Berichten van 22 maart 2025 tot 23 maart 2025

De Amerikaanse dichter Gary Joseph Whitehead werd geboren op 23 maart 1965 in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. Zie alle tags voor Gary Whitehead op dit blog.

Making Love in the Kitchen

We do it with knives in hand,
blue tongues licking the bottoms of pots,
steam fogging the windows from hearts
of artichokes being strained.

Hearts are made to be carved
out, cooked soft, slathered with butter,
fork-stabbed and lifted to another’s
open mouth. We say we are starved,

as though we were doing this alone,
lonely as an onion in its skin,
say we are starving when what we mean
is that we want to postpone

the inevitable, which is inedible,
however we dice
it, and so we make—as it consumes us—
this love we call a meal.

Lot’s Wife

Sometime soon after the embers cooled,
after dust clouds settled, after the last strings
of smoke, hoisted by desert breezes, cleared the air,

they must have come, people of those three cities
remaining, to pick among the charred bones,
the rubble of what was once temple and house,

stable and brothel; to kick at stones; to tug
at handles of buckets, blades of shovels and spades.
Later, raising ash plumes in the scorched plain,

cloths at their mouths and noses, eyes burning,
neither fearful nor repentant but full of wonder,
full of the scavenger’s overabundant hope,

they would have found her—even as now
some men encounter the woman of their dreams
(beauty of the movie screen, princess they capture

with a camera’s flash, girl whose finger brushes theirs
when she takes their card at the market register)—
found her, that is, not as the person she was

but as whom they needed her to be, and, man or woman,
each of them would have wanted a piece of her.
Standing in that wasted landscape,

she must have seemed a statue erected there
as a tribute to human frailty, white, crystallized,
her head turned back as if in longing to be the girl

she had been in the city she had known.
And they must have stood there, as we do,
a bit awestruck, taking her in for a time,

and then, with chisel and knife, spike and buckle,
chipped at her violently and stuffed their leathern
pouches full of her common salt, salt with which

to season for a while their meat, their daily bread.

Vol bloed en irrelevant

Als het geheugen vingers had, zou het
elke vergeetbare dag die we deelden uit me wringen.

De double date-rit naar Plum Island
in de stromende regen, ramen beslagen

als doucheglas. Ik zou nu naar elke
lach van je luisteren. Die zondagochtend,

maart, een mislukte kruiswoordpuzzel herstellend
terwijl onze kleren rolden in het mechanische liedje

van de wasserette. Welk shirt
droeg je? Hoe lang was je haar toen?

Een jaar in retrospectief is een afgevinkte lijst
geschreven in verdwijnende inkt en vastgeklemd

in een strakke vuist. Shampoo opruimen. Vuilnis
buiten zetten. Sluitring in gootsteen vervangen.

Hoeveel uur hebben we samen doorgebracht?
Als we de kans kregen om het opnieuw te doen, zouden we

het dan op dezelfde manier doen? En als het geheugen
vingers had en die vingers een

vuist vormden, zouden onze tijden dan schitteren,
rood als robijnen, vol bloed en irrelevant?

Vertaald door Frans Roumen

Gary Whitehead (Pawtucket, 23 maart 1965)

Zie voor nog meer schrijvers van de 23^e maart ook mijn blog van 23 maart 2020 en eveneens mijn blog van 23 maart 2019 en ook mijn blog van 23 maart 2015 deel 1 en eveneens mijn blog van 23 maart 2014 deel 1 en ook deel 2.

De Amerikaanse dichter en schrijver Billy Collins werd geboren in New York op 22 maart 1941. Zie ook alle tags voor Billy Collins op dit blog.

Canada

I am writing this on a strip of white birch bark
that I cut from a tree with a penknife.
There is no other way to express adequately
the immensity of the clouds that are passing over the farms
and wooded lakes of Ontario and the endless visibility
that hands you the horizon on a platter.

I am also writing this in a wooden canoe,
a point of balance in the middle of Lake Couchiching,
resting the birch bark against my knees.
I can feel the sun’s hands on my bare back,
but I am thinking of winter,
snow piled up in all the provinces
and the solemnity of the long grain-ships
that pass the cold months moored at Owen Sound.

O Canada, as the anthem goes,
scene of my boyhood summers,
you are the pack of Sweet Caporals on the table,
you are the dove-soft train whistle in the night,
you are the empty chair at the end of an empty dock.
You are the shelves of books in a lakeside cottage:
Gift from the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh,
A Child’s Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson,
Anne of Avonlea by L. M. Montgomery,
So You’re Going to Paris! by Clara E. Laughlin,
and Peril Over the Airport, one
of the Vicky Barr Flight Stewardess series
by Helen Wills whom some will remember
as the author of the Cherry Ames Nurse stories.
What has become of the languorous girls
who would pass the long limp summer evenings reading
Cherry Ames, Student Nurse, Cherry Ames, Senior Nurse,
Cherry Ames, Chief Nurse, and Cherry Ames, Flight Nurse?
Where are they now, the ones who shared her adventures
as a veterans’ nurse, private duty nurse, visiting nurse,
cruise nurse, night supervisor, mountaineer nurse,
dude ranch nurse (there is little she has not done),
rest home nurse, department store nurse,
boarding school nurse, and country doctor’s nurse?

O Canada, I have not forgotten you,
and as I kneel in my canoe, beholding this vision
of a bookcase, I pray that I remain in your vast,
polar, North American memory.
You are the paddle, the snowshoe, the cabin in the pines.
You are Jean de Brébeuf with his martyr’s necklace of hatchet heads.
You are the moose in the clearing and the moosehead on the wall.
You are the rapids, the propeller, the kerosene lamp.
You are the dust that coats the roadside berries.
But not only that.
You are the two boys with pails walking along that road,
and one of them, the taller one minus the straw hat, is me.

BOOKS

From the heart of this dark, evacuated campus
I can hear the library humming in the night,
an immense choir of authors muttering inside their books
along the unlit, alphabetical shelves,
Giovanni Pontano next to Pope, Dumas next to his son,
each one stitched into his own private coat,
together forming a low, gigantic chord of language.

I picture a figure in the act of reading,
shoes on a desk, head tilted into the wind of a book,
a man in two worlds, holding the rope of his tie
as the suicide of lovers saturates a page.
or lighting a cigarette in the middle of a theorem.
He moves from paragraph to paragraph
as if touring a house of endless, panelled rooms.

I hear the voice of my mother reading to me
from a chair facing the bed, books about horses and dogs,
and inside her voice lie other distant sounds,
the horrors of a stable ablaze in the night,
a bark that is moving toward the brink of speech.

I watch myself building bookshelves in college,
walls within walls, as rain soaks New England,
or standing in a bookstore in a trench coat.

I see all of us reading ourselves away from ourselves,
straining in circles of light to find more light
until the line of words becomes a trail of crumbs
that we follow across a page of fresh snow;

when evening is shadowing the forest,
small brown birds flutter down to consume them
and we have to listen hard to hear the voices
of the boy and his sister receding into the perilous woods.

Introductie tot poëzie

Ik vraag ze een gedicht te nemen
en tegen het licht te houden
als een kleurendia

of een oor te drukken tegen zijn omhulsel.

Ik zeg laat een muis vallen in een gedicht
en kijk hoe hij tracht zijn weg naar buiten te vinden,

of loop de kamer van het gedicht binnen
en tast de wanden af naar een lichtknopje.

Ik wil dat ze waterskiën
over het oppervlak van het gedicht
wuivend naar de naam van de schrijver aan de wal.

Maar alles wat zij willen
is het gedicht met touw aan een stoel vastbinden
om er een bekentenis uit te martelen.

Zij slaan het met een tuinslang
om te weten te komen wat het bedoelt.

Vertaald door Ron Rijghard

Billy Collins (New York, 22 maart 1941)

Zie voor nog meer schrijvers van de 22^e maart ook mijn blog van 22 maart 2020 en eveneens mijn blog van 22 maart 2019 en ook mijn blog van 22 maart 2016 en mijn blog van 22 maart 2014 deel 1 en eveneens deel 2.