Mass of the Birds by Gillian Clarke

Frances, this morning,
buttercup dust on our sandals,
we drift back from early walks,
bring roses in long briars,
foxglove, bedstraw, meadowsweet,
cow parsley, ragged robin.

The mist is off the fields. Swifts
spin their shrill litanies.
Under the barn’s beaten silver
incense of cut grass, creosote,
the sun’s mat at the door.
We bring our privacies.

Rough table. Circle of chairs.
A heel of granary loaf.
Wine over from last night’s supper.
A leather book. Luke. Romans.
Corinthians. Silences.
A congregation of eight.

The lapsed, the doubting, those
here for the first time, others
regular at named churches
share the meaning of breaking bread,
of sipping from one glass,
of naming you.

Mass of the birds. A blackbird calls,
a wren responds, calling, answering
what we can only feel.
We offer this as the sun
raises its wafer too brilliant
to look at or understand.

Do you remember the elder
that was sick to death last year,
all skin and bone in the arms
of a rambling rose? This year
it flourishes, grows green,
supports the rose.

By Gillian Clarke

= = =

Side note: The annual Eurovision Song Contest grand finale post will be published on Saturday 18th May.

Ночь темна… (The Night Is Dark) by Yury Galanskov

The night is dark.
There is a moon.
She is, of course, not alone,
And I am absolutely not lonely,
And just now – the bell rings.
I hear a prearranged knock on the door,
jump up, grasp the handshake,
put on a raincoat,
and we go out
almost
in a downpour of rain.
We go out,
and, it is to be supposed,
we are going to overthrow someone.

by Yury Galanskov
1955 (?)
translated by Albert C. Todd

Ночь темна

Ночь темна.
Луна.
Она, конечно, не одна.
И я совсем не одинок,
вот-вот — и прозвенит звонок.
Услышу в дверь условный стук,
вскочу, схвачу пожатье рук,
надену плащ,
и мы уйдем
почти
под проливным дождем.
Уйдем,
и надо полагать —
идем кого-то низвергать.

Additional information: Ю́рий Тимофе́евич Галанско́в (Yuri Timofeyevich Galanskov); 19 June 1939 – 4 November 1972) was a Russian poet, historian, human rights activist and dissident. For his political activities, such as founding and editing samizdat almanac Phoenix, he was incarcerated in prisons, camps and forced treatment psychiatric hospitals (Psikhushkas). He died in a labor camp.

Galanskov’s father was a common worker. He studied briefly at Moscow University but was expelled in his second semester for “the independence of his views.” In 1961, as one of the first human rights activists, he helped found the underground journal Feniks (Phoenix), where, in the first number, his own poetry first appeared. The second number, Feniks 66, he published on his own. He was arrested in 1967 and sentenced with Aleksandr Ginzburg to seven years in a severe-regimen camp for assisting in the production of the White Book about the trial of Andrey Sinyavsky and Yuly Daniel. Beginning in 1969 he was in and out of prison hospitals for treatment of ulcers. He died tragically at the martyr’s age of thrity-three from a blood infection following an ulcer operation.

Galanskov was an unusually courageous, uncompromising enemy of the violence, vulgarity, and hypocrisy of the Soviet system; none of his poetry or essays was ever published in the official Soviet press during his lifetime.

Biographical information about Galanskov, p.954, ‘Twentieth Century Russian Poetry’ (1993), compiled by Yevgeny Yevtushenko (ed. Albert C. Todd and Max Hayward) , published by Fourth Estate Limited by arrangement with Doubleday of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group Inc. (transcribed as found in the original text).

The Nun by Anonymous (15th Century)

A pious, dark-eyed maiden
Has with loving made me pine.
If for another’s profit
I’ve loved, God, I’m lacking wit!
Woman I love, what’s all this –
You don’t like gay Spring birches?
You, that eight stars go to tint,
Won’t let your beads be silent?
A saint of a religious,
Kind to the choir, not to us?
Enough of bread and water
For God’s sake, and cress abhor!
Mary! with these beads have done,
This monkish Rome religion!
Don’t be a nun – Spring’s at hand,
And cloister’s worse than woodland.
Your faith, my fairest truelove,
Goes quite contrary to love.
Worthier is the ordaining
Of mantle, green robe, and ring.

Come to cathedral birch, to
Worship with trees and cuckoo
(There we shall not be chided)
To win heaven in the glade.
Remember the book of Ovid,
Cease from the excess of faith.
We’ll obtain in the vinetrees
Round the hillside, the soul’s peace.
God loves with blameless welcome,
With his saints, to pardon love.
Is it worse for a maiden
To win a soul in the glen
Than what we have done, to do
In Rome or Santiago?

by Anonymous
(15th Century)
translated by Tony Conran

Равнодушие (Indifference) by Dmitry Bobyshev

Indifference –
A house
Packed with ice,
Full of snow.
Indifference –
A house
For freezing,
Not for living.
A vault. A plush crypt.
Indifference. A house.
Moldy bread and boxes.
Peels, dead birds, combings, scrapings.
Peer closely – here are also people,
Two-humped people – freaks!
And they kick off from boredom.
And people!
O people are camels!
And virgins are whores.
Peer closely.
But try to enter in,
Only try!
I am like a physician,
I tear out an eye, knock out teeth,
But I will give back!
Indifference.
The coffin. Dead flesh.
House of the dead. Bird feathers.
Broken claws.
Indifference. A house. Indifference.

by Дмитрий Васильевич Бобышев
(Dmitry Vasilyevich Bobyshev)
translated by Albert C. Todd

Равнодушие

Равнодушие —
Набитый льдом,
Наполненный снегом дом.
Равнодушие —
Не для жилья,
Для замораживанья дом.
Погреб. Плюшевый склеп.
Равнодушие. Дом.
Пыльный хлеб и коробки.
Корки, мертвые птицы, очески, поскребыши.
Загляни — здесь и люди,
Двугорбые люди — уроды!
И подохнут со скуки.
И люди!
О люди — верблюды!
И девки — о потаскухи.
Загляни.
Но попробуй зайди —
Лишь попробуй!
Я уподоблюсь врачу.
Вырву глаз, выбью зубы,
А возвращу!
Равнодушие.
Гроб. Мертвечина.
Муравьи и мышиный помет на полу.
Мертвечина.
Мертвый дом. Птичьи перья. Разбитые клешни.
Равнодушие. Дом. Равнодушие.

Additional information: Dmitry Vasilyevich Bobyshev (Дми́трий Васи́льевич Бо́бышев), born 11 April 1936, Mariupol, is a Soviet poet, translator and literary critic.

Bobyshev grew up in Leningrad, where his father died during the blockade in World War II. In 1959 he completed studies at the Leningrad Technological Institute as a chemical engineer and worked in the fiend of chemical weapons. At the end of the 1960s he began working as an editor in the technical division of Leningrad television.

Bobyshev began to write poetry in the 1950s and was first published in the samizdat journal Sintaksis (Syntax) in 1959 and 1960 and then later briefly in Iunost’ (Youth) and Leningrad almanacs. His first collection, Ziianiia (Hiatus), appeared in Paris in 1979, the year he succeeded in immigrating to the United States. His resolution to be a poet was significantly affected by his meeting with Anna Akhmatova, who dedicated the poem “Piataia roza” (The Fifth Rose) to him, though he considers the poetry of Rilke to be his literary wellspring.

Biographical information about Bobyshev, p.862, ‘Twentieth Century Russian Poetry’ (1993), compiled by Yevgeny Yevtushenko (ed. Albert C. Todd and Max Hayward) , published by Fourth Estate Limited by arrangement with Doubleday of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group Inc. (transcribed as found in the original text).

Halls by Dannie Abse

Halls of houses own a sweet biscuity smell;
and the carpet’s frayed, the staircase lonely.

The landing light belongs to winter evenings.
When empty, all doors closed, the hall’s itself.

It becomes an ear. Aware of a loud party
behind walls, and of cartilage clicking in a knee.

Between the porch and the head’s eye in a living room
it is the eight paces that can alter a man.

No wonder our grandfathers put clocks in halls,
and percussed barometers hopefully.

Lest the hall betray the host’s formidible smile,
guests ushered in are not enticed to linger.

Later, guests leaving, slightly drunk, deranged,
neither know the hall nor the host, smileless.

What’s detained by loitering, in gloomy halls,
near the leaded window and the telephone?

Well, nothing’s defined by the keenest mind
aware of inviolate odours in halls.

Arcane, unparaphrasable halls.

by Dannie Abse
from A Small Desperation (1968)