by Brett Rutherford
from Meleager, The Greek Anthology v, 157
So sharp it is
that one light scratch
afflicts the heart:
love poisoning!
Tuesday, November 22, 2022
Monday, November 21, 2022
Mosquito Jealousy
by Brett Rutherford
Adapted from Meleager, The Greek Anthology, v.152-153
1
Blood-sucking and shameless,
the little monsters come
in ones and twos, and dozens,
to pester Heliodora’s sleep.
Winged predators, be warned:
the lady must be allowed
her beauty-sleep: on this
the whole city is counting.
Here are my arms, all bare
as a I kneel at her bedside.
Am I less savory? Young veins
are pulsing with love-heat,
So have your way with me.
Here comes a cloud of your
sisters to feed on her:
One by one, must I crush you?
2
My vigil done, to home
and my own sleepless bed
I crept away. Just as I turned
the corner, a cloaked man,
younger and taller than me,
approached the garden wall.
I shuddered and turned
my back to him – did he pass on,
or did he leap the wall,
and is he now with her
another of her secret lovers?
One solitary mosquito lights
upon my forearm and waits
for instruction. Friend insect,
once you have fed on me,
pray land on Heliodora’s ear
and whisper this message:
"One who adores you,
kept watch at the foot
of your curtain’d bed.
"Sleep not, fair sluggard.
Have those small vampires
left you so somnolent
that someone’s arms
embracing you seem but
a dream ongoing?
"Does someone younger,
taller, yet timid in love,
sleep nestled brotherly
beside you?" Tell me,
mosquito spy and pander,
that I have nothing to fear!
O nearly-weightless monster,
had I but Hades’ or Hecate's
power, I would bulk you up
with the muscles of Hercules
and send you off to fetch her!
Do this for me, and for my part,
instead of crushing you,
blood and all, a smear
upon my fingers, I’ll give
you the hero’s lion-skin
and send you off well-armed,
demigod of Mosquito-Land!
Spring Garland
by Brett Rutherford
Adapted from Meleager, The Greek Anthology V.147
Which, the spring meadow, or
Heliodora’s wild tresses, grass
bursting green at verge of spring,
or the blond-gold weave and braid
I cannot stop caressing? Which?
Spring is her rival with white violets,
Narcissus amid the myrtle berries
makes one forget all other beauties.
Here come the lilies, mocking me
with fragrance a woman can wear
with artifice only. Crocus and hyacinth,
what more delicate, fair
as a new born fledgling, young
as never shall we be again? --
oh, unbearable, the thought
that roses will come back again,
her only real rivals. Put all
in a wreath, and watch
as she embrows herself,
the petals scattering
amid those impossible curls.
For this, most flowers die
willingly.
Trapped
by Brett Rutherford
from Meleager, Greek Anthology v.96
To kiss you, Timarion, is to step
in quicksand, or be stuck
like a hapless dove in bird-lime
that terrible glue bird-catchers make
from the bark of the holly tree.
I did not see it coming. Blinded
I was by the fire in your eyes.
Your glance is phoenix-fire,
your touch the tender trap
that will not let me go.
Tuesday, November 15, 2022
At the Temple of Ares
by Brett Rutherford
after Meleager, Greek Anthology VI, 163
a mock sword, mock spear,
a shield of no more use
than a cake platter,
garlands and roses, ribbons
and stalks of wheat,
a maiden's under-
garments, trophies
of someone's
wedding night.
I am not amused,
and neither is Ares,
who fortunately sleeps
right now below horizon
or there'd be hell to pay.
The proper offerings here
are pointy spears, lances
broken in battle's fervor,
helmets shorn of plumes,
a dented shield with both
one's own and the enemy's
blood proudly unwiped.
Young man, no matter
how long you fought
the fierce virgin, and won,
don't crow about it.
The precinct of Ares
is for men of arms,
and blood on bronze.
The Cats of Kilkenny
by Brett Rutherford
on which of two cats,
tied tail-to tail and flung
over a washer-woman's
clothes-line, which
would prevail -- the black
or the tabby?
Both toms
to make it worse,
they tore one another
bloody, no place to run,
no way to signal
polite surrender,
they howled and clawed
and howled
and clawed and howled --
until an outraged
officer came out
from his beer-stupor
and demanded an end
to the feline fray.
One lop of the sword
and both cats fell,
fled tail-less
to opposite points
of the compass.
When higher-ups heard
Mrs. Kelley's complaint
of two bloody tails
amid her husband's
long underwear,
the soldiers swore
to a tall-tale of tails:
the charms of one
lady cat, sunning herself
on a fence top,
provoked an act
of mutual cannibalism
between two Romeos.
"Ate one another, they did,"
one soldier explained.
Cat fight of the century
in fair Kilkenny,
completely consumed
they were, all gone,
all but the tails.
Monday, November 14, 2022
Callimachus at Alexandria
This volume presents new translations/adaptations of most of the epigrams, and two segments from the Homeric hymns. These poems are personal, imbued with the poet’s own personality; they are usually short, compressed, and brutally to the point. He did not invent the epigram, but created examples of breath-taking beauty. Even when the poem is an imaginary tombstone epitaph, the slightly self-mocking world-view of Callimachus shines through. Fate is brutal, life is short, and heroism mixed with passion are allowed to shine, even if they do not triumph.
Stuffy classicists of the past, mired in Puritanism and sexual repression, seemed unwilling to read between the lines and let Callimachus speak. We can now see him as the high-minded, aloof, gay librarian who lives down the hall, with a never-ending array of younger male companions, a man who lives well, eats well, and veers between joy and desolation, all on a librarian’s salary.
The poems in this volume are not literal translations. Although they contain most of the Greek’s words or phrases, much has been added to flesh out the narrative and to create a more modern, speaking voice. Other things are added to make each poem self-explicate so that footnotes are not needed. To varying extent, then, these are paraphrases, adaptations, and expansions. The form is improvised free verse, with a nod to the elegance and restraint of Roman poetry.
“Love Spells,” a poem by Callimachus’s friend and successor Theocritus, is also included.
The Poet's Press. This is the 305th publication of The Poet’s Press. Published October, 2022. Paperback, 82 pages, 6 x 9 inches. ISBN 9798355028183. $12.00.
Opus 300 - The Poet's Press Anthology
The 50th Anniversary Anthology — FREE DOWNLOAD. The Poet's Press celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2021. This 406-page oversize anthology contains the best and representative selections spanning the whole history of the press -- from long out-of-print chapbooks up to the present day. Brett Rutherford has chosen work from 146 poets and writers, including 363 poems, two play excerpts, and five prose works. Works are selected not only from single-author chapbooks and books, but also from the numerous anthologies published by the press.
This volume is full of surprises. Some of the best poems of Poet's Press principal authors like Barbara A. Holland and Emilie Glen are collected here along with works from poets as diverse as Hugo, Longfellow, Goethe, Scott, and Shelley. The Greenwich Village poets of the last Bohemia of the 1960s and 1970s are joined by their successors across the Hudson from the "Poets of the Palisades" poetry community. What all the poems share is that they are a delight to read.
This book also includes a year-by-year chronology of the publications of the press, a bibliography of authors and titles, and a list of all poets published in books from The Poet's Press and its imprints.
The Poet's Press. This is the 300th publication of The Poet’s Press. Published November, 2022. PDF ebook, 406 pages, 8-1/2 x 11 inches. CLICK HERE FOR FREE DOWNLOAD. Readers are encouraged to download and share this book. A print edition will be made available by special order for libraries and archives, but this book will NOT be sold on Amazon and will NOT be sold in bookstores.
Friday, November 11, 2022
An Oak Leaf, Solitary
by Brett Rutherford
after Lermontov
A single, solitary leaf of oak,
sensing disaster imminent
and prematurely brown,
breaks free of its tall parent
and in a fit of panic
hitches whatever breeze
comes first, and from it goes
above the treeline to cloud-
top, to where the Boreal
gods make annual rounds
from Arctic to Tropic.
Though he is young,
he has dreamt the death
of those who came before him,
a holocaust,
hecatombs of his brothers piled.
From bark and root he knows
all history, an acorn chronicle
dating to Titans and Olympians.
In sight of the great inland sea
there grows a most splendid chinar —
an ancient sycamore — round top
a perfect hemisphere, million-leafed,
green, yellow, brown branded bark smooth,
rain-swept to glossy sheen, proud tree
which in the warm Crimean clime
has grown to the height of giants of old.
It is a citadel and a city of birds,
an avian metropolis of a thousand songs.
Men honor it, and spare the axe
for under the shade of one such,
Hippocrates taught medicine, and Socrates
befuddled the mind of Plato!
“Tree of Wonder! Give me shelter!”
So speaks the pilgrim leaf at edge of shade,
begging a restful interlude from sun
and from the decaying elements. “Regard me
as one from the desolate North, too soon
apart from my oaken sire, too young
to know what fraught danger awaited me.
“I trusted the wind, defying gravity.
I have been taken I know not where.
Dried up, my strength has abandoned me.
One day among your wholesome leaves so green
I would pass in your kind shadow.
Tales I can tell them of wonders seen.”
The sycamore is silent. Birds sing
oblivious, obsessed with love and feeding,
feathers of every hue a-flutter among
the broad leaves and spreading branchlets.
One song he understands: a lark
goes on and on about a mermaid
it has seen within the nearby bay.
“That was no mermaid,” the oak leaf offers.
“Fair bird, it was a submarine, a thing of war.
Iron arrows it carries, and a wall of fire
it can unleash upon both forest and city.”
But on the lark sings, of a golden palace,
and talking fish in a jeweled sky.
“Tree of Wonder! Heed my warning!”
So speaks the rasping and withered guest.
“The sky is full of metal birds. Bombs fall
and flatten towns full of innocent people.
Lunatics rage. Wheeled juggernauts
stake out imaginary lines and kill
to defend them. Humans’ hot breath
has swept the Polar Regions and set alight
dry woods and wolds. The gods themselves
would have not meted out so cruel a thing,
as they would smite the smiter first. Instead,
every last shrub will be crushed beneath them.”
Finally, the sycamore replies,
in voice as sweet as the oak had been stern:
“Always have I been tall, and green, and free.
If some thieving wind tears off a leaf,
or branch, I grow
a new one.
“Nest-builders have many times told us
of dark times coming! Stupid birds!
Every hawk is the death of them.
‘End of the world!’ they chatter on,
endlessly migrating north and south,
never content with where they are.
“We have no need of your bad messages.
Perfect we are, and perfect we shall be.
Does not an ocean nourish our roots?
Is not the sky the biggest sky of all?
Are not my birds the biggest crowd ever?” —
“Tree of Wonder!” Please remember!
Have not wars come and gone? Have not
your kind been burned and plowed under?” —
“Always have I been tall, and green, and free.
Be on your way and find some other shelter.
Sun blesses me, rain falls on me, the moon
dashes up and over to lull my sleep. Begone,
you dusty and malformed, tawny orphan!”
“Fool!” cries out the oak leaf. “I flee
your hateful shade on the next breeze upwards.
Just as you shed your bark, so too
you shed all troubling memories,
as innocent of history as a new-born babe.”
All the high sycamore counters
is its same idiot refrain:
“Always have I been tall, and green, and free.”
Mikhail Lermontov’s short lyric poem, “An Oak Leaf,”(1841) is famous. It personifies the poet as a drifting
oak leaf, flying from Russia into the warm clime of Crimea (part of the poet’s
military life). The mysterious tree Lermontov calls the “chinar” is not so
exotic as it seems, for the chinar is the sycamore or plane tree, whose "Western" variety is now a common sight
in parks, public places and streets. My goal in making a new English adaptation
of a poem is to make it into something new, so here I have expanded Lermontov’s
original and made the sycamore tree into a narcissist speaking lines out of
today’s headlines. And the oak leaf carries a warning of climate change, the
last thing Donald Sycamore wants to hear.
Deceit
by Brett Rutherford
adapted from Meleager,
The Greek Anthology V, 184
unfaithful girl! I am a poet, after all,
and gods bring me little messages.
That you are lying is self-evident.
Call not on your gods to defend
falsehoods as black as night. Say
not that you slept alone, alone
in this bed you swore I was the only
guest to sweat its sheets with love,
alone you say, when I know otherwise.
"Alone! Alone" you repeat like a parrot.
Was not Cleon here an hour before me?
His smell is all over you: garlic
and axle-grease, a whiff of manure.
Gods gave me this nose for a reason!
"Oh no, not him!" you swear, profane
a divinity again with your oath:
watch lest your tongue fall out,
and half your teeth as well, liar!
I think I'll just leave. This mattress stinks
of the evil you have done in it.
Or shall I stay and read some Homer?
That should take some hours, I think.
Yes, I'll do that, and watch you fret
and steal quick glances at the door.
He's coming back again, I venture
to guess. With wine and a friend or two.
Well, let them come. I'll just read on.
Invoke your gods: you are no Helen.
Epigrams on Gravity
by Brett Rutherford
1
Gravity unkind to flesh,
the reason old folks
without their clothing,
what's up's
antithesis
2
Gravity,
the suicide's best friend
at cliff-edge, bridge
railing and tower-top
3
Avenging force,
weaver of sink-holes
that swallow the wicked,
lord of the nine-day fall
from here to hell
4
Gravity, the first
of the race of Titans,
the resultant between
creation's messy chaos
and the collapse to null
5
Gravity felt everywhere
and instantly, speed
of light no barrier,
transcendent yet not
a thing in itself --
no I and Thou
concerning Gravity --
not even a force
so-called, it is
the price of being.
God Has
by Brett Rutherford
GOD HAS
no enemies
no favored kings
or princes
no national
boundaries
no favorite colors
no winning teams
no prayers heard
no idea where
the lost pet went
no warehouse
where the dead are kept,
no tally of names
and ancestry
no more in one place
than another,
no Golden Age
remembered,
no covenants there
to be reminded of
no wish
to be bothered at all
oh, and no name
to call him by,
no anagrams or sigils,
yet not, assuredly not
nothing at all
since his or its
eidolon persists.
One thing only
asserts itself
everywhere
and instantly,
a thing ironically
called "g"
elusive and
ineluctable, a thing
that makes anvils drop
on the heads of fools,
or apples to
the open hand --
Gravity!
Father and Son
.jpg)
The Titans were a nasty lot. Saturn (Kronos in Greek) always devoured his own offspring to prevent a new generation of gods. A rock was substituted for Zeus, so that the boy could be reared in secret in an oak tree. Later he would attack his father, cutting him open and releasing his brothers and sisters from the Titan's belly.
All of which provoked me to write this little epigram this morning:
FATHER AND SON
Zeus slipped away,
oak-coddled
by his mother Rhea,
taking with acorn-milk
the seed of rebellion.
One day your bloated
belly will be cut,
the never-digested
rocks and Titans
spewn out to make
a whole new Mythos,
somewhat less cruel
and capricious
than the elder
monstrosities.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)