Three Poems

One from France, one from Poland

I’m not knowledgeable about poetry, but I love it. I hope you share your favorite poems too.

It’s Poetry Week at The Truth Barrier.

I published both of these at the original Truth Barrier, 2013, and am not sure anybody else liked them.

People think they don’t understand poetry but people do.

It’s the opposite of propaganda. Ok, let’s see what you think:

1.

To Resume

We suddenly got too close to something from which we’d been kept at a mysteriously favorable and measured distance. Since then, corrosion. Our headrest has disappeared.

It is unbearable to feel oneself a committed and impotent part of beauty that is dying through the fault of others. Committed in one’s breast and impotent in the movement of ones mind.

If what I show you and what I give you seem less to you than what I hide,

my weighing is poor, my reaping ineffectual.

You are, poem, a wayside altar of darkness on my too exposed face. My splendor and my suffering have slipped between the two.

I must cast off life’s ugly accumulation and find again the gaze that loved it enough in the beginning to display its foundation. What is left for me to live exists in this assault, this tremor.

—René Char

What They Said: Theodore I. Rubin

“I must learn to love the fool in me–the one who feels too much, talks too much, takes too many chances, wins sometimes and loses often, lacks self-control, loves and hates, hurts and gets hurt, promises and breaks promises, laughs and cries. It alone protects me against that utterly self-controlled, masterful tyrant whom I also harbor and who would rob me of my human aliveness, humility, and dignity but for my Fool.”

― Theodore I. Rubin, M.D.

Small Heart

-–for Jan Jozef Szczepanski

The bullet that I shot

at the time of the great war

made a circle around the globe

and struck me in the back

at the least suitable moment

when I was already sure

I had forgotten everything

his-my faults

after all just like others

I wanted to erase from memory

the faces of hatred

history consoled me

that I had fought with naked force

and the Book said

–it is he who is Cain

so many years patiently

so many years in vain

with water of compassion I washed away

soot blood insults

so nobility

the beauty of existence

and perhaps even goodness

could have a home in me

after all just like everyone

I longed to return

to the bay of childhood

to the land of innocence

the bullet I shot

from a small calibre weapon

circled the globe

against the laws of gravitation

and struck me in the back

as if it wanted to say

—that nothing will be forgiven

to anyone

so now I sit alone

on the cut stump of a tree

exactly in the centre

of the forgotten battle

and I

gray spider

weave bitter meditations

about too great a memory

about too small a heart

—Zbigniew Herbert

(Translated from the Polish by John and Bogdana Carpenter)