Favorite Poems n Shorts: the Forest, Waiting, and the Harp

Three short poems from Miroslav Holub that I like.



The Forest

Among the primary rocks
where the bird spirits
crack the granite seeds
and thetree statues
with their black arms
threaten the clouds,

suddenly
there comes a rumble,
as if history
were being uprooted,

the grass bristles
boulders tremble,
the earth's surface cracks

and ther grows

a mushroom,

immense as life itself,
filled with billions of cells
immense as life itself,
eternal, watery,

appearing in this world for the first

and last time.




Waiting

The one who waits is always the mother,
all her fingers jammed
in the automatic doors of the world,
all her thougths like
egg-laden moths pinned alive,
and in her bag the mirror shows
time long gone by when
glad cires lingered int he apple trees,
and at home the spool and the thread are whispering together:
What will beocme of us?

The one who waits is always the mother,
and a thousand things whose fate is
ineluctable fall.

the one who waits is always the mother,
smaller and smaller,
fading and fading
second by second,
until in the end
no one sees her.



The Harp

Of all stringed insruments I like best
the harp stretched from hand to hand,
From blood to blood. from disaster to deliverance. From
error to perfection.
Of all stringed instruments I like best
the harp of healing.
Its music sounds at man's deep centre.
He who never was,
He who always will be when the candle
gutters and the flesh
is lifting off the bone.




Linda's Hearth note: Here are three poems from, Miroslav Holub Selected Poems. Published 1967 by Penguin Books. Translated by Ian Milner and George Theiner, with A. Alvarez as advisory editor. Holub is a Czeckoslovakian poet and scientist.