Poem for 23 August in the Danish poet Klaus Høeck's '1001 POEMS'

        the dog days are now

        over the grass is

changing colour bleached with chlor

        ine and is getting

        ready for the words

of the text the poems are

folding in on themselves it’s

        summer still yet it’s

        already autumn

like a double stop from frantz

        ignaz biber’s ros

        ary sonatas

A poem by the Dutch writer Toon Tellegen

AT A WINDOW

I stand at a window.

I see words coming.

Some words I recognise:

although, red, previously,

nevertheless in its flapping jacket,

truthfulness, imperfect...

Some clamber onto each other’s shoulders.

‘Who are you?’ they shout.

‘Overcast,’ I shout.

‘Heavily or fairly?’ they ask.

‘Slightly,’ I say. ‘Slightly overcast.’

I lower my eyes.

I wish I was glittering

or somewhat

or even more: notwithstanding.

It starts to rain.

Although looks up, her cheeks grow wet.

Far and wide run away.

Darkness falls.

A poem from Lars Gustafsson's latest collection 'On the Use of Fire'

Roach

This was the strange word

that I looked for in my dream

And was quite unable to find.

I woke up

having dreamt of a fish

with red eyes

easy to catch with chewed bread

on a bent pin

So much more sluggish than fair bleak

those warm shorewater’s

indefatigable dancers

                  *

Yes, this dream was full

of beauty and dancing

And no one in the whole world knew

That the roach is called roach.

Another poem by the Danish writer Jeppe Aakjær, later set to music by Aksel Agerby

May Night

When wild geese honk on Walpurgis night

who thinks then of going to rest?

With dew-beaded hat you roam out of sight

through fjordland and woods newly dressed.

Way out there gleams so mighty a star

that all of my eye it now fills;

I’m sure that same star I once saw afar

when I gazed o’er my childhood hills.

And the peewit’s cry is borne on the wind,

though longing’s borne farther away.

How bitterly close one’s heart is confined

when the avocet migrates in May!

There’s trickling in grass and cheeping in moss,

the tree-tops twitch out of their slumber;

from the farthermost cape the scent wafts across

of anemones countless in number.

The lonely young lamb on the hill far beyond

can be heard with its plaintive small baa,

and the frogs all croak from puddle and pond,

as if star now were singing to star.

(1916)

To see what Klaus Høeck does with this poem in his collection 'In Nomine', go to here.

To hear a snatch of Agerby's version, go to here (no. 7)

Workshop poem by the Dutch poet J.C. Bloem - fifth draft

DE NACHTEGALEN

Ik heb van ’t leven vrijwel niets verwacht,

’t Geluk is nu eenmaal niet te achterhalen.

Wat geeft het? – In de koude voorjaarsnacht

Zingen de onsterfelijke nachtegalen.

THE NIGHTINGALES

Of life my expectations have been slight,

Joy’s just a thing to which we go on clinging.

What does it matter? – In the cold spring night

Once more the immortal nightingales are singing.

This is the second Bloem workshop poem. To see the first go to here, and the second here.

Poem by the Swedish poet Hjalmar Gullberg

Jag trodde på en gud

Jag trodde på en gud men han visste det inte,

han fick aldrig veta att jag trodde på honom

ännu många år efter han var död.

Vid ingående förhör med mig om saken

blev jag upplyst om det verkliga förhållandet.

O slocknade stjärnors ljus som når försenat fram

till ögon i natten! Jag har skådat min gud

som han var i sin härlighet före katastrofen.

Han fick aldrig veta att jag trodde på honom

och att jag inte visste han var död.

I believed in a god

I believed in a god but he did not know it;

he never found out that I believed in him

even many years after he was dead.

On close interrogation with me on the matter

I was informed of the actual state of things.

Oh, light of extinguished stars that reaches

delayed the nighttime eye! I have viewed my god

as he was in his glory before the catastrophe.

He never found out that I believed in him

and that I did not know he was dead.

Poem by the Dutch writer René Puthaar

HOMECOMING

(after Mallarmé's 'Brise Marine')

The sailors are silent. Only the heart sings now.

Beneath the keel the deep reef calls, the mast is tall,

A zephyr softly strokes the ship’s deck and its prow;

No seaman’s grave is once more promised by some gale.

By hope so sorely vexed all human senses grow

Contrary now the flag flies from the harbour wall.

Farewell, exotic nature. Lower your anchor,

Steamer, homecoming draws near. See the people wave.

Nothing about the mother and her child has altered,

Nothing still guards from stories the empty page

When morning light pronounces doom on loneliness

And, capable of all questions, pulls up more weeds.

Waylaid the heart fast plummets, but with steely face.

Between the so familiar foam and sky I see

Birds, foolhardy, drunk, though almost home. Home ahead!

The flesh is sad, alas! and all the books are read.

(To see the original poem and Arthur Symon's translation, go to here)

Poem by the Dutch writer Alfred Schaffer

THE PARALLEL UNIVERSE

At that time Superman was known as extremely friendly.

He would greet politely at the breakfast table,

pass the sugar when asked

        and enjoy the breathtaking panorama.

He would play old music when making decisions

and afterwards phone his mother.

Until the night the windows of his birthplace were smashed

his balloon face hung like a boy’s dream

        throughout the town.

He asked: take pity on my situation,

but had to wave his fists

                to keep people’s attention.

He became The Great Absentee. He would sneak in

        and sit on the back row of theatres

and roar for another encore, or grin for minutes on end

at women in the lift via mirrors

                and bide his time.

He has done marvels by leaning forward

        at unguarded moments

and whispering something into an ear,

by adding moustaches to unknown people’s photos

in the scrapbooks he took with him to auditions.

He could actually fly. Whenever he felt bored

he simply rented a couple of comic films.

Poem by the Dutch writer Willem Jan Otten

ALEXANDER AND ETERNITY

1

His garden philosopher he called me,

but I was toothless and intrigued him

by being doting and untravelled.

I saw that something scared him,

hard to know precisely what, oh nonsense,

he said, and then I just let slip:

you fear the first of January.

What do you mean, he softly asked.

Eternal one, I said, a chance remark,

I spin on my own axis, while you move.

2

For a great conqueror time is

the forward downward thing,

the deep-descending chute where all

the realm collapses in a ceaseless fall.

Iskander was so right. Time only moves

in one direction. Shall. Shall.

But by the never-ending Royal Road,

at every hamlet’s edge there always stands,

just like a bar line in a music stave,

a mumbling philosopher like me, who waves

and tells Iskander: Your journey, that is me,

and I’ve a memory that’s pitiful,

not even you will I take to my grave.

3

There’s no direction and no downward path,

were there no toothless poet to be passed,

eternity is where the conqueror

without contrivance loses all his wits,

it’s just a flash, and then the sideways step,

the Mighty Will stills all his legions

and wipes the dotard drivel off my skin.

A suite of poems by the Swedish writer Lennart Sjögren

Crow suite

Searched out my soul

creatures with crow’s wings

the three-legged

and every other possible thing

outside the normal.

Everything outside the normal.

Was submerged in my soul

a late-Roman pair of twins

with wolf fangs

and the fish of fishes.

They copulated with each other

and what wasn’t given birth to

because of these acts.

*

Had lived peacefully quite some time

had sought my food among the classical

and even the refuse bin had a classical touch.

Had spent quite some time among

the embalmed

where right was right and evil was evil.

*

Come for a night into my soul

dwarves with cow-horns in their forehead

spiders with faces of closest friends

and my own portrait

brought in by wood-lice.

Talking lilies and stone barriers.

And self-flagellators

child-flagellators

the shipwrecked on the island of death.

Come down into my soul: the female weepers

the female laughers

but something to weep or laugh about

wasn’t visible just then.

Even so they were at hand as a deliverance.

And I thought that all that was now taking place

did so in an age

that was not only that of man.

And I listened to the far-off hills

and I heard there

the utterly clear laughing

and utterly clear weeping

*

All the low-slung frogs came leaping

those who at night form

one great protracted clucking –

A clucking for all forms of what is alive

not least the hybrid forms.

And I asked myself if I was a frog

in the circle of frogs

a monkey in the monkey cage.

Or a crow

in the cunningly laid snare.

*

This very night

an old well-known discus thrower

descends from his marble plinth

he is tired of the white

he asks for the pig’s snout

the crayfish’s leg.

And the pair of twins with wolf fangs

do not hold him back

nor does the fish of fishes.

He then flings his discus

way, way beyond the stands.

What do the marble staircases say then

yes,

what do the city planners say.

After staying there for a while down in

the world of the crayfish

he makes his way back to the marble

but

what one once has abandoned cannot be recovered

all that easily.

And it was not the night

that then gained its completeness

and it was not the night’s morning

but it certainly was a seduction.

Yes, it was like a resurrection from the

graves of time.

And the dream of the discus thrower

to be sculpted stone once more

came to nothing.

Far too uncertain and sown with doubt

was his craving for the stone

and far too many memories existed in the wind

above the square.

Then

he left the stone for good

and went to those free in the disease.

Laugh oh my soul, he said

try a laugh at the moment of abandonment.

*

Then I heard once more

how the plains and more distant mountains laughed

and I went out to meet them.

And I went to the old snake –

she the female snake among the boulders

with her cleft tongue

she who sloughs her skin

and swallows her food whole

she with her inflexible smile

who guards the origin of the world.

She looked at me playfully

and held out the poison to me

when I approached.

Be of good cheer, she whispered.