp,
And larger than this flower...
The size and lastingness aren't important...
They're only size and lastingness...
What matters is that the flower lasts and has size
(If reality is the true dimension of things)...
Being real is the only true thing in the world.

Does my verse make sense if the universe doesn't make sense?
In geometry does a part exceed the whole?
In biology does the function of the organs
Have more life than the body?

From afar I see a ship go by...
Drift indifferently down the river Tagus.
Indifferent not for paying me no attention,
I don't feel distressed by that...
It's indifferent because it has no sense at all
Outside of the simple nautical fact
Of its going downriver with no reference to anything beyond that...
Downriver toward the reality of the sea.

Truth, untruth, certainty, uncertainty...
That blind man there in the road also knows these words.
I sit on a high step and have placed my hands
On top of my knee which I've crossed over the other.
So then: truth, untruth, certainty, uncertainty, what are they?
The blind man stops in the road,
I remove my hands from the top of my knee.
Truth, untruth, certainty, uncertainty, are they the same?
Something changed in one part of reality – my knees and my hands.
Which science has an understanding of this?
The blind man continues on his way and I make no more gestures.
Already time is not the same, nor people the same, nor anything the same.
Being real is this.

So I pass cleanly to Matter
To restore in its rightful place what mankind has disarranged
For its true purpose wasn't noticed.
I straighten out, like Reality's good housewife,
The curtains in the windows of Sensation
The doormats at the doors of Perception
And sweep the rooms of observation
Cleaning the dust off of simple ideas...
This is my life, from verse to verse.

I take joy in the fields without looking at them.
You ask me why I take joy in them.
Because I take joy in them, I answer.
To take joy in a flower is to be beside it unconsciously
And have a notion of its scent in our vaguest thoughts.
When I look, I don't take joy: I see.
I close my eyes, and my body, that's on the grass,
Belongs completely to the outside of someone who closes their eyes –
Before the firm freshness of the fragrant and uneven earth;
And to some of the indistinct sounds of things that exist,
And only a shadow formed of light pulses gently on my lids,
And only a trace of life is heard.

________ 

TPB's notes: The 1st of today's 'long poem' day - in no particular order.
To be honest, we have not read this poem through-. let us know what you think? 

_________________

NEW AFRICAN VERSE: DAMBUDZO MARECHERA & ISOJE CHOU
******************************************************************************

ISOJE CHOU
The Precision of Living

If we fear owls, it is because they eat those
in their own image. Killer birds however small are natural
enemies of other birds, big and small. I look at
the furniture in my apartment to see instead
the elementary particles. They swirl their intrinsic spin, conspire
my human comforts plotting my ultimate demise
and I who exists congregate mountain of their image is
prey of the gods. I see the gods atomic flee sideways as knife plows
through orange, teeth sink into apple, the congealed leg of a table indifferent to
the constrictions of human heart, the quarrels of human time,
these killer birds, these makers of me, the gods molecular;
the ecstasia of illustrious photons simmer around a bulb
to cause momentary blindness and I lose after all what it means to be
accepted or rejected, tribe or country or not, to have or not have
the absurdities of these fears in the face of the precision of
a crueler joke! With headphones on, I have
walked to your non-sense beauty, I have heard
the terror of fizzing particles the
nonbodies floating in aural waves; I,
who submits this single will
called my body
called my being,
which you shall crush soon enough
as you transform
into new forms,
walking in this borrowed body,
I begin to hear your impatience:
In the middle of a war, the failing warrior heard the following:
With a single fragment of myself I pervade and support the universe.
Life or death,
Antimatter, that brutal article, destroys matter destroys mirrors of itself
Killer atoms perform the origins of an end. The end of problems.
The end of dying. And I reach this place of mind 
Matter devoured antimatter lives on in the insides
Of my head and I dream the night skies electrons
I dream the nearness and the distance
These precisions of living.

___________

TPB's notes: published in Contemporary Africa Poetshttp://www.centreforafricanpoetry.org

DAMBUDZO MARECHERA
I Used To Like Tomatoes

I get tired of the blood
And the coughing
and more blood
I get out of that flat real fast
to some cool quarrelling bar
and talk big to bigger comrades
washing down the blood with Castle an’ Label
shaking hands about Tsitsi bombed to heaven
trying to forget I don’t like cooking in dead people’s
pots and pans
I don’t like wearing and looking smart-arse in dead
people’s shirts an’ pants
(They said yoh mama an’ bra been for you
said these are your inheritance)
I’m soon tight as a drum can’t drink no more
It’s back at the flat on my back
swallowing it all red back hard down
I woke up too tired to break out so bright red a bubble.

__________
TPB's notes: Dambudzo Marechera, Cemetery of Mind, Which of you Bastards is Death?

ISOJE CHOU 

Hell, or A short survey of comments read wide-awake at 3:45am 

i. 

Hunger,
Said one commenter to another 

Is always a way to prolong life

I take the subway whenever I can

Came the original wall poster

LMAO replies another
Lolling in five exclamations

So I think my fb friends, said another

At 3:04, can do simple additions
You’re trying too hard to be

Attractive here, came the response

At 3:05. All my modest life I’ve been

Looking for reaches of time to know

Who I am said a non-sequitor
Maybe I’m trying to manage 

Your expectations, came original poster

Lolling in seven exclamation marks

ii. 

Little twists inserted here and there

Hell is a place allowed its own hounds

From ogun’s unheeding dogs of vexations

Right through trolls of europa’s tribes

A good balance between IQ-EQ-SQ

But the directions are never really clear.

Once death goddess of old norse tribes 

Hell sits today mistress of the lighted 

Screen, chthonic daughter of Looking 

___________
TPB's notes: published in CounterPunch Online 2013-02-15 Replaced an earlier poem at request of the poet. 

DAMBUDZO MARECHERA
Smash, Grab, Run

Let the minutes unleash
The bullets Brixton wishes
Barbed wire is the ivy on my walls
Acrid cordite like mist in autumn
Dissolves the harsh street into pellucid cameos
Think how the striking truncheon outpaces thought
How the burgeoning Molotov cancels discussion
And for just this once in my black British life
Exploded the atoms in me into atoms of power
Let each viewfinder’s instant exorcise
The pictorial myths complacency devises
Each hurtling brick aimed to smash this enchanter’s glass
Aimed to loot the truths for so long packaged in lies
I am the hundreds of putrid meat in English prisons
In derelict houses, in borstals, the millions of condemned meat
Who let the grim minutes unleash their canned grime.

___________
TPB's notes: first published in Dambudzo Marechera, Cemetery of Mind.