Breyten Breytenbach. Translated to Enlish by / vert. deur Waldemar Gouws
poem
take me through a zone of snow
farmlands with bales of hay in summertime
where birds eat the patches of words
then swarm to rhythms in motion
towards clearness, towards some clearness
take me back over the courses of a life
where loved ones lie with decayed faces
in cribs of dust
show me the purpose of the tortoise tracks in the sand
let me see the stars another final
first time blessing the earth
with clearness, with thirsty clearness
let me grasp how the wind hangs out
flags and joys for the fluttering
in the tremor of tree tops
let me hear the child cry
the boy’s laugh on his way to school
the lament of the hailer of darkness at night
for clearness, for the dream of clearness
let me stretch this body for a while yet
over the folds and the sighs of a woman
let the quivering of the spinal column be a flame
it’s all right that dark like day against the window glass
sheds the recalled in seed of forgetting
and that love and grief were mentioned
for the sake of clearness, for the sake of the silent song of clearness
take me to the highest mountain
let me carry stones in my trouser pockets
fit the wings of plastic across my shoulders
that I might soar where everything blue crackles
and only the empty level sea-mirror glitters
of clearness, of the blinding quality of clearness
lower me into the deepest well
where walls are damp from the searching of hands
for the moon that like a thought
is bobbing faceless in the deep’s dark
string the flow of words like a rope around my neck
and let me hang from the raw intertwinement of clearness
but let me sit squatting in silence
let it all come and go
let me forget and be absorbed in coming and passing away
let me hear the heart swobbling in the void
as it is a journey, a space of breath
of clearness, oh the clearness
(©Tr. by Waldemar Gouws / 2015 of the unpublished poem “gedig” of Breyten Breytenbach)