A small request for Christopher Marlowe by C. Buddingh'

Original title: Klein verzoek aan Christopher Marlowe - from: Het houdt op met zachtjes regenen - 4e druk 1978 - De Bezige Bij, Amsterdam

A small request for Christopher Marlowe

Christopher Marlowe
[1564-1593]

 
They were, those old poets, surely masters
of posing sonorous sounding questions! Kit Marlowe,
two of your most beautiful lines (from Doctor Faustus)
            are still: "Was this
the face that launched a thousand ships and burned
the topless towers of Ilium?" We, later ones,
generally look for it, rightly or wrongly,
            a bit closer to the ground.
 
But they do make a deep impression on us: just yesterday, 

while undressing, when my gaze lingered for a moment on what

my mother called my bare pins,
            I suddenly thought: ‘Was this
the leg that terrified so many young goalies?’
and I was, despite all the nostalgia,
immediately comforted too: the leg might have become as stiff 

            as a board, but the noggin, it’s still going strong.
 
You know, Kit, Augustine once said:
‘We are only a soul, burdened with a body,’
(and although that of a soul is unfortunately highly dubious),
            as you get older, you gradually
get tired of all those limbs and innards,
windpipes, kidneys, stomach, heart and liver, and you think:
How wonderful it would be if man could consist only
            of sexual organs and a head.

And even those sexual organs… If you had to choose,
Kit: ‘No more writing or no more rogering?’
wouldn't you choose that damn pen? Or let
            me put it a bit differently
(and now I'm getting symbolic, but you yourself
were certainly not averse to that either), who
would it be if someone asked you with a pistol to your chest:
            Caliban or Prospero?
 
You know Kit, that's why I actually don't care
that I will never be on a high score list again,
or even that I can barely move that once-famous leg
            because of the lumbago.
It's bloody painful and indecently annoying,
but it's still a minor issue: like the buzzing
of a mosquito around your head just while your very 

            own Helena makes you immortal with a kiss.
 
The seasons, Kit, in human life
may be differently divided than in nature,
at fifty-four you have to admit
            that it’s turning into autumn, slowly but surely.
But perhaps if you ever meet Zeus again, would you then
ask him if he wants to make sure that I too
may stumble into my winter with a head
            where it is still spring.

Paris 1953 by L.Th.Lehmann

Original title: Parijs 1953 -  from: Wat boven kwam – 2006 – Uitgeverij De Bezige Bij, Amsterdam. 

Paris 1953
 
Her name was Pat Bostic.
She was from Georgia.
It was in Paris. Where back then

Louis Th. Lehmann
[1920-2012]

many writers still believed
that novels had to be set:
that was more literary!
We walked down
from Rue Gay-Lussac
where in our local pub,
a black American,
Aaron Bridges, played piano.
We descended, parallel
to boulevard Saint-Michel,
to rue de la Huchette
where her hotel was.
She was barefoot,
and halfway down her calves
hung the frayed edges
of the first cut-off jeans
I'd ever seen.
I sang: "Put your shoes on, Lucy,
don't you know you're in the city?"
She said: "That's what they always
sing to me at home."

Hit and run dream by Hans van den Bos

Hit and run dream
 
On a Friday morning
a female deer was killed
on the R634, close to Tallow.
Further on up the road her two kids
were searching for her in panic.
The gardaí immediately closed the road
to investigate the situation.
A catholic priest was called and
she gave the poor mother her last rites.
A bit later an ambulance took her
to the hospital for an autopsy. 
The social services were able
to catch the two kids,
which will be looked after
in the Cork Zoo.

A sheepdog came forward
as witness to the accident
and he will be used to trace
the driver of the car,
who can expect to lose
his or her driver’s license
for at least two years
and will have to pay all the costs.

‘John Akii Bua by Bert Schierbeek

 (Original title: 'John Akii Bua  from: In- en uitgang - 1974 - De Bezige Bij, Amsterdam)

‘John Akii Bua

Bert Schierbeek
[1918-1996]

(olympic and world champion in 400m hurdles in Munich)
 
a moment we thought
(of course)
he's going too fast
he'll probably fall
we thought
(it has to be)
he almost fell
(we saw)
but he didn't fall
(we saw)
he got up again
i.e.:
   he would have gotten up again
we saw
even though he didn't fall
(we saw)
but:
   if he had fallen
(we saw)
he would
but no
he's running faster than ever
(we saw)
it's not possible
but he's running faster than ever
he’s running gold
(we see)
he’s running all out gold
(of course)
of course Akii Bua runs for gold
(the fastest in the world)
 like
(like we said before)
Akii Bua runs for gold
like nobody else
with a radiant face Akii Bua runs for gold
(like we said before)
 
Akii Bua
didn't fall.

The Ghosts of the forest by Hans van den Bos

Dylan [2004-2018]
Canus domesticus sapiens

 Original title: Schimmen van het bos

The Ghosts of the Forest

                                     as told to me by Dylan our dog

Often I heard strange noises 

between the dark trees, during my daily walks

on the hills around my home town.

It gave me a shock every time. There was

no smell and I never saw any creature.

My mother, a believer in the goddog 'Lupus',

used to tell me and my two brothers stories

about dogs with wings, spirits

of evil hounds, holy bitches, and the like.

I clearly remember a story

about a enormous hound with red eyes,

somewhere in a town called Baskerville.

Because of all those stories, I was always afraid

to go outside on my own in the dark

and I had often bad dreams about it.

Is there more in this world than I can see?

Now more than 8 years old,

Thomas, one of my brothers,

and I have a house and garden of our own.

We have two attendants, a human male

and female, who have their rooms upstairs.

They are very intelligent and often have

discussions about all kinds of interesting subjects.

They can talk to each other for hours.

Listening to them, while I'm resting

in my basket, I know now that

my mother's stories were just stories,

because there is no truth to them at all.

She was possibly indoctrinated by her Setteric family

and I think that the humans around her

were not very helpful either.

I heard that our father, a secular Sheeper,

had a kind of a scientific education,

but he had to leave our mother

before we were born, so he could not inform us

about the natural world.

One day, a few months ago,

on a walk with our male attendant,

we heard the noise again

and all three of us looked

in the direction from where it was coming.

'Look over there', our attendant said,

'two jays, what beautiful birds they are!'

You see, now I know what the noise was.

So if you keep your eyes, ears and nose wide open,

than you can learn a lot about the real things.

Other animals than Homo can be sapiens too,

you know!`

In memoriam Pablo Neruda by C. Buddingh'

(Original title: In memoriam Pablo Neruda - 
from: ‘Het houdt op met zachtjes regenen’ – 1978 – 

C. Buddingh'
[1918-1985]

Uitgeverij De Bezige Bij, Amsterdam.)

In Memoriam Pablo Neruda

 
You know, Pablo, perhaps the most precious thing I possess
   —aside from wife and sons, of course—
is that little book about you in the series Poète d’aujourd’hui,
which you gave me three years ago in Rotterdam,
with the dedication: ‘de Pablo Neruda a su amigo
         C. Buddingh’— well, real friends, of course
we barely became in those five days,
and yet we almost swapped ties: yours
a plain red one, mine a Liberty print.
you practically put the idea into my head,
but I was too shy to go along with it:
   you were one of my heroes, and that I could simply
   talk to you and drink a whisky in your room
was already so unbelievable
   that I crawled further and further into that very shell
   that you were trying to pull me out of.
 
People often asked what you looked like now, and I'd say:
   ‘A gentleman in a cap,’ and that was true enough,
but then ‘gentleman’ in the true sense of an aristocrat:
you are, together with Mazizi Kunene, I believe, the only
person that I've ever seen with the real allure of a monarch,
         and actually that had little to do,
however monumental, with your poethood:
you only had to open your mouth, when there was a discussion
and everyone listened—and not
because you were a more powerful magician with language
than anyone else, or an ambassador in Paris, no, they listened
   because you spoke not only for an entire continent,
   but for every disadvantaged person in the world:
yours was the conscience that each of us so much
   wanted to have, but couldn't, or didn't dare—and for that
   alone you were the greatest of us all.
 
We knew you were ill: cancer, and that we would probably
   never see you again, but you acted and fought
as if all eternity still lay before you.
When you left, you said, ‘see you’, but two years later,
your friend Allende was murdered and your house plundered
         within an hour of your death by the same
mob that had previously chased you out of your country,
the Chile that you gave history and stature
and that now became the measure for what true virtue is: either you are
pro-Neruda, and then you would rather starve
than engage with slaughterers in tailored suits,
   or anti: there is no middle ground,
   and believe me: one day, maybe
not they themselves, but their descendants will pay
   for what the hired assassins’ hands
   have inflicted in that land of your dreams.
 
Yes, you preached revolution, but also and above all,
   love and awe for everything life
had to offer humanity: beauty, art, companionship:
you no longer had to look for the philosopher's stone,
because every rock or pebble you found
         on a beach or in mountain ravines
seemed to you a greater miracle than raising the dead,
or walking on water, and an onion had for you
the same ranking as a solar system:
wherever you looked you saw a Garden of Eden,
only: behind every Adam and Eve stood
   almost everywhere a man with a whip, who therefore
   had to disappear first, and then life
would become as simple as the colour red—and hatred
   you had to feel, yes, but never foster, because
   it was that which precisely kept blocking future's path.
 
If there was anything you weren’t, it was dogmatic, if there was something
   you didn’t want, well then: as little for everyone:
no, you thought that even for the poorest farmer or stonemason,
even the best would scarcely be good enough,
for you the entire human race was a race of kings,
         that’s why you steadfastly stood up for them,
they had not only to throw off their chains, that would be
wonderful of course, but only a beginning, the moment
when true life could finally make a start,
and every shit-shoveler or whore be crowned with gold.
That was your dream, for which you kept fighting and fighting,
   and I know for sure that even in the hour of your death,
   you continued to believe in that day when all the rejected,
displaced, downtrodden, vilified, hunted—and without
   Jesus or anyone else descending — will
   inherit paradise here on earth.