by Brett Rutherford
adapted from Meleager, The Greek Anthology v, 163
by Brett Rutherford
by Brett Rutherford
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!
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.
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.
by Brett Rutherford
by Brett Rutherford
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.
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.
by Brett Rutherford
by Brett Rutherford
