The importance of a page

Walking in October sun
I see ...

a no-name house;
its shutters barred,
the veranda empty,

no one picks
the figs to spread
on bread for tea,

underneath the fir tree
no one sits to write
or listen to the sea,

there are no stories of the sea,
there is no tide
no ebb or flow for me.

Yet ...

tethered to the quay
is a nutshell boat
and a man nearby,

'rather small for you'
I joke, glad to have
some company on the way,

'when all is said and done
I can make myself to be
any shape in poetry'

he laughs, and tears
a page out from his book
which like a leaf takes flight,

cartwheels over water,
as if it wants to be
out of sight before the ink
has dried.

'Why do you write?'
I ask and look away
to watch more pages para glide
across the bay.

'My thoughts leave home,
it is my autumn' I hear
him say-or has he heard me?

I do not know
so turn my head,
but man and boat have disappeared.



For Misho who understood the absence of things.

Seagulls, by David Hart

David writes that his poem Seagulls appears in the current edition of Modern Poetry in Translation and the following is his note which appears in that edition:
"Milorad Krystanovich came to Birmingham from Croatia in 1992, from the upheaval in that part of Europe, and after a few years made the transition from making poems in Croatian to writing and publishing in English. His latest is Improvising Memory (Nine Arches Press 2010). In recent years he has been in less than good health, and as a gift I had the idea of a poem of a meeting of gulls from his birthplace and from my own. The words were put into Welsh by someone I was at school with, Helen Wallis, for which thank you; the Croatian is by Milorad, and I am grateful to his close friends Cathy Perry and Martin Underwood for enabling the process."
To read the poem, go to the Poems page on this site.

Posted on behalf of David Hart
http://davidhartbirminghampoet.blogspot.com/