Fairy Tale In Verse

In a local branch of Age Concern I came across an LP on the old Camden label. It was entitled simply Brahms Liede. I paid for it and brought it home full of anticipation. I am very keen on Schubert and like particularly the Winterreise. These liede by Brahms were all new to me. What was so fascinating was that I did not recognise any of the poets. Frustratingly there were no translations, only the original poems in German. I listened to the LP and made a CD of it. Then with the help of my German dictionary I set about working out what the songs were about. Eventually I managed to come up with some translations. This one by Dieter Rihm (with the date 1858) has a beautiful lilting rising melody and haunting rhythmic accompaniment on piano. I have not been able to track down Dieter Rihm though I assume him to be a little known, perhaps unpublished poet who was a friend of the composer.

It is called Fabel in Versen which means Fairy Tale in Verse.

There was a town of noble heritage,

A church, shops, thatched roofs with spiral chimneys,

A hill that sloped down to a landing stage.

I see white blossoms drifting on the breeze,

The pleasant boredom of the boats in Summer,

How Autumn’s setting sun and fiery leaves

Influence the lake with bronze, how it grows calmer.

I see the stillness deep Winter conceives

 

When in the lake an image of the town

Appears: sloping roofs, smoke in blue air,

The shops closed-up, the church’s gentle spire,

This holiday, pointing both up and down

Into the water, which holds as in a mirror

Good will for everyone, both here and there.

 

A Ballad for Joe and Heidi

I have changed the title to “A” ballad rather than “The” because I realise this poem is far from definitive, others may write their own ballads of the same subjects, also I may try again. Clearly also, the first stanza owes something to LP Hartley’s:

“The past is another country; they do things differently there.”

I would like to thank RR (formerly known as LDP) http://ldptonedeaf.blogspot.co.uk/ and LK  http://box-elder.blogspot.co.uk/  for their encouragement and support for the idea behind this ballad, which is I hope a beginning of something more…

Sitges is a town famous for its Bohemian atmosphere and long beach on the Costa Dorada https://www.onthebeach.co.uk/destinations/spain/costa-dorada/sitges 

 

Finally here is a link to Joe’s book of sonnets Handbook for Explorers with photographs by Lucy Kempton. It is a deluxe colour edition. A beautiful book visually and   aurally 

  http://www.blurb.co.uk/b/3030400-handbook-for-explorers    A second more affordable edition for the pocket or bag may soon appear…

 

 

 

 

A Ballad of Heidi and Joe

 

First we must draw a country of the mind,

its maps and contours, pictures; then agree

to go there. If it’s anywhere we’ll find

the explorer’s life, it’s in another country,

a country with a Sitges and an August sea

and with a Tunbridge Wells where they’re content

walking both together on the pavement.

 

Who swam the furthest, talked the most, was thinner,

understood people best is hard to know;

who could divine an animal’s agenda,

some would say Heidi, some that it was Joe.

It is a fact: until just a while ago,

not as some couples,  one leader, one behind,

they walked both together on the pavement,

 

crossed over to the sand and breathed sea air.

Their sufferings and illnesses seemed past;

the future like a strong and rusty stair

led upwards to a landscape set to last;

they did not know its light was fading fast;

the past in front of them, their present was behind,

walking both together on the pavement.

 

Whole stories hide here; pictures stun with colour;

trees ebb like tides at night, by day a-buzz

with multiples of wing and throat. A cooler

and glasses, Ipad, he waits to greet us

with maps and plans, and later on he’ll tweet us

with routes that he and Heidi have in mind

walking both together on the pavement,

 

as if we too with root and flower could stay

unmindful of the assassin, changeless summer,

within the panorama of this day;

not noticing the sky’s not getting dimmer,

nor fireflies by right begin to glimmer.

Our shadows lengthen, leave them both behind,

walking both together on the pavement.

 

Of Ballads and Blogs

It has been a slow and gradual return to the blogger’s universe for me since Joe’s funeral. The moving tributes and accounts by Joe’s friends have meant a great deal to me, as the brief meetings with them at the funeral were not representative of the large meaning of their presence. So thanks to Robbie, Lucy, Tristan and Claire, and to those who in turn commented on their posts.

Joyce has also been recovering from a severe asthma attack following the Dust Cloud over London, which entailed a 10 day stay in hospital. She is only just adjusting now, and it will take several more days before she will be fully rehabilitated.

I have been fortunate to have a storehouse of memories of seeing Joe regularly in the weeks before he died and am attempting to turn these into some kind of ballad, maybe The Ballad of Heidi and Joe…

However, this is proving hard and unpredictable, a project in the making rather than a statement or even the draft of a statement.

My friend John Arnett met me in The Pineapple for a drink. He was telling me about his favourite aunt, who has recently died, and how on a visit to her he found himself alone with her, while his cousin went to make some tea.

“What are you thinking about?” John asked his aunt. Her vagueness and memory loss of recent months had not prepared him for the answer. She looked straight back at John and pronounced, “I’m thinking about you!”

On the way back to London in the car (I imagine a late sun slanting in under the visor) John found the words of a poem forming and formulating in his mind. As he drove the phrases became more clearly etched and by the time he reached home he was able to reach for a sheet of paper and write down what was in his head. It was only then he fully realised the poem was all about his favourite aunt.

I happened to have an envelope and a pen in my pocket and it was on this surface that John wrote out the following while I fetched him a pint. Here is John’s tribute to his aunt.

Try to remember where

You saw it last

This thing you lost

Somewhere in the past.

It won’t be where you left it

That’s a fact –

And I know to my cost

It can’t come back

This thing you lost

This thing we call the past.

Some things aren’t meant to last

Some things do, and should

So, whatever else you lose,

Don’t lose heart –

There never was a heart

So true, or good.

 

Thanks to John for allowing me to share his poem on my blog, and for the willingness to appear in the Pineapple from time to time to drink deep and discuss consciousness.

 

Joe Hyam 20/09/1933 - 10/03/2013

Handbook for Explorers 19

And yet, you must keep saying "and yet",
To preserve your mind from loss of balance
And keep on thinking that there's still a chance
To find a route which you can safely bet
Will lead into an unlikely country
Where people have learnt the art of kindness,
With no rules of play and no blind duress,
No referee to insist how you must be.
But if they tell such stories to keep up hope;
And if you choose to sing as you trudge on,
Valiant hymns of love and salvation,
You'll feel better; and feeling better, stop
To reflect that no end is more worthwhile
Than, when it comes, you can't holdback a smile.

Joe Hyam

Peace Sonnets Not War Poems

 

 

Photographers’ Sonnet

Rupert Brooke 

Now, God be thanked Who has matched us with His hour,

And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping,

With hand made sure, clear eye,  and sharpened power,

To turn,  as swimmers into cleanness leaping.

We have found safety with all things undying,

The winds, and morning, tears of men, and mirth,

The deep night, and birds singing, and clouds flying,

And sleep, and freedom, and the autumnal earth:

And think, this heart, all evil shed away,

A pulse in the eternal mind, no less

Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;

Her sights and sounds, dreams happy as her day;

And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,

In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

 

 

Reassembled  by K.Hyam from Rupert Brooke’s sonnets Peace 1914, Safety 1914 and The Soldier 1914.

Perspectives

 Perspectives on a Lake

 

On that shore small people move,

walk tiny dogs, sit on small benches;

on this shore birds patrol their grove,

slow and long-legged under green branches

that etch the unrelenting rays

in bars of complicated shade.

Stretched wide, out there the sunshine plays

easily on tree,  colonnade

and path. Perspective grinds them down

to semblance on a tapestry,

a distant likeness of the town,

pastiche of inches, lacquered sky.

Whilst here, an insensible curved rat –

still wet from the swim that made her great.

 

+++

Jazz Riff for Nigel Henderson

Italian Street Scene                    after                                   Nigel Henderson         Stressed Photograph 1951

 

concertina’d                                        
space against space
                                  horse w/ cart
going up
              the street’s tiled zig-zag  
paved crazily
                      swirled in Henderson’s dark dish              

                      rippling up to white-walls
of a displaced convertible –
                                                gleam-sheen  
                                    merged into brick
                low door open –

white shirt hair slicked back
as if sprouted from his own car

it’s all been pulled back squeezed up stretched                                 
so not knowing
                which way to look
                                         you’re in the photo too

                                         coffee in the air
breadrolls flowers
like the bunch she’s carrying
                                in one hand
haloed by morning sun
as she arrives walking
                             too cool to agitate
unstoppable jazz walk
                                unstressed –
testing the hem
of her retro-for-real check-print dress
                                  
the staccato tattoo
of those heels
wins out in all the other sounds –
motor starting                      
an aria of an argument
                                neighing horse –
in the old cacophony
                                    a rhythm-awakening

On Vivian Maier

The Eye of Fame

 

Resting alone, the eye of the coming storm,

nervously awake, her own space of mirrors and light.

Vanishing to the streets in style, her own style

made timeless by a Paris memory,

in these quarter-heal leather shoes she walks

and walks in; the restless streets, skyline

“…vivid against the little soft cities.” Demolition men

enter the frame, and a woman being canoodled,

incredulity that the camera lady comes so close, fascination

at this twin lens shooter, the steady aim. Cardsharps

interested as if: “Hey, a dame just took a picture.”

 

 

 

Kenneth hyam may 2013

The Post Below

The post below is a coming together of my own thoughts and an attempt at a translation of Laforgue's Pierrots. Laforgue wrote these Pierrot poems as part of a longer work entitled L'immitation de notre dame la lune, which literally means The immitation of our Lady the Moon. 
Translation is always a dicy business. I realise that the first question is: how does the poet translator circumnavigate the problem that all poems are almost by their nature untranslatable? Has the poet/translator come up with a new poem> If so, how much is this a translation and how much a new poem masquerading as a translation?

I don't on my conscience know the answer to these questions. However , I will be as honest as I can. One of these poems is in fact a translation, the other is well....a transreflection, an extrapolation from the non-existence of a poem which does not have a material counterpart..

Pierrots

Pierrots iii

As dusk falls, these molesters

Of statues, deep in the parks,

Only offer their arms and attentions

To the least improperly dressed.

In a one-to-one with a woman

It feels as if there are three,

Mixing up tomorrow with yesterday,

Intensely demanding nothing.

Claiming, “I love you” with eyes

To the gods, ecstatically dead-pan,

Concluding their mad declaration

With, “Oh hell, shall we just leave it!”

…Until She, in forgetful daze,

Seized by one-knows-not-what need,

Drunk on moonlight, falls into their arms

Very far from respectable ways.

Pierrots After Hours

In a café over absinthe glasses

They stretch the tight rope of a gaze;

A tilting line that gently sways,

Linking them briefly to express

Mad steps with nonchalant disdain,

Twinned in the dim light where they drink,

Where to fly upwards is to sink

And losing balance is to gain

A new context for the curved Moon

the velvet sea she’s swimming through.

Their blood freezes: nothing more to do

Except fall; fallen, fly alone

Onto the blue cobbles where all’s well,

White clothes spread out, a drifting calm,

‘til whirr of metal, crash , alarm

As church clock grates its ancient bell.

Terrestrial Park

 August 2012

The clouds straddle the flats high up like china clay;

five o clock feels warm and light as August might,

and the flats reach up towards the beckoning light

away from Earth like giant spikes, to head away.

Challenging space as if it needed to be fought,

young riders ride into the sprawling bushy park

on bikes, some paid for, some taken for a lark,

skidding and crashing, from game to impact sport.

The white car with the door wide open draws a crowd,

becomes a learning hub: a local Doctor Seuss

raps tall from a tower where trouble brews.

The car has pedigree, a secret whispered loud,

a half-told story’s well-known sequel, how for hours

it was driven round, returning round a certain bend,

not for a bad reason – just to help a friend.

There’s talk of pacts and treaties, the sharing of powers:

“…if one side can respect, the other understands.”

Now even younger kids have blades; one little boy

a blade that coils and uncoils like a toy,

a game of stick and scatter, for brain and glands

that boil with thoughts. The nerves send their orders;

the bikes skid, slide round; one hits the deck;

the rider smirks, jeans ripped, t-shirt newly wrecked.

Up in the flats a breeze helps a mother get their suppers.

Her thoughts simmer; she won’t go to money-lenders –

even before the doorbell rang she’d know the score.

Now she calls, “Supper” from the window, shouts, shouts more,

and her message is relayed by willing messengers

Kenneth Hyam Dec 2012

Reasons Why Not

....to crack a Walnut…                      

Of all the nuts they say

are good for you, one wins

out in front by a whisker:

Nature’s tooled Netsuke

in the shape of your brain.

You may well need

its white squiggly crunch

of protein

glazed and shining,

like a Botticelli cloud,

reined in by a husk;

yet much more than its

gonad-protecting,

memory enhancing,

artery-washing nutrients

you need the dream

of the walnut, the inside-

its-shell stage, where

a perfectly-formed

concert grand is waiting

for the femininity and lyricism

of Mitsuko Uchida.

You can't know
that that's not true:

or never have heard her play Mozart

just look a little closer

at the walnut

and see how it’s made

of two halves – a left

and a right side

you might say –

and how each is shaped

like a coracle, sailing

where two oceans meet.

_______________________________________

Festival 51

To go with my photobook on the Festival of Britain celebrations of last summer on the South Bank, I have written this poem

Festival 51

I’m lost among these Londoners

and semi-Londoners I live among,

yet London stirs me whenever London stirs.

The silent losers and the real winners,

Enigma-breakers in the crowd, unsung,

were lost among these Londoners

who drank in tents to scientific wonders,

who danced on terraces where Skylon hung;

 London stirred them whenever London stirred,

and would include each bunch of foreigners

who came to stay. No matter how much stung

or lost among these Londoners,

new cohorts came to interleaving boroughs –

a hovel built on clay, mist-bank where sunrays clung,

when London first stirred, whenever London stirred.

Smoked rubble, lives peeled off in pastel layers –

the bomb-sites pollinated, bells were rung,

and each voice lost in other Londoners’ –

a climb of sound, a point where nothing stirs.

Foundry Gates

A pint of Broadside from Southwold got John reminiscing about his teacher training days in Manchester. He was walking past some gigantic gates of a defunct iron foundry and took a photograph. He also wrote a poem about the image which he took. All this was 20 years ago. He told me he could still remember the poem and would write it out now in the pub. I rummaged in my rucksack for paper to no avail. John went for some,  and came back WITH A PAPER PLATE. He then proceeded to write down his poem from memory without a pause or a single crossing out.

Please click on the image to read the poem. Thanks John for this poem, and the new genre of paper plate pomes.

Photobook

Fairground 51 | Make Your Own Book

Please try clicking on the icon under the book and to the right with four arrows radiating out to see a preview of my new blurb book. This icon will give you the full screen version.The book came about as a result of a photography project I did on the South Bank of the Thames. Inspired by the celebrations of the 60th anniversary of the Festival of Britain I took a series of photographs on the theme of Fairground '51. I have included an introduction and some poems and captions, the idea being to tap into the spirit of that time, both in the sense of the actual Festival of Britain and also the rekindling of it in 2011 - I think the words help the reader to tune in. There was a strong and emotive atmosphere which made me feel it was not only OK to take photographs, it was somehow nesessary as the artifacts and installations - beach huts, photobooth, fairground attractions and the 1950s ice-cream vans - would soon disappear from sight. However, on the preview you will not be able to see much of the text clearly, even on full "Full Screen." The pictures are clear, which is a good thing, thanks to Blurb. Another reason I took the photographs was because of the joy of making them, just being there as an observer and participator. I hope some of this feeling translates to the viewer of the pictures.

Benches and Book Vaults

Benches and Book Vaults

The only company is the pigeons that fly at knee height and settle on the ground. He watches as a girl sits cross-legged to photograph her beau. He watches how shadows of birds climb walls in sunlight. He feels cold. The thought of toast just made from an old pop-up toaster, the sound the knife makes across its surface and how the butter…. He walks on through sunlight wondering if, to a ghost, it might seem a wall impenetratable. There are concrete towers, there were slums the concrete towers replaced.
The arrow to Scoob takes him down metallic stairs into a low-ceilinged basement where books are ranged in avenues of shelves. He listens to the dusty quiet in which pages murmur of someone close they’ve lost – History, Politics, Architecture, the film section open access – Poetry a little harder to get to, enclosed in a little room of shelves where two people must be conscious of each other. Up on Marchmont Street the man still smiles into the camera of his girl as she squats beside him on the sunny bench. No sunlight here exactly, in the little Poetry room with its walls of spines and titles – an older daylight reflects up from the open page, a light of rivers, reeds and orchards sunlight passes through.


Kenneth Hyam Jan 2012.
Urban Landscapes

Story

Red Zodiac

Tommy gradually began to realise that an X-ray and an extraction were not the same thing. An X-ray involved no taking out and was painless, whereas an extraction….The one good thing about the extraction was that Uncle Gerry was coming to take him there in the red Zodiac. There were Consuls on the estate, a grey Triumph and an ageing MG but certainly no Zodiacs. That was going to turn a few heads. The other good thing was that he was going to get an extra 1s pocket money on Saturday, which he calculated would make 2s .. 6d as opposed to the usual 1s .. 6d. When you added this to the 5s .. 6d he had already saved , it came to 8s which was one penny more than the price of the model Lysander aeroplane he was saving to buy. It was still there, in the window of the Ipswich Sports & Toyshop… Yet when Tommy awoke on the day, he felt a mounting sickness together with dreadful images of torture. His mother cooked him breakfast. Toast was not enough, she explained. He would get a headache on just toast. Tommy tried yet couldn’t eat a thing. Uncle Gerry laughed and even scoffed some of the egg while she was out of the room. He winked and wiped his moustache, knowing that if all the egg disappeared his older sister would be onto him.

Some time after the injection, which was a quick stab of pain, there was a crunch, a wrenching and a sound like a pencil being snapped. After the tooth was out, his mouth felt funny, trying to talk made him laugh, and his knees started to shake. On the motorway the speedo needle of the Zodiac went from 75 to 85 and touched 90. Tommy was forgetting about his tooth. They were off to see Haley in her caravan. She never made him eat anything, and she was often dressed in her costume, which was like a silvery glittering kind of swimsuit or bra. Still feeling drowsy from the injection, Tommy lay back on the comfy trim of the Zodiac’s front bench seat. His uncle was saying something about horse power, synchromesh and overhead cams. Tommy did not have much idea about what these were, just that they sounded good. When they got to the circus compound, Haley’s caravan door was open. She’d got him ice cream cake and cherry aid. Haley said the cake would be OK because it wasn’t hot.

After he’d eaten some of the cake and drunk all the cherry aid, it was time to watch Haley and Tearaway rehearsing. Tommy loved the sound of the big hooves careering round the sawdust ring. Suddenly Haley was up on Tearaway’s back whispering into the two pointed ears as they spun past. Steadily, she began to raise first one leg and then the other onto the horse’s brown back. A second later she was standing up and spreading out her arms for balance. Uncle Gerry’s moustache and his lower lip had parted company. Tommy, in his unmathematical way, wondered why the tent was getting smaller, and he watched as the performer effortlessly shifted her weight until, standing on one leg, she became a perfectly streamlined shape.

Card Player

Card Player



A card player smokes at a folding table
on his balcony over the alleyway,
which is reached by other alleys and steps
worn smooth as a luck-stone always carried.

He says the air’s better in his domain
fifteen feet up from the morning clatter
of chairs and bottles. He’s cool up there,
though the tuc-tucs come and the stalls are starting,

and all over the city voices are stirring.
In his one-room palace his hand strengthens,
his quick hands flick as they flip his cards over
and as they land on the green cloth he exhales

with the “Ah…” of one who makes a discovery
and an “Ah!” and “Ha-ha” of sudden good humour.
Though the game he controls is made of frustration
he’s fifteen feet up from it, in an air

of elevated thought, an unshattered air,
and the card player delights in not knowing
what is going to happen next in his life
of cards. He smokes. Tea sweetens his throat.


***

Climbing towards the Light

Climbing towards the Light


There’s a ladder I have to climb,
that goes up like a white trellis
into the blue sky. The sun’s already up,
nothing is in front of me but this.
The white rungs quiver, steady up,
sway again – it all takes time.

Too high now to go back down
I take my time and rest holding
onto the supports of thick-weave rope,
telling myself it’s easier to cling
than let go, believing I can cope,
cut off over a sleeping town.

Trouble’s already starting there:
business begins as curtains stir,
the whole mechanism is a clock,
vast, faceless and sinister,
without face or hands or safety-lock
to stop it. It works on air

as I do, and it feeds like us
and feeds off us – easy to forget
it is after all just a machine
that goes down streets in dry or wet,
fitting into each morning scene,
quotidian as the morning bus.

I don’t climb to get away.
I quarry into the sunlight,
the unburst bubble of dust-seed air.
Sirens, planes, birds in incessant flight
will soon make nothing of my dare –
resting, I greet the swaying day.

The Night Mirror

I have recently made a short video of a poem called,The Night Mirror. If you would like to see it please be prepared to use headphone or speakers, go to Youtube and type in:

The Night Mirror wmv