A good day!
Here is my ode to this country:
"I Cannot Live Without You"
http://www.poetsreadingthenews.com/2021/01/i-cannot-live-without-you/
Considering narcotics or a cliff
to jump from to escape life’s spasms,
its stench, its futile clinging to reflexes,
and also since we dig ourselves
into the ground while still warm––
the question of how to make it
from one margin to the other,
to traverse the canvas via lines
of color, in rows of beans and corn,
leaving spaces, at the end, for air.
(Beloit Poetry Journal, Vol 58, No 2, Winter 2007)
No quick flashes, the minnows’
field of darts, only the clarified
form––a large fish, its cool shield
unhurried and slick as shadow,
sinking below the surface, away
from the waves’ stacked wheels
tripping over themselves as they
topple and foam to the shore––
down to where plankton settles
like snow, where the pale creatures
scull and sift into a wide-mouthed
murky darkness––and here, below
the blood’s agitation, to resume
again, to suppose translucence.
for my father
A golden feather
sanded smooth, a slenderness
in small print.
In the brain’s geography,
your absence is a distant place ––
like the mountains we walked in
the day grandmother’s straw hat
blew off into the valley
and I cried.
You were kind
and said there would be another,
but I knew better.
The life of birds: most fledglings
won’t reach an age suitable for building
a nest of their own.
Rilke's Duino Elegies: Fifth Elegy, translation co-authored with Tony Brinkley. Cerise Press. We also comment on translating Rilke.
Rilke's Cemetery by the Sea, translation co-authored with Tony Brinkley. Ezra Translation.
"An die Sonne," Ingeborg Bachmann, Translation by Leonore Hildebrandt and Tony Brinkley
TO THE SUN
Lovelier than the moon with its ennobled light,
Lovelier than the stars, renowned medallions of the night,
Lovelier by far than a swift comet’s fire,
Summoned to loveliness—more than any other in the heavens—
Because her days sustain your life and mine—the Sun.
When asked to take a stance, the word straightens,
feet braced apart, elbows jutting. Clears its throat
to field questions: Is it still the same?
Left alone, it talks motherese with the creatures,
plays in the shelter of large boulders.
The word finds precautions are never enough.
But then - the stage ready––it settles into lines,
stringing together. Why was it born? Who will attend
its funeral? The curtains swing open.
A man has come down the embankment. He enters the house, heaves himself up the stairs as if drunk. In the morning he wakes on a wooden bench, the room full of stagnant hours. Instead of a bride, he finds an infant here, a girl asleep, and knows–––washing up, both hands scooping cold water over his head, the short curls dripping like a dog’s pelt–––that she will marry a soldier, no matter what she thinks. In this town, they all marry soldiers.
I grew up in the Nachkriegszeit.
Like seedlings defying
broken soil, we learned to observe
the happy occasions, our birthdays.
The past was treacherous –
our burned city, the rubble
dumped into moats and covered
for wider roads – lessons ravaged
by new routines.
Two Logs. The Spoon River Poetry Review. Listen to this poem read by Leonore.
Jazz Night at the Museum, Café Review.
JJ Amaworo Wilson is a German-born, British-educated novelist, short story writer, poet and non-fiction writer. His novel Damnificados won the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Debut Fiction, the Independent Publisher Book Award for Multicultural Fiction, and the New Mexico-Arizona Book Award for Fiction. He is the writer-in-residence at Western New Mexico University, USA, and teaches on the MFA in Creative Writing at Stonecoast, University of Southern Maine.
Deerbrook Editions in Cumberland brought out Leonore Hildebrandt’s third book, “Where You Happen to Be.” The Harrington resident is quietly one of Maine’s most meticulous writers, as evidenced in “The Next Unknown” and “The Work at Hand.”
Check out the flip-thru preview and read a few poems. To order a copy from the publisher, go here.
Rulers have their praises set in stone––
monuments command the public square,
so the things we have always known
guide our vision. You and I meander
through the old-town, leaving traces
in garbage bins. We don’t decipher
the plaque’s inscription. Impatient
for another art––less enduring but wider,
not trapped by materiality––we delight
in a street market’s ambience: clues
for seeing into things. The sights
from below: airborne graffiti, tent-city blues,
a clown’s uncanny grin. The statue descends,
The Shelter, a collaboration with painter Heidi Daub. The publication by the Split Rock Review features Heidi’s paintings, which Leonore's writing responds to, along with a recording.
Thinking Potatoes, read on Maine Public Radio by poet laureate Stu Kestenbaum.
“Passing,” Harpur Palate, Summer/Fall 2016.
“The Book’s Secret,” Sugar House Review 15, Spring/Summer 2017.
"The Book’s Secret"
Every sentence can be read in an almost infinite number of ways!
David Hawkes on the I Ching
Earth. Plumes of smoke, bedrock, the planet ball gone astray in expanding words. You stumble from winter to summer, a country humming with voices, engines, brighter accents. Before a mother is buried, the fight for succession unhinges marvelous frames.
Pachacuti was the 15th century warrior-king who founded the Inca empire. (In Quechua, Pachakutiq means "he who overturns space and time.”) His statue near Machu Picchu is transformed, in turn, by the advent of pigeons. Now his strong arms bestow blessings to the people. Poetry may act like these birds.