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Bij Moederdag
Mary Cassat, Young Thomas And His Mother, 1893
Herinnering
Moeder, weet je nog hoe vroeger
Toen ik klein was, wij tesaam
Iedere nacht een liedje, moeder,
Zongen voor het raam?
Moe gespeeld en moe gesprongen
Zat ik op uw schoot en dacht
In mijn nachtgoed, kleine jongen,
Aan 't geheim der nacht.
Want als wij dan gingen zingen
't Oude altijd-eendre lied
Hoe God alle, alle dingen
Die wij doen, beziet,
Hoe zijn eeuwige, grote wondren
Steeds beschermend om ons zijn
- Nimmer zong je moeder, zonder 'n
Beven dat refrein - ,
Dan zag ik de sterren flonkren
En de maan door de wolken gaan,
D' Oude nacht met wijze, donkre
Ogen voor me staan.
Martinus Nijhoff (20 april 1894 26 januari 1953)
De Vlaamse dichter Jan Lauwereyns werd geboren op 13 mei 1969 in Antwerpen. Zie ook alle tags voor Jan Lauwereyns op dit blog.
Wanneer je in slaap valt
Wanneer je in slaap valt,
je hardgekookte lichaam nog
op pijnlijke prikkels reageert,
van houding verandert,
wanneer je halsbrekende rechterarm te lang
onder mijn hoofdkussen gekneld zit,
slaap ik,
Type-3-communicatie verstoord.
Wat het gevolg kan zijn
van over gloeiende kooltjes lopen
in plaats van één te worden
met het ochtendgloren.
Gedicht/Niet-gedicht deel 1
Bij Rainer Maria Rilke's "Lied vom Meer"
Oeroud gewaai van zee, zeewind bij nacht
Jij gaat naar geen die waakt of zien zal hoe
Oeroud gewaai van zee, zeewind bij nacht
Jou te weerstaan! Oeroud gewaai van zee
Jij gaat naar geen die waakt of zien zal hoe
Versteend is van louter ruimte rijten
Jou te weerstaan! Oeroud gewaai van zee
Zo gevoel je vijgboom, hoog in maanschijn
Versteend is van louter ruimte rijzen.
Zo gevoel je vijgboom, hoog in maanschijn.
Jan Lauwereyns (Antwerpen, 13 mei 1969)
De Vlaamse dichter Reinout Verbeke werd geboren op 13 mei 1981 in Roeselare. Zie ook alle tags voor Reinout Verbeke op dit blog.
Nanomeisje
Een meisje tot de min negende macht
is mijn liefde aan het meten. Niet mijn oogopslag
de trilling in mijn stem, maar stuwing van bloed
aantallen eiwitten per kubieke centimeter
Een meisje op een miljardste meter. Meisje molecuul
van goudpartikels en van kwarts. Ik heb haar nodig lief
Zij mijn vreemde lichaam, ik haar voorspelbaarheid
Ben ik haar proefdier
en dubbelblind Oidipous gelijk?
Ik wil het haar vragen
maar alleen van meetbaarheid
wil ze spreken, zoals:
stijgt de liefde voor het heengaan?
Reinout Verbeke (Roeselare, 13 mei 1981)
De Engelse schrijver Bruce Chatwin werd op 13 mei 1940 in Sheffield geboren. Zie ook alle tags voor Bruce Chatwin op dit blog.
Uit: In Patagonia
Never in my life have I wanted anything as I wanted that piece of skin. My grandmothersaid I should have it one day, perhaps. And when she died I said: Now I can have thepiece of brontosaurus, but my mother said: Oh, that thing! Im afraid we threw it away.
At school they laughed at the story of the brontosaurus. The science master said Idmixed it up with the Siberian mammoth. He told the class how Russian scientists haddined off deep-frozen mammoth and told me not to tell lies. Besides, he said,brontosauruses were reptiles. They had no hair, but scaly armoured hide. And he showedus an artists impression of the beastso different from that of my imaginationgrey-green, with a tiny head and gigantic switchback of vertebrae, placidly eating weed in alake. I was ashamed of my hairy brontosaurus, but I knew it was not a mammoth.It took some years to sort the story out. Charley Milwards animal was not a brontosaurus,but the mylodon or Giant Sloth. He never found a whole specimen, or even a wholeskeleton, but some skin and bones, preserved by the cold, dryness and salt, in a cave onLast Hope Sound in Chilean Patagonia. He sent the collection to England and sold it to theBritish Museum. This version was less romantic but had the merit of being true.My interest in Patagonia survived the loss of the skin; for the Cold War woke in me apassion for geography. In the late 1940s the Cannibal of the Kremlin shadowed our lives;you could mistake his moustaches for teeth. We listened to lectures about the war he wasplanning. We watched the civil defence lecturer ring the cities of Europe to show thezones of total and partial destruction. We saw the zones bump one against the otherleaving no space in between. The instructor wore khaki shorts. His knees were white andknobbly, and we saw it was hopeless. The war was coming and there was nothing wecould do.Next, we read about the cobalt bomb, which was worse than the hydrogen bomb andcould smother the planet in an endless chain reaction.I knew the colour cobalt from my great-aunts paintbox. almostentirely religious. She did lots of St Sebastians, always against a cobalt-blue background,always the same beautiful young man, stuck through and through with arrows and still onhis feet.So I pictured the cobalt bomb as a dense blue cloudbank, spitting tongues of flame at theedges.
Bruce Chatwin (13 mei 1940 18 januari 1989)
In 1984
De Britse schrijfster Daphne du Maurier werd geboren in Londen op 13 mei 1907. Zie ook alle tags voor Daphne du Maurier op dit blog.
Uit: Rebecca
The drive was a ribbon now, a thread of its former self, with gravel surface gone, and choked with grass and moss. The trees had thrown out low branches, making an impediment to progress; the gnarled roots looked like skeleton claws. Scattered here and again amongst this jungle growth I would recognize shrubs that had been landmarks in our time, things of culture and grace, hydrangeas whose blue heads had been famous. No hand had checked their progress, and they had gone native now, rearing to monster height without a bloom, black and ugly as the nameless parasites that grew beside them. On and on, now east now west, wound the poor thread that once had been our drive. Sometimes I thought it lost, but it appeared again, beneath a fallen tree perhaps, or struggling on the other side of a muddied ditch created by the winter rains. I had not thought the way so long. Surely the miles had multiplied, even as the trees had done, and this path led but to a labyrinth, some choked wilderness, and not to the house at all. I came upon it suddenly; the approach masked by the unnatural growth of a vast shrub that spread in all directions, and I stood, my heart thumping in my breast, the strange prick of tears behind my eyes. There was Manderley, our Manderley, secretive and silent as it had always been, the grey stone shining in the moonlight of my dream, the mullioned windows reflecting the green lawns and the terrace. Time could not wreck the perfect symmetry of those walls, nor the site itself, a jewel in the hollow of a hand. The terrace sloped to the lawns, and the lawns stretched to the sea, and turning I could see the sheet of silver placid under the moon, like a lake undisturbed by wind or storm.
Daphne du Maurier (13 mei 1907 19 april 1989)
De Schotse dichteres Kathleen Jamie werd geboren op 13 mei 1962 in Currie, Edinburgh. Zie ook alle tags voor Kathleen Jamie op dit blog.
Skeins o Geese
Skeins o geese write a word
across the sky. A word
struck lik a gong
afore I wis born.
The sky moves like cattle, lowin.
I'm as empty as stane, as fields
ploo'd but not sown, naked
as blin as a stane. Blin
tae the word, blin
tae a' soon but geese ca'ing.
Wire twists lik archaic script
roon a gate. The barbs
sign tae the wind as though
it was deef. The word whustles
ower high for ma senses. Awa.
No lik the past which lies
strewn aroun. Nor sudden death.
No lik a lover we'll ken
an connect wi forever.
The hem of its goin drags across the sky.
Whit dae birds write on the dusk?
A word niver spoken or read.
The skeins turn hame,
on the wind's dumb moan, a soun,
maybe human, bereft.
Kathleen Jamie (Currie, 13 mei 1962)
De Amerikaanse schrijver Armistead Jones Maupin Jr. werd geboren op 13 mei 1944 in Washington. Zie ook alle tags voor Armistead Maupin op dit blog.
Uit: The Night Listener
I don't want that to happen when I talk about Pete. I will try to lay out the facts exactly as I remember them, one after the other, as unbejewelled as possible. I owe that much to my son, to both of us, really, and to the unscripted intrigues of everyday life. But, most of all, I want you to believe this. And that will be hard enough as it is.
I wasn't myself the afternoon that Pete appeared. Or maybe more severely myself than I had ever been. Jess had left me two weeks earlier, and I was raw with the realization of it. I have never known sorrow to be such a physical thing, an actual presence that weighed on my limbs like something wet and woolen. I couldn't write or wouldn't, at any rate unable to face the grueling self-scrutiny that fiction demands. I would feed the dog, walk him, check the mail, feed myself, do the dishes, lie on the sofa for hours watching television.
Everything seemed pertinent to my pain. The silliest coffee commercial could plunge me into profound Chekhovian gloom. There was no way around the self-doubt or the panic or the anger. My marriage had exploded in midair, strewing itself across the landscape, and all I could do was search the rubble for some sign of a probable cause, some telltale black box.
Armistead Maupin ( Washington, 13 mei 1944)
Zie voor nog meer schrijvers van de 13 mei ook mijn blog van 13 mei 2011 deel 1 en eveneens deel 2.
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