‘n Mens kan maar net hoop vir ‘n kalmer, redeliker en sagter week. Kom ons skop af met ‘n mooi gedig deur Czeslaw Milosz:
Incantation
Human reason is beautiful and invincible.
No bars, no barbed wire, no pulping of books,
No sentence of banishment can prevail against it.
It establishes the universal ideas in language,
And guides our hand so we write Truth and Justice
With capital letters, lie and oppression with small.
It puts what should be above things as they are,
Is an enemy of despair and a friend of hope.
It does not know Jew from Greek or slave from master,
Giving us the estate of the world to manage.
It saves austere and transparent phrases
From the filthy discord of tortured words.
It says that everything is new under the sun,
Opens the congealed fist of the past.
Beautiful and very young are Philo-Sophia
And poetry, her ally in the service of the good.
As late as yesterday Nature celebrated their birth,
The news was brought to the mountains by a unicorn and an echo.
Their friendship will be glorious, their time has no limit.
Their enemies have delivered themselves to destruction.
(Berkeley, 1968)
Dankie! Ek is ‘n groot fan van beide Milosz en Carver. As jy ‘Gift’ vir my gestuur het sonder om van die outeur melding te maak, sou ek geraai het Carver self het dit geskryf!
Desmond, hier’s nog ‘n mooi Milosz-gedig. Vir jou Dinsdagoggend. (Toevallig was dit ook ‘n gunsteling van Raymond Carver – hy open sy bundel “A new path to the waterfall” daarmee …)
Gift
A day so happy.
Fog lifted early, I worked in the garden.
Hummingbirds were stopping over honeysuckle flowers.
There was no thing on earth I wanted to possess.
I knew no one worth my envying him.
Whatever evil I have suffered, I forgot.
To think that once I was the same man did not embarrass me.
In my body I felt no pain.
When straightening up, I saw the blue sea and sails.
(c) Czeslaw Milosz