Some Young Kings (audio only)
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It turns out however that I was deeply Mistaken about the end of the world The body in flames will not be the body In flames but just a house fire ignored The black sails of that solitary burning Boat rubbing along the legs of lovers Flung into a Roman sky by a carousel The lovers too sick in their love To notice a man drenched in fire on a porch Or a child aflame mistaken for a dog Mistaken for a child running to tell of a bomb That did not knock before it entered In Gaza with its glad tidings of abundant joy In Kazimierz a god is weeping In a window one golden hand raised Above his head as if he’s slipped On the slick rag of the future our human Kindnesses unremarkable as the flies Rubbing their legs together while standing On a slice of cantaloupe Children You were never meant to be human You must be the grass You must grow wildly over the graves
Click the icon above to listen to this audio poem.
Click the icon above to listen to this audio poem.
Click the icon above to listen to this audio poem.
Burning, he walks in the stream of flickering letters, clarinets, machines throbbing quicker than the heart, lopped-off heads, silk canvases, and he stops under the sky and raises toward it his joined clenched fists. Believers fall on their bellies, they suppose it is a monstrance that shines, but those are knuckles, sharp knuckles shine that way, my friends. He cuts the glowing, yellow buildings in two, breaks the walls into motley halves; pensive, he looks at the honey seeping from those huge honeycombs: throbs of pianos, children's cries, the thud of a head banging against the floor. This is the only landscape able to make him feel. He wonders at his brother's skull shaped like an egg, every day he shoves back his black hair from his brow, then one day he plants a big load of dynamite and is surprised that afterward everything spouts up in the explosion. Agape, he observes the clouds and what is hanging in them: globes, penal codes, dead cats floating on their backs, locomotives. They turn in the skeins of white clouds like trash in a puddle. While below on the earth a banner, the color of a romantic rose, flutters, and a long row of military trains crawls on the weed-covered tracks.
Wilno, 1931