POEMS 2007
I
Oh my love-filled days,
where have you gone to?
I’ve got up from bed in a daze,
no dreams to turn in to,
unless they’re yours, my friends.
The means do not justify the ends,
I’m sorry, I mean
the end doesn’t justify the means.
In love I must not be mean,
and in the end friendship is love,
for me agape is
above
eros. But give me
one more true love
before my days end.
II
I plucked for her that poem like a flower
although it was after midnight,
if I hadn’t told you, you wouldn’t know the hour,
I could have kept my lips sealed tight.
Now you know I am a night gardener
and sad in Russian
is garden; her
is anonymous and general here,
naming names in poetry can generate fear.
She may be in the past present or future,
breaking the frail chronology is her feature.
I’m not going to impress on her any rigid features
and won’t force her to unpick my wounds’ sutures,
enough that she be in this night room with me
somehow in spirit, mind and body
so that I can be less lonely, less no-body,
so that we can together be.
III
‘All’s fair in love and war’,
‘Make love not war’,
and my fair love
the olive twig holds the dove.
I’ve written my share of war poems
from unbunkerlike homes.
Envelop me in your love, my friends,
I may become more sore and needy one day.
As for now, in the silence, I’m keeping sleep at bay.
The day has ended, night rules
and the fishing line spools
out. I’ve caught another wish
and broadcast it on a satellite dish:
freedom for Jamshid Karimov, the journalist,
no abuse for this Uzbek, take him off the blacklist.
IV
When a country’s war lasts longer
than its peace. When evil is stronger
than good – wherein lies the hope?
Is there really any scope
to create peace after terror –
somewhere there’s a fundamental error
in human nature that allows humans,
of all the species, to assume an
aggressive position,
whether it’s not allowing a robust opposition
to a ruling party or
not coming to terms with history of yore.
James Bond perverted live and let live
to live and let die. I’d give him a lecture or two in four
languages
for I’m beginning to box my age.
The Cold War and Peace is hotting up with global warming,
it’s up to poets too to issue a solemn warning.
‘In hope I bide’ is the MacIan motto,
before I become senile or blotto
I’m not prepared to bide my time,
I strike and the wish is on,
give us hope for our daughters and sons.
V
A little bit of world melancholy,
how softer it sounds than depression,
see, at the end of the word is holy,
you wouldn’t notice that at a first impression.
Baudelaire, Coleridge et al. were all drug users.
I have no need to go cold turkey,
not myself being a user or rather abuser.
No screw on me turns the key
though I have had mental confinements.
I am free to exercise poetry’s refinements,
two handfuls of rhymes at my behest
and with an infinite curiosity I am blessed.
If I were a cat I’d be killed nine times
but I haven’t been flogged with the cat-o-nine-tails, though
oft times
I interpreted for torture survivors.
At heaven’s gate they will not fluff their vivas
in whatever language they take them,
but Peter, Azrail give them life and hope before you take
‘em.
VI
Helen, Captain Michael, are you sleeping down below?
As for me, my feet are firmly on the ground below.
The Uzbek radio journalist thanked me for my pain –
my God, here sing the birds thinking it’s dawn again.
I’d never been thanked for my ‘pain’ before,
how did he sense on the telephone I was hurting?
He’s right – it’s more than empathy for
others’ pain but it’s infinitely mind opening and rewarding.
There’s Uzbekistan, where I’ve never been,
there’s this guy in the psikhushka whom I’ve never seen.
Here’s me staying up very late, starting a cycle on love
and finishing up with something above
politics but political but not litigious.
It makes complete sense to Pushkin, and I’m not
disingenuous.
I read Pushkin to calm myself down
but like my pipe tobacco he boosted me up and calmed me
down.
VII
FOR RAY SHORTHOUSE
The seventh poem in this nocturnal cycle
returns to love, not just my love
and yes, ‘a fish does need a bicycle’.
I’ve asked travelling friends for pebbles from above
the shoreline and from the sea itself.
I hope they don’t shift, the tectonic shelves,
though passionate love can be a volcano.
Hephaestus or Vulcan, oh
they were lame like the forger of these verses.
I risk being perverse
and my father in the 70s said to me: ‘No one likes a
dissident’,
but when to death he made his slow descent
he said he admired my work at the Medical Foundation
and that gave love to our parting and a secure foundation.
‘The peace of the world that passeth all understanding’,
I’d like to add my drops of ink to understanding
in a non-blasphemous way. Give us a driving metaphor
to carry us from the troubled sea up onto the shore.
VIII
So many people are anti-tyranny
especially those under tyranny.
Do the people get the leader they deserve?
No, that’s like saying the military
has ‘toys for boys’. I’m chary
of obita dicta
but angry against dictators.
It’s I myself who sucks these hours
out of the night. Others have greater powers
of communication than this humble poet,
skating on thin ice with a rollerball, don’t you know it.
There is solidarity in the BBC World Service Radio band,
late night listening – carry me my little waves,
lull me but not yet to sleep.
My adrenalin is flowing and I can’t keep
in bed. Families were split in the 40s,
the radio reminds me. Don’t split Jamshid’s personality
and, Doctor in heaven, don’t split mine.
It’s wake up call at ten past nine,
just over five hours to go,
my poetry has already had a wonderful go.
IX
When the driver gets an adrenalin rush
in a risky but necessary overtaking manoeuvre,
when a poet is writing his magnum opus,
or in medias res of a new oeuvre,
how does he come down from the sublime
to his small room in his provincial time:
this is how he does it – he writes himself down.
It’s a serious thing in the circus playing the clown,
I wear no mask in country or town,
so you can see my real smile or frown.
I never had a cover so it could not be blown,
I’ve managed to avoid debts and loans,
I hedge my bets before I place any,
yet somehow I have inherited and developed a bravity
with its own specific gravity
and I fight for myself when I fight
for others, that unity of comradeship
that goes most of the way to purge fright –
no need yet to bail out the ship.
X
Tomorrow or rather today I’ll have
a helluva poetry hangover.
In the morning I’ll already have
had a close shave, a too brief sleep over.
But I’ve noticed my strength to recover
and this without a live-in-lover
to confide my confidences in.
It’s how one misconfronts ‘sin’
that can lead to the bin.
I have to swallow the News in sips,
I still sometimes feel a shudder when I hear the pips.
I should realise here I’m closer to journalists
than to most poets, though both I enlist.
Whole Cycle, Night of 19 January 2007
Richard McKane
IN MEMORIAM HRANT DINK
I
Difficult not to be devastated or rant in anger or turn to
drink
on hearing the news of the shooting of Hrant Dink
but he’d want us more to write
and to give life to that most basic human right
to live and let live. His life was taken –
he did not give it lightly:
his struggle was for human rights in Turkey
and he turned the keys of politics and history.
His life was spent in defending minorities,
not only his Armenian but the Kurds and within the framework
of his
country.
Threatened with death threats and court cases,
supported by his close family and friends, he found a basis
not only to exist but work and live
and stay on in the country and city he loved.
He described himself in his last article as an apprehensive
pigeon, now we know he was a brave dove.
20 January 2007
II
I didn’t want to write an elegy for Hrant Dink
and I thought it was better not to drink
the poisoned cup of his foul murder to the lees
but give thanks for his life with pleas
for a cessation of violence and for reconciliation
among the hybrid Turkiyeli nation.
‘Then you can put it aside’
one of my best friends said.
I know Hrant Dink has died
but since I never met
him it’s somehow as though he’s not dead.
Have you ever had that feeling? Absurd yet
it may ring true for you too –
as though Hrant is still editing anew,
Agos, his Armenian Turkish newspaper,
as though there is no need to light candles from a taper.
No, it doesn’t really work this substitution caper.
He’s been shot, that’s it for him,
he is now the dead victim
who went out on a limb
for us and we are the survivors of him.
21 January 2007
Richard McKane
FOR RUTH AND JAMES CHRISTIE
I told Hajar, the pretty Turkish waitress,
that I am going to write this poem to you,
so I order another cappuccino
and sit down to it without strain or stress.
We worked well together today
and work with you is serious play.
We translated A White Bed
by Tuğrul
Tanyol and I led.
Then I realised I was not leading but led
and the poem was a totally joint effort.
When I dropped a word or vice versa each other we caught.
You’d been in pain, your gums had bled
when the tooth was
extracted,
but now you concentrated, were not distracted
and the whole session was enacted
and our shared wisdom in the poetry was impacted.
We’d come to the end of another
book together
to add to Oktay Rifat and Nazim Hikmet.
We went back to how we met
at Cevat Çapan’s talk –
today I couldn’t persuade you to walk
to the Café so I came here with James
and we sat in the garden and talked
not so much Turkey as turkey.
We three sing in the same key
and though Ruth and I don’t play the cello
or the computer as well-o
we share a musicality of line, that’s no delusion.
A Russian speaking loudly interrupts
my train of thought, corrupts
the poem with his intrusion.
You realised that I am in a different space
these days. To Russian poetry I’ve set my face
again and time flies and time races
and none of us can readily adjust our lifelong paces.
‘How good it is to remember you’
as Nazim said, but no four walls
divide us and the remembering you
is more thinking of you than recall.
Others’ words in Turkish
became our words in English,
so one language prompts
another into the preparatory exprompt.
There is a slight breeze
which puts me at ease
as the evening starts.
God protect our hearts,
lead us through the valley of life,
you two inseparable man and wife,
sometimes the stiff upper lip
can be more than just a quip.
Scotland has been yours since your cotland
and you both carry her in London within you.
We give to each other more than a hand,
there are many poets – translators are few.
We are in the same boat
when we take a poem on an outing.
Our linguistic wrangles never lead to shouting.
When Burton read Fern Hill he fought with a lump in his
throat.
You have, Ruth, what the Russians would call a broad
diapason,
your reading takes us into various zones
and we three dote
on each others’ anecdotes.
James gives generously of his wit.
I have lifted from it selected hits,
all three of us now have senior moments
when we forget what we meant.
But we’re adept at piggy-back memory
and our conversations individually continue.
I don’t want to talk about memento mori,
I just want to remember that we give each other clues.
Thank God in lyric poetry
there is no concentration on chronology.
Time darts and plays like a fish
and keeps the mind fresh.
Chez vous we had
an orange soup
and a kidney bean and tuna salad
and wine white and red before putting Tuğrul through the hoop
and working on his poems, not ballads.
Yes, my rhyming may be facile
but it’s the right side of it.
We’ve translated our last poem together for a while,
but translation, we’ll never get enough of it.
The poems we’ve translated have teeth
as well as the ones in our mouths now,
they also have taste somehow,
none of us are washed up on retirement’s reef.
Activists of the brain,
playing ping pong with languages,
we’ll go on for ages,
for we are still in training.
Those who translate feel a double
strain for both languages when trouble-
some give rise to seemingly impossible
quandaries, but with a twist and a turn the target tongue is
enabled.
Words are not imprisoned but free,
yet we translators liberate
them in English, that mighty
language which in its essence no one can berate.
It was by chance I stayed on in the Café garden,
almost out of tobacco I felt like heading home,
then to write a poem to you two, my will hardened
and here I am completing it at night at home.
It’s the longest one I’ve written
since starting my quatrains with which I’m smitten,
which would give any publisher kittens
since they are now in their thousands.
James, remember the robin on the wall
and our quipping ‘run robin, run robin, run, run, run’,
serious lines mix with unalloyed fun,
this is the sort of poetry and life to which I’m called.
I think best these days and nights
with pen in hand, then I worry less.
The words can’t quite
catch up with the thoughts which may be in a mess.
Well, with my new resolve
of not writing into the wee hours
to save for the morning my powers
I’m going to leave this poem with the clock hands to
silently revolve.
If I don’t think it’s finished,
in the morning refreshed
I’ll go fishing for words again.
Sleep well, Ruth and James Christie – and Richard McKane.
***
Up in the night once more – there must be unfinished
business.
Whence this busy beeness
that turns me into a nocturnal animal,
does it come from method translation of Tuğrul Tanyol.
I’d actually slept an hour
to the tunes of Radio 3,
but I’ll not let this writing turn sour,
it’s just there’s still a ripeness that dwells in me.
It’s good to have direct addressees
to write this poem to,
thereby I guarantee
an audience of two of you.
Sleepy head, get thee to bed
and ignore the zithers of your breathing.
These last hours you’ve said
enough to be bequeathing.
In the morning, fast approaching,
into the computer I’ll be broaching
these lines – a sign of the times
with all their rhythms and rhymes.
Press on regardless, otherwise known as POR,
when opportunities for good verse are
on offer you have to seize the night,
then sleep and rest till well after it’s light.
I wonder when the pencil sharpener was invented.
These words I have ventilated not vented –
see how they fill the silent night air,
taking up so little room there.
Unspoken they are, only read by me,
but when you read this part of me,
it’ll be ours, mine and yours,
selfishness doesn’t reign, for you this pours.
I know when to stop: when the stream
of consciousness dries into sleep,
when the curve of the night becomes too steep
to ignore and the graph tells you to write no more.
I’ve not quite reached that compromise
but my health I’m not compromising.
I’ll have a long lie in, I promise
myself and really the results are quite surprising.
If I make haste like the shepherds to The Birth,
it’s because we are only guests on this earth.
I believe we only come round once
so I’m eking out my extra energy’s every ounce.
I’m only burning the candle at one end
and I have replacements in the kitchen.
It’s our own power cut that is the flipping end,
come on you readers, this craft’s ready for hitching.
Hold steady now, the harbour is nigh,
both readers and poet let out a sigh
of relief. We’ve avoided the rocks’ teeth,
we’ve pierced through the dangerous reef.
No, this writing
is too exciting.
I can’t alight from it yet,
it’s too bright inside my head.
Have I broken the sound barrier?
We’ve broken the language barrier.
No carrier pigeon will carry this long message
which is more than a rite of passage.
So, I’m up at night, the silent Muse at my shoulder.
When we three are together I never feel you’re older
than me – we are all contemporaries
and our partings will be temporary.
Do you remember giving me the recording
of Wallace Steven’s Idea of Order at Key West?
Such perfect words ordering –
he was indeed blessed.
Now not just tiredness but real fatigue
is setting in. I am in my pyjama fatigues.
Is this writing a form of somnambulism?
No, I am talking not walking at waking and sleeping’s
schism.
It may take quite a few blows
to hit the nail on the head:
three o’clock strikes and I’m not abed,
I’m not hiding that from you, God knows.
I sharpen my pencil that’s run down.
I trust this is not going down
like a lead balloon –
it’s really not a load of ballyhoo.
If it wasn’t for these fourliners’ formality
I wouldn’t be able to exercise informality
for there wouldn’t be the frame even if it’s limericklike.
This is my main work now – I’ve got on my bike.
It’s more superobservant
than hypervigilant.
Night fishing for words
can end with the dawn
chorus of birds.
I’m pushing the boat out tonight
like a Robin Hood smuggler.
I haven’t taken on whisky galore
or the Tsar’s Vodka – I promise I’m not tight.
Nonetheless it’s a bit like a student
staying up to meet a deadline. If I’d been more prudent
I’d have started this poem to you years ago –
but now at least I’m giving it a go.
It may seem overwhelming
but there’s truth in its fragments.
A wealth of poems is something
and I think you follow the arguments.
So still now the night,
now no element of fright,
now I’ll give in to slumber,
page 14 is the notebook number.
When I pause for a line
I have a minute smoke –
the ass gives birth to the moke –
of addiction a sure sign.
Do I kid myself it keeps me alert?
It’s the poetry itself that is the winner.
I know others get hurt when I am hurt,
of omission especially I am a sinner.
I’m never going to resign my poet’s commission,
there’s a slender line between vocation and mission.
I don’t object to being in the term of ‘semiretirement’,
less interpreting puts me in my writer’s element.
The dawn chorus comes a bit earlier every night
and starts with solitary notes.
Through the heavy curtains I have no sight
of the bird – I just hear the song from its throat.
I’ve topped my record for number of lines
but I’m feeling fine,
but like a stitch for a runner is a warning sign,
I should pick it up in time and save nine.
Yet I plough on in the dark – my brain is floodlit.
I am an ark on the face of the waters,
floating prepared when the deluge rains hit,
with four by four lion-hearted lines I face the conservation
disaster.
4-5 June 2007
