Poetry Circle of the Air
December 21, 2006 Thursday 3PM CT
( listen)
|
This hour on Here on Earth: Radio Without Borders, Jean Feraca and her guests talk about Bulgaria's national poet, Lyubomir Levchev.
Guest
- Molly Peacock, poet and author of five books of poetry, including "Cornucopia: New & Selected Poems"
- Dana Gioia, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts and author of "Can Poetry Matter?" and "Daily Horoscope"
- David Lehman, editor of the Best American Poetry Series and editor of the "Oxford Book of American Poetry" and author of six books of poems, including "When a Woman Loves a Man"
Poem to be Discussed
Love in the Military Hospital, by Lyubomir Levchev, 1989
Night's greatcoat is large for us --
It will cover us both and still trail on the ground.
It will cover our tracks and just
our words will remain
to wander about and find each other sometimes.
It so happens I've bid farewell to arms,
yet in such a way that God
will remember me.
But I have never been in any military hospital.
By the quiet poisonous Don
I have rolled
sabered by Cossack girls' eyelashes.
But I have never been in any military hospital.
Among stars and sand and plague
with the dreadful artist Gro
I have contemplated the visit of the great mirages.
But I have never ...
Yet, yesterday
we were in the military infirmary.
Covered by the greatcoat --
like a puddle
among puddles of clotted and not-yet-shed blood.
Among piles of pus-stained bandages and gauze
and Heavy Metal chains
we lay embraced, no,
clung to one another.
You had stopped my fatal wound with a kiss
and my soul was flowing out
not into chaos and the pitch dark
but into you, my light abyss.
At the bottom. That's where I wished to hide myself.
We were trembling, both of us.
While around us were screaming the blind, the amputated,
the drugged, the doomed ...
they were vomiting death screams:
"Allons enfants! Allons enfants!"
"Egalité!" "Fraternité!"
The sailor with the cut-off legs
broke into a song with his last inspiration:
"Rot Front!" -- the armless raised his arms.
"Avanti populo!"
"¡No Pasarán!
"Za Stalina, za Rodinu!"
"Za Stalina! ..." --
the punitive squad was shouting,
as well as those -- the Other Ones,
the almost buried in the thirty-million-graves ones.
"¡Patria o muerte!"
"¡Venceremos!"
And maybe I am also blind already.
And that's why I am caressing you like mad.
I read you like Braille: "Forgive me!"
And you whisper: "Not that! Say that other thing!
Say it to me again!"
And I shout: "I love you!" like someone just convicted.
The way one cries out his last word.
Don't worry, they won't hear us
in the twentieth-century military infirmary
among all these screams, moans,
curses, wheezes,
and residual silence.
When tomorrow morning the gravediggers come for me,
speak up again and say you've already burned me.
Say that's what I wanted -- to be burned separately.
Don't say that you mean your fire.
As for my name, it may stay with the Other Ones
in the common grave ...
But even that's too much.
Better claim until the end
that I have never been in any military hospital.
Related Links
|