Jan Škrob 

Translator

--/--/2015
It’s weird, this climate change phenomenon. Creepy. Like rumours of an army that has encircled your town but you don’t actually see any soldiers. And then, a sniper’s shot.  Someone at the window of her home falls. Then quiet again. Days later, a bomb falls a few streets away … you hear that a house caught fire. You wonder when the war will reach your house.

I’m remembering when I was a child, probably twelve, and it began to seep into my imagination that nuclear annihilation was an actual possibility. It really could happen that at the command of a powerful leader, a button could be pressed and Armageddon would begin. In weeks, if not days, the planet could become a ruin of ash and wisps of smoke, suspended in dark space.

Perhaps a child’s imagination is what we need now. This … is annihilation – just creeping. Mostly. For now.


--/--/2015
In a way, the deepest horror of this is how surreptitious its horrors are. Subtle disappearances. You’re talking to a literature class and you happen to mention miwiz. Puzzled looks. From everyone. You describe this fruit, its look, its taste, as best you can. Not one student in a class of more than thirty has ever seen a miwiz. Then it strikes you: When last have you seen one?

Incremental shifts. How many years have so many people in the Caribbean been saying: “Phew! Woy! To me, October didn’t use to be so hot!”?

No, it didn’t  … Or April … Or July … Or …

At first only old persons said this sort of thing. Now, young fellers on the block on a sweltering evening, teenage girls trying on outfits before each other for a party – they say it without irony: “When I was younger ...”


--/--/2015
So what do I say to my son, who turned nineteen two weeks ago? My granddaughter, who’ll be ten just three months from now? What do I say? “Yes, we knew but –“

What possible valid statement can follow that ‘but’? Really. What can matter more than giving children and grandchildren the possibility of a future with the normal good things of life in it and the possibility of them giving that to their children and grandchildren?

Thinking of the reasons why our ordinary everyday actions are taking place in a kind of poisonous psycho-miasma of our very being (the external miasma of greenhouse gas emissions is its exact counter-part) I am stunned, again, at how completely heartless this system is. Thinking of how much time, how much human effort, how much of the earth’s materials go into making millions of boxes of corn flakes a day, how many tons of tree-pulp transformed into cardboard, how much synthetic dye to make the boxes colourful, how many millions of genetically modified seeds engineered with the prime consideration of rapid growth, how many billions of barrels of oil to fuel the harvesters and haulage trucks and huge ships loaded with containers to bring these boxes to supermarket shelves and then to tables and then into bodies – and how little real nutrition there is in all of this. Thinking of how much cynicism it takes to keep this going. And I am stunned, yet again, at how completely heartless this system is. I shouldn’t be. I come from the Caribbean, where that heartlessness was systemically structured into the slave plantation.


--/--/2015
‘Global warming’. It’s a carefully scientific term, trying to avoid the knee-jerk judgemental morality that can be so limiting to science. That’s understandable, can’t quarrel with that. But ‘global warming’ for me is a dishonouring, a violation, of The Mother.

And to honour The Mother now, in this time, another way of living is needed. Another economic system, first of all. Whatever it’s called is, if not irrelevant, at best distracting. The point is it must honour The Mother. Everything flows from that.


--/--/2015
Out walking earlier today and the last couple days and seeing the familiar scenes and realising I really need to look at them again, closely. I really need to wonder. I need the child’s imagination again. Look at the vendor’s arcade at the harbour’s edge. Look at the GFL Charles airport, its main gate a sauntering one-minute walk from Vigie Beach. Look at the cemetery on that beach - my father is buried there. Can it really happen that with a one meter rise in sea level, all this could …?


--/--/2015

CONJUGATIONS – 5: THALASSA
i look           out where the sea, not far now, sips the shoreline in
you like        the still, stark beauty of this widening desolation
it lakes                     the empty roadways, buildings, dissolving the idea of progress
we lack        all hope now. You tell us: This cannot be contained;
you lock       your dams, dykes, doors in vain; the waters rise;
they lick       unhurriedly at the diminishing world which they will swallow.



--/--/2015
I wrote the poem a couple years ago. But only one part of me believes it. This situation now calls everything into question. Every morning it stares me down, makes me ask: Okay, so what do I do? What do we do?
Now everything is in hazard. The weight of that phrase is sinking into me as I write it, in a way I never felt before. ‘In hazard’. The negative charge of the word is obvious. But I’m also sensing the subtle tremor of another current. Hazard is risk, yes. But risk is chance. And chance is possibility.

Perhaps it’s because I’m involved in a climate justice campaign: 1.5 To Stay Alive. Perhaps it’s also to do with being from the Caribbean, which I’ve always seen as a zone – inner and outer – of possibilities that defy normal expectations. Perhaps it’s because I’m a father and grandfather, so I refuse to not hope, knowing that hope is a channel for a higher energy of being and acting. Whatever the reasons, this time of hazard is a time of possibility.

The possibility? That in the necessary snarl and snap of heated discussion as our negotiators fight for us and our future in Paris in December and in the people-clamour outside and all over cyber-space calling for climate justice, the voice of The Mother will be heard.

Because you do not heed the voices of Imagination,
neither the tongues of trees nor the voices of poets,
earth will erupt in a conspiracy of poetry and nature.
Earthquake and landslide will snap and grind to rubble
your Baal-high idols of concrete and metal.
Fire will shrivel the pre-fabricated palaces
swelling like boils on our inflamed land.
Wind will shatter the thin cocktail glass illusions of our progress
into glittering dust scattering
over the ruins of casinos and the high-rise cemeteries made low.
Sea gnashing at our degraded shoreline
will foam corrosive spume that will dissolve your headstones —
they will return to sand.
But the poet’s words will last.
You will hear them prophesying in the hurricane,
their warnings in the night-sea whispering towards your chambers.
It will be the poet’s words coming at you
in the thundering sermon of the landslide,
in the revenging wind swearing down through the valley,
the crackling of the sun gone wild.
And when the earth has had her say and retribution,
afterward, in the green time of healing,
there will be other words, given to other poets.
They will be precious stones with healing properties;
mixed with dirt, folded in leaves and used as poultices,
they will protect the children who recite them.
But these words now – are for you,
David-stones, found at the river of reflection
and gathered in a poem, ready.
Come, fascioners of progress, come.
You hold the steel cuffs of the law,
the silver coins of bribery, the gun.
But when you see a poet writing poems,
run.

What he’s most wanting is not what he wants
Is not what he craves
Deeper than avarice, if he’d let himself feel, is the haunting hunger
That saves

He holds the whole world with his hired hands
Desperately trying
To have it. But trapped in his spasming grip, his seizures, the earth
Is dying

He cannot stop grasping. Whatever he sees
He is accounting
Its self into cost into price into sale into profit into himself
McWanting

He gluts till he’s wracked with a spasm and spews
Blood-flecked bits of self
A wasting consumption leaving him gasping for life and clutching
At pelf

What is the deep whole he’s wanting to fill
For what is he hungry?
Gorged with the planet’s green flesh, its black bile, its ripped out entrails
And yet empty

Running to every thing and running everything
Avoiding the whole
He’s afraid that will swallow him into its void where he has no thing
No soul

And yet he touches us, Midas-like, desperately
Haunted and haunting
And we, his children, we bear his name like a watermark, secretly
McWanting

i dim                the lamp, though night is rising round the house
you deem        my action fitting, dark calling to dark until
it dumbs          our very thoughts; the silence seeps in, spreading …
we dam           our rising fear as you, dispassionate, remind us:
You damn      your greed too late; the levelling floods are here
they doom       us all on this last treeless, lightless night.

What is this, what is it, what is this sound?
Hovering through streets in perishing cities of the wasting world we’ve made - this buzzed uneasiness,
like a low crepitation of burnt paper blowing, black scraps of it fluttering overhead,
like the dark notes of a didgeridoo swarming out of the ground – this sound, this dirge
of bees.
               The thick-electric-bristling-black-cloud of them
pauses over the jagged veins of breakening sidewalks,
over the brown crackling leaves in withering parks;
the wind disperses it; it resembles dried plucked petals of funeral wreaths
for a death that is still undergoing consummation.
The sound of bees widens - gradualizes downwards to their final silence
and ours. Their threnodies of global closure -
the coda of our cosmic possibilities.

This sound is … is … what this sound is …
Is a billion buzz-saws severing something from us.
What? They are severing their selves out of the cosmos.
Choosing to fly into the sun, a Sauteurs Leap upwards,
their frizzling wings falling back on us, a black drizzle, then a rain, then a soundless thunderstorm
of curses – on us now and on our unsucceeding generations.
How they fly wingless, only they can know,
clusters of them swarming from each almost-last refuge,
away from Earth, from Ovalea, from The Mother,
to each other, a cosmic coagulation of planetary flesh
swelling into a black bruise as we look up
to see a slight discolouration on the sun – only a moment –
then a flare of cleansing light. Fire.

And no great-grandchildren, and then no grandchildren
to tell of this, of us, what we did, what was …

What is the time?
It is the time of waiting

What time is it?
The time of little left

Is this the time?
It is the soon, the almost now

Tell me this time
The nearly now, the almost

What is this time?
The time of no more

Is our time - ?
No more, no more

(for Ayodele and Idara)

This, all this, is language:
a sullen mob of rain distant and murmuring,
wind whispering low rumour in the bushes,
clear shout of light over the hill.
The earth is utterance:
hosanna! is the scattering of pigeons,
hallelujah! stands the tree in the noon hour,
selah, the psalmody of waves in the late afternoon.
Branches like epileptic prophets in the wind
gibber wild questions at blue silence
and the taciturn ground, in sudden joyful places
cries: chrysanthemum! rose! bougainvillaea!
i listen, half-remembering....

The river, talking often in its sleep
a long sentence, an incantation
of silver and white feeling tumbling too quick for thought ...
damn, the river makes no sense at times
but words are like that
especially when spoken, like wind and water words.
So lately i trust the rocks especially;
they write their messages.
They intend, like all the ancient poets,
their words should take the weathering
of time, stay true as epitaphs.
Awed by that vocabulary – of things themselves –
i am illiterate, dumb before them.

This morning now, raw wind tearing away leaves,
the sky unscrolls
that puzzling calligraphy of clouds again.
i shake my head, turn to
the rugged cuneiform of dry-river stones,
quick script of wind on grass,
blackbirds printed on blue morning -
all, everything, like ciphers in a code,
hieroglyphic messages i used to know....

On days like this
i try to read the earth-poem
but a scrawl of haze, a smoke
from something charred, but smouldering
sneers over the landscape.
Singed, the young grass twinges
memory, the scent of childhood insidiously accurate
rises acridly and stings.
On days like this my eyes run
and everything is blurred


© Kendel Hippolyte

Our hammers. Our sticks. This furtive
sporting life. Oh, our gasoline. Clothed
in low-rent autobiographies we slouch toward eviction
like dying brickworks. Outside

is day, a nice big one, floor upon floor
of well-mixed cocktails, and beyond the smog line,
a dissimulation of small birds. In darkness,
the city is a basement. We hunch in its hallways

like Goya’s cats, low to the ground and brindled
with enigmatic rashes, stiff in the joints.
Glued together with rye, or blow, or glue,
we are a regular family.

*

Newspaper boxes, billboards, SUVs, Coke machines,
all is lost but for their breaking. We itch
and prosper heavenward on bands of grit and smoke,
our names, unknown, a bloody racket,

car alarm, nothing personal. We rip it up
alright. The trouble’s not the tear-down,
it’s the stall of afters when our hands hang.
The asking each to each what’s next as we lean

inside like crummy tables. No wonder we don’t feel
so well. Look here, soup is crawling
out of our bowls. The midtown Scotiabank’s topmost
light has turned that cloud the colour of Cheezies.

*

There is a tenderness in things. In things,
ruined. As if, freed from functions we bend
them to, they are newborn to the prime
unalphabeted world. As though this were possible.

It doesn’t matter. Burn it. Glass sparkles
my hair, my skin refined with ashes. I’ve pinched
what tools I own. Material things,
which have no soul, could not be true objects

for my love. Will I see you soon, candled
in the streetlit chalk of some immoderate place?
We could stand in wreckage and adored,
where nothing ever fades before it falls.

Oligotrophic: of lakes and rivers. The heat
an inanimate slur, a wool gathering, hanging
like a bad suit. Suspended fine particulate

matter. And an eight-million-dollar ferry shoves off
for Rochester with no souls aboard. I see you,
you know, idling like a limousine through the old

neighbourhoods, your tinted windows. In what
they call “the mind’s eye.” Catch me here
in real time, if that’s the term for it. We’re working

our drinks under threat of a general brownout.
Phospholipase: bitter stimuli activate it.
Back home, we call this a beer parlour.  

I washed my hair at 4 a.m., he says. The full moon,
it was whack. He can’t sleep. The woman
who says pardon my French, over and over,

can’t sleep. They are drunk as young corn. Sweet,
white, freestone peaches. A bit stepped-on.
You said we’d have fun. Do I look happy?

Our fingers, our ankles, swelling in unison. Word
spreads quickly. “Toronto”, in Huron, means
“place of meetings.”  Even now, you may be

darkening my door. On my bike, she says, I dress
all reflective. Even now, you’re troubling
my windbreak. The vertebrate heart muscle

does not fatigue and is under the regulation
of nerves. I’ll wait. First it is unlike evening.
Then it is unlike night. Thirty degrees in a false

high noon, no shade to be found when all things
lie in shadow. The lake is a larger mind
with pressures brought to bear, a wet hot headache

in the hind brain. Above it, cloud racks up.
A mean idea it’s taking to, breathing
through its mouth. In this year of Our Lord

your approach shoulders in like the onset
of a chronic understanding. There are rivers
underfoot, paved over. The Humber, Taddle Creek.

Just the way they sound. To be abyssal
is to inhabit deep water roughly below 1,000 feet.
I need a good costume, he says, but don’t know

what that entails. Walk the districts. There,
the misery of historic buildings. Here,
the superheated rooms of the poor. Sorry,

cooling station closed. Lack of funding. I like
my feet covered up at night, doesn’t everyone.
Blinking, we lie naked atop our sheets.

Spare a dollar for a half-hour in an air-conditioned
cyber-cafe? Okay. Now get lost. My mood
this day is palpable and uncertain. Our smoke

rises but does not disperse. The air hairy as a fly.
In fly weather. Tight under the arms.
It also depletes your spinal fluid. In your spine.

The aesthetic injury level is the degree
of pest abundance above which control measures
should be taken. God, what she’s wearing.

I’m tolerably certain you know the way. The red
tide of the sidewalks.  Pass the dry cleaners
and Wigs, Wigs, Wigs! It used to be called

100% Human Hair! That’s right. “Ontario”
is a Iroquois word meaning “sparkling waters.”
Like doleful seaweed, our predilections undulate.

Rats come out to sniff the garbage blooms
in rat weather. Heavy cloud the colour of slag
and tailings, a green light gathering inside

like a angry jelly. Pardon my French. And the city
on its rails, grinding toward a wreck the lake
cooks up. Its lake effect. When you arrive you may

be soaked to the skin. A tall drink of water. Darken
my door.  All of my organs are fully involved.
He is a little freshet breeze. We are as any microbes

inhabiting an extreme environment, surviving
in the free-living or parasitic mode. Chins above
the germ line. Is it true a rat can spring a latch.

Is it true all creatures love their children. Raccoons
and skunks smell society in decline. That sag
at the middle. In rat weather. Fly weather. A certain

absence of tenderness. Who will you believe.
Bear me away to a motel by the highway. I like
a nice motel by the highway. An in-ground pool.

It’s a take it or leave it type deal. Eutrophic: of lakes
and rivers. See now, she says, that’s the whole reason
you can’t sit up on the railing. So you don’t

fall over.  Freon, exhaust, the iron motes of a dry
lightning. Getting pushed, he says, is not
falling. Jangling metal in your pockets

you walk balanced in your noise, breath
like a beam. I harbour ill will in my heart.
By this shall you know me. Caducous:

not persistent. Of sepals, falling off
as a flower opens. Of stipules, falling off as leaves
unfold. Speak of the devil and the devil appears.

Snow is falling, snagging its points
on the frayed surfaces. There is lightning
over Lake Ontario, Erie. In the great
central cities, debt accumulates along the baseboards
like hair. Many things were good
while they lasted. The long dance halls
of neighbourhoods under the trees,
the qualified fellow-feeling no less genuine
for it. West are silent frozen fields and wheels
of wind. In the north frost is measured
in vertical feet, and you sleep sitting because it hurts
less. It is not winter for long. In April
shall the tax collector flower forth and language
upend its papers looking for an entry adequate
to the sliced smell of budding
poplars. The sausage man will contrive
once more to block the sidewalk with his truck,
and though it’s illegal to idle one’s engine
for more than three minutes, every one of us will idle
like hell. After all that’s happened. We’re all
that’s left. In fall, the Arctic tern will fly
12,500 miles to Antarctica as it did every year
you were alive. It navigates by the sun and stars.
It tracks the earth’s magnetic fields
sensitively as a compass needle and lives
on what it finds. I don’t understand it either.

                           auch jesus war weiß und mittelschicht.
                      ist das jetzt sarkastisch oder amerikanisch
                                zu verstehen?

                      … zeig nicht so mit dem finger herum.
                                             ich sollte mein leben ändern, wenigstens
                               mal das wasser wechseln,

                                                                              meinesgleichen
                                                                                        sind nicht meine leute,
                                                                                                     kurwa,

                      und ich wandle
                             unter euch als bruder, brüder.
                                   wisst ihr,

                                                                               von den birkenmännern
                                                                     ist alles herden- oder hütervieh.

                                     wie das kluge fleisch weiß
                      den bannerträger der genossenschaft,


                                                                                      so gib schon
                                                                         deutsches pfötchen, bitch.
                     … höre ich dich
das sagen in deiner sportpalaststimme
                                    oder meiner?


                                                   (das zur gnade
                                    der späten replik)


                            zeig her die letzte ehrliche haut
                                     des oder-neiße-friedensreichs
                                            weil mein schatz im untergrund ist.


                           meine gleichnisse sind spaltbar
                                      wie die achtzigerjahre, mein haus
                                             der häuser mittleres, mein blut
                                                        regt schaurig nachts die liebe,
                                                                                              kälter als der tod.


                                           … geh halt nach österreich …
                                                   

                                                   ein jeder
                                          kennt so einen antisemiten
                                                                               den er mag.

der inhaber des lyrischen ichs im eingangsbereich
           bitte bei den kassen melden!

                                   was wir brauchen ist mehr geld als gott,
                      a whole new generation to sell to.

please remain calm and assertive
             until we come back,

                                                 von wegen overshoot und so, heut
                                    ist tag der selbstbenennung.

                                    die biologischen sachverhalte
                                              könnten dich einfach wegdiskutieren

                                                           hand aufs herz, vati, wann hast du
                                              gemerkt, dass du heterosexuell bist

                                                            war das
                                      gleich nachdem du rosa oder blau anliefst.

                wie uncool, rauchende eltern, wir sind
                          (gegen) die auserwählten der zersiedlung,

                                     und wen die heimt so sehr liebt zieht
                                                 die fassaden blank

               wie sagt man so schön: punk
                                     kommt von pünktlichkeit,

                                         hört denn das jahrhundert überhaupt nicht mehr auf?
                                    [based on the epic tv mini series „the bible“]

jedem anfang wohnt ein zauber inne,
die älteren werden sich erinnern
(der rest in verschiß).

das sind die gedanken, von denen man nicht weiß,
ob man sie schön oder geistreich nennen soll,
penisse des kleinen mannes.

griffe kloppen kannste im statementraum,
menschewik, oder wie nennt sich das
wo du herkommst.

wa’allah, sei mal ehrlich,
wenn du schon das volk bist
folg halt auch.

1

von draußen von hohenschönhausen
komm ich her, wo sie zu hause sind,

und was berichten sie vom mann
der nachts im fenster steht,

an heizungsrohre schlägt
und in die träume glotzt?

die zähne zeig ihm
wenn du schlafen kannst

(und auch diese fahne
ist rot).

2

darauf eine mitarbeit
und einen mitarbeiter

mehr pro wohneinheit,
arbeit ist ja jetzt überhaupt

das wichtigste (ein häkchen
an jedes ende des kreuzes).

3

die nacht ertüchtigt dich im gasbeton.
nimm die hände aus der tasche,

schneid dir mal die haare,
pickelrobert unter linden,

plattentrottel unter plattentrotteln,
zieh nicht leine, das ist deine sache

hier, du deutsche sau,
du künstler.

1

wo das dorf der onanisten
träumt sich reinheit, zierde
und zufriedenheit,

das glück zu den linnen,
den schlüpfrigen
stellen der schrift

2

wer war zuletzt
in tante ilses zimmer?
die zornigen zeichen.

das ist verdolmetscht,
die im haus sind
leuchten nachts zum fenster raus,

in tante ilses zimmer mit dem groben
tuch im maul,

und ärgert dich dein rechtes aug,
so reiß es aus und wirfs
in tante ilses zimmer.

3

wo das schweineleder hängt,
in tante ilses zimmer,

stehn die fettkartuschen
schmiere in der dunkelheit.

du liebes herzblatt immertreu,
sie sagen tante ilse

ist schon lange tot,
das schwein.