Fragments of a Journey
A Fistful of Life
www.fragmentsbyjosedekoster.com
Blog 9
Hi Everyone. In this blog, instead of carrying on with the story, I have decided to include, instead, some of the poems that are to be found in the book and which do not, and will nt, feature in episodes of the autobiography because they are not integral to the story but are included in a separate section, entitled "Particles". I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I have
Che
When Che was alive, the people
wore berets and smoked thin cigars,
shouted and looked sombre,
smiling only when the word, 'revolution'
spoke its name.
The berets are back in cupboards
or thrown out. Cigars are more expensive
and even this ones have lost their flavour.
The look of deep thought smiles no longer.
Revolution now, could mean Khomeini or Pol Pot
Che, you died not only
in a shabby little room in a Bolivian Police station
but also, Che, inside the heart of the memory.
Alas....
Osip Mandelstam*
Tired bones thrown into a grave with other bones
is not the end... for each night at ten,
I lay you out, sleepy hands and dead feet
the skull awake on a slab of gold
and dresses in the fineries of your long gone poverty
with God's finger on your forehead.
And from the voice of Akhmatova
(the last sound of a Tartar princess)
I borrow a sound, a word, a drop of honey
and I wrap your defleshed body in that word
gently, my brother. Then
I fill the grave with you
and wave my fists at the white sky
and sing my songs of remembrance.
Remembering for you
of what I cannot articulate – yet do know within my soul
and curse for you, the gigantic death-dream of Stalin,
silence the knocking fist on your door
and return to the womb
the essence of that evil
which threw tired bones into a grave full of other bones.
Or shall I simply lay you out at ten?
Forever.Oh, Osip, sing on.
*Osip Mandelstam was a Russian poet who was imprisoned by Stalin and sent to a guag in Siberia where he died from cold and deprivation
Dissident
High above the roofs of Moscow
an eagle hangs silent
its claws ready to shatter the human soul
flung wide like a scream across the minds of men.
Down below, a man stands trial,
sits before a wall of grim, forbidding faces
in a cold, sinister room of a grey, squat building oozing menace.
Hissing, snake-sissing sounds are uttered.
“Dissident!” it sizzles
The man's face, like a vault with its door shut tight
betrays itself momentarily as the macabre accusations
pound into his brain.
Soon, his name will become a blade of grass
somewhere on a steppe in in far-white Siberia.
His bones will yield pain back to earth
and his eyes will fill a flower.
“Shcharansky, Shcharanskyyyyy” will cry the wind
as it blows through the trees
and falls dead against the closed heart of Soviet thought.
Somewhere in a forest
a hand points up from under the sod.
It is Galanskov fingering our guilt
Remember this,
A poet dies only when
no-one reads him anymore.