De Amerikaanse dichter, librettist en essayist Scott Cairns werd geboren op 19 november 1954 in Tacoma, Washington. Zie ook alle tags voor Scott Cairns op dit blog.
Our Lost Angels
Ages ago, clouds brought them near
and rain brought them to our lips;
they swam in every vase, every cupped palm.
We took them into ourselves
and were refreshed.
For those luckier generations, angels
were the sweet, quickening substance
in all light, all water, every morsel of food.
Until the day the sun changed some, as it had,
took them skyward, but thereafter
the clouds failed to restore them.
In time, streams gave up
every spirit, and the sea, unreplenished,
finally became the void we had feared
it would become, the void we had imagined.
And, as now, clouds brought only rain,
and the emptied rain
brought only the chill in which
we must now be wrapped.
A Lot
A little loam and topsoil
is a lot.
—Heather McHugh
A vacant lot, maybe, but even such lit vacancy
as interstate motels announce can look, well, pretty
damned inviting after a long day’s drive, especially
if the day has been oppressed by manic truckers, detours,
endless road construction. And this poorly measured, semi-
rectangle, projected and plotted with the familiar
little flags upon a spread of neglected terra firma
also offers brief apprehension, which—let’s face it,
whether pleasing or encumbered by anxiety—dwells
luxuriously in potential. Me? Well, I like
a little space between shopping malls, and while this one may
never come to be much of a garden, once we rip
the old tires from the brambles and bag the trash, we might
just glimpse the lot we meant, the lot we hoped to find.
Homeland of the Foreign Tongue
Each morning we begin again. My wife
wakes me with a shove, and condescends to try
her sorry Deutsch with me; she’s chewing mud.
God, she’s dumb. I tell her so, but mostly
in a dialect she never understands.
Carefully now, she mouths her thanks and takes me
by the hand to the dampness of the trough,
where she leaves me throwing water on my face.
I wash those parts I want to wash, begin
my bump along the wall to the sour kitchen,
where coffee waits and something tasteless chills
against the plate. Grace is blind, and probably
deaf as well, happens only where angels
let it—nowhere you’ll ever find in time.
I’ve never seen the woman’s face, though once,
too far from here to count for much, I wished I could.
But it’s morning come again, and she,
as is her habit, begins to sing above the soup.
Somewhere, some angel pities me, as God
must once have pitied her: Her voice forgets
its tenement, and I neglect the words.
Idiote Psalmen
4
Isaaks boetepsalm, zonder begeleiding.
Opnieuw, en ja, opnieuw, o Onophoudelijke Verdraagzame
van onze troosteloze terugkomsten o Eeuwig Verzakende
Verlatene (zonder conclusie), o Onuitputtelijke,
vind ik mijn gezicht tegen de grond, en opnieuw
ontsnapt mijn smeekbede aan onreine lippen, en aan een hart
dat is aangekoekt en vernauwd door zijn eigen bezoedelde resten.
U bent voor eeuwig, en voor eeuwig gezegend, en ik verlang ernaar
op een dag mijn knoop te ontwarren en de zaken te veranderen,
om minstens één laatste seizoen zondeloos te doorstaan,
om nog één keer zonder hartzeer voor u te buigen.
Vertaald door Frans Roumen
Zie voor nog meer schrijvers van de 19e november ook mijn blog van 19 november 2020 en ook mijn blog van 19 november 2018 en eveneens mijn blog van 19 november 2017 deel 3.