The Collected Poems Read online

  The need for distance: We can imagine to ourselves (I like to think about this) a youthful Herbert, who in occupied Lwów is looking through albums of Italian art, perhaps paintings of the Sienese quatrocento, perhaps reproductions of Masaccio’s frescoes. He’s sitting in an armchair with an album on his lap; maybe he’s at a friend’s place, or maybe at home—while outside the window there can be heard the shouts of German (or Soviet) soldiers. This situation—the frescoes of Masaccio (or Giotto) and the yells of the soldiers coming from outside—was fixed permanently in Herbert’s imagination. Wherever he was, however many years had passed since the war, he could hear the soldiers shouting outside the window—even in Los Angeles and the (once) quiet Louvre, in the now closed Dahlem Museum in Berlin (its collections transferred to a modern building on Potsdamer Platz), or in his Warsaw apartment. Beauty is not lonely; beauty attracts baseness and evil—or in any case encounters them frequently.

  The paradox of Herbert, which is perhaps especially striking in our modern age, also resides in the fact that though he refers willingly and extensively to existing “cultural texts” and takes symbols from the Greeks and anywhere else, it is never in order to become a prisoner of those references and meanings—he is always lured by reality. Take the well-known poem “Apollo and Marsyas.” It is constructed on a dense, solid foundation of myth. An inattentive reader might say (as inattentive critics have in fact said) that this is an academic poem, made up of elements of erudition, a poem inspired by the library and the museum. Nothing could be more mistaken: Here we are dealing not with myths or an encyclopedia, but with the pain of a tortured body.

  And this is the common vector of all Herbert’s poetry; let us not be misled by its adornments, its nymphs and satyrs, its columns and quotations. This poetry is about the pain of the twentieth century, about accepting the cruelty of an inhuman age, about an extraordinary sense of reality. And the fact that at the same time the poet loses none of his lyricism or his sense of humor—this is the unfathomable secret of a great artist.

  (Translated by Bill Johnston)

  CHORD OF LIGHT

  1956

  TWO DROPS

  No time to grieve for roses, when the forests are burning.

  —JULIUSZ SLOWACKI

  The forests were on fire—

  they however

  wreathed their necks with their hands

  like bouquets of roses

  People ran to the shelters—

  he said his wife had hair

  in whose depths one could hide

  Covered by one blanket

  they whispered shameless words

  the litany of those who love

  When it got very bad

  they leapt into each other’s eyes

  and shut them firmly

  So firmly they did not feel the flames

  when they came up to the eyelashes

  To the end they were brave

  To the end they were faithful

  To the end they were similar

  like two drops

  stuck at the edge of a face

  HOME

  A home above the year’s seasons

  a home for children beasts apples

  a square block of empty space

  under an absent star

  home was childhood’s telescope

  home was feeling’s skin

  a sister’s cheek

  a tree’s branch

  a flame blew out the cheek

  a bullet struck out the branch

  a homeless footsoldier’s song

  over the scattered ash of a nest

  home is childhood’s cube

  home is feeling’s die

  a burnt sister’s wing

  a dead tree’s leaf

  FAREWELL TO SEPTEMBER

  The days were the color of amaranth

  shining like the lance of an uhlan

  Over the megaphones was sung

  an anachronistic ballad

  about Poles and bayonets

  A tenor struck like a riding-whip

  and after every verse

  a list was published of live torpedoes

  Who nota bene

  through six years of war

  were to smuggle lard—

  pitiful unexploded bombs

  The commander raised his eyebrows

  like a mace

  and chanted: not one button

  The buttons mocked:

  We shan’t give we shan’t give the boys

  sewn flatly on to the heath

  THREE POEMS BY HEART

  1

  I cannot find the title

  for a memory of you

  with a hand torn from the dark

  I move on the remains of faces

  faint profiles of friends

  froze into hard outlines

  revolving around my head

  empty as the wind’s forehead—

  the silhouette of a black paper man

  2

  living—despite

  living—against

  I reproach myself with the sin of forgetting

  you left an embrace like a needless sweater

  a gaze like a question

  our hands won’t pass on the shape of your hands

  we let them go to waste touching common things

  our eyes reflect a question

  tranquil as mirrored glass

  unclouded by warm breath

  every day I refresh my eye

  every day my touch grows

  tickled by the nearness of so many things

  life purls like blood

  Shadows softly melt

  let’s not let the fallen perish—

  a cloud will pass on their memory—

  the worn profiles of Roman coins

  3

  the women in our street

  were ordinary and good

  patiently they fetched from market

  nourishing bouquets of vegetables

  the children in our street

  —such a torment to cats

  the pigeons—a mild gray

  in the park there was a statue of the Poet

  children rolled their hoops

  and their colorful cries

  birds sat on his hands

  reading his silence

  in the summer nights wives

  patiently waited for mouths

  smelling of familiar tobacco

  women couldn’t answer

  their kids: he’ll be back

  when the city went down

  they put out fires hands

  pressed up to their eyes

  the children from our street

  met with a very hard death

  pigeons fell lightly

  like air shot down

  now the lips of the Poet

  are a flattened horizon

  birds children and wives cannot dwell

  in the city’s pitiful shell

  in the cool down of ash

  the city which stands on water

  smooth as a mirror’s memory

  is reflected from the river-bed

  and flies to a lofty star

  where the fire smells far

  as a page from the Iliad

  TO THE FALLEN POETS

  The singer’s lips are welded fast

  he mouths the night with his eyes

  under a horizon’s malevolent cast

  where the song ends dusk arrives

  and sky’s shade covers the earth

  As pilots snore in stacks of stars

  you go hiding papers a silly sheaf

  shedding mosaics made of words

  Metaphors mock you as you flee

  into a spray of righteous bullets

  Your vain words are a shadow’s echo

  and a wind in empty stanzas’ rooms

  Not for you to hallow fire with song

  you wither scattering to no purpose

  the languid flowers of pie
rced hands

  ENVOI

  Silent one receive A shrieking bullet

  lodged in his arm so he fled surprise

  Grass will cover this mound of poems

  under the malevolent cast of horizons

  your silence will drink to the dregs

  WHITE EYES

  Blood lives the longest

  it surges and craves air

  translucence congealing

  loosens the pulse’s knot

  at dusk the mercury column rises

  at dawn mold covers the mouth

  closer and closer

  temples sinking

  eyelids subdued

  white eyes burn no lights

  broken triangle of fingers

  breath taken from silence

  the mother screams

  rends a numb name

  RED CLOUD

  A red cloud of dust

  summoned that fire—

  the setting of a city

  over earth’s horizon

  just one more wall

  one more brick chorale

  has to be knocked down

  to remove the painful scar

  between the eye

  and recollection

  with milky coffee rustling papers

  the morning workers

  blew warmth into dawn and rain

  resounding in flumes of dead air

  with a steel cable

  a swollen silence

  they fish out the contraband

  from space cleared of rubble

  a cloud of red dust descends

  the desert passing overhead

  at the height of razed floors

  frameless windows appear

  when the last steep slope

  is toppled

  and brick plainsong falls

  nothing will ruin dreams

  of the city that was

  the city that will be

  the city that is not

  INSCRIPTION

  You look at my hands

  they are weak—you say—as flowers

  you look at my mouth

  too small to utter: the world

  —let us sway on a moment’s stem

  let us drink the wind

  let us watch our eyes setting

  the lilies that fester smell sweetest

  the shape of ruins dulls the senses

  there’s a flame in me that thinks

  and a wind for fire and for sails

  My hands are impatient

  I can

  sculpt a friend’s

  head out of air

  I recite a poem I’d like

  to translate into Sanskrit

  or a pyramid:

  when the stars’ source dies

  we will light up the nights

  when wind turns to stone

  we will churn up the air

  MY FATHER

  My father liked Anatole France

  and smoked Macedonian tobacco

  with its blue clouds of fragrance

  he savored a smile on narrow lips

  and back in those far-away times

  when he sat leaning over a book

  I used to say: father is Sinbad

  at times it’s bitter for him with us

  upon which he set off On a carpet

  on the four winds Anxious we ran

  after him in atlases but we lost him

  In the end he’d come back take off

  his odor put his slippers on again

  the jangling of keys in his pockets

  and days like drops like heavy drops

  and time passes changing nothing

  one holiday the net curtains down

  he stepped through a windowpane

  and didn’t return I don’t know if he

  closed his eyes in grief or never

  turned to look at us Once in a foreign

  magazine I saw a photograph of him

  he is now the governor of an island

  where palm trees and liberalism grow

  TO APOLLO

  1

  He went in a rustle of stone robes

  he cast a shadow a glow of laurels

  his breaths were light as a statue’s

  but his movements like a flower’s

  rapt by the sound of his own song

  he raised a lyre to the height of silence

  immersed in himself

  his pupils white as a stream

  stone

  from his sandals

  to the ribbons in his hair

  I imagined your fingers

  had faith in your eyes

  the unstrung instrument

  the arms without hands

  give me back

  youth’s shout

  arms held out

  and my head

  in an immense crest of delight

  give me back my hope

  speechless white head

  silence—

  a fissured neck

  silence—

  a broken song

  2

  I slow diver won’t touch

  the rock bottom of youth

  now I fish out only

  salty broken torsos

  Apollo appears to me in dreams

  with the face of a fallen Persian

  poetry’s auguries are false

  it all happened differently

  the epic’s fire was different

  the city’s fire was different

  heroes did not return from the expedition

  there were no heroes

  the unworthy survived

  I am seeking a statue

  drowned in my youth

  only an empty pedestal remains—

  the trace of a hand seeking a form

  TO ATHENA

  Through owlish darkness

  your eyes

  above a pointed helmet

  your wisdom

  carried

  by thought weightless as an arrow

  we run through the gates of light

  from brightness into blindness

  carried

  on a swooning shoulder

  we salute you

  with bodies on a shield of shadow

  when the head falls on the chest

  bury your fingers in our hair

  carry us high

  lift your sharp and striking shape

  just an instant

  from under the bird’s third eyelid

  let your goodness destroy us

  let cruel pity be our undoing

  in the empty body

  opened by a spear

  pour the oil

  of gentle radiance

  tear from the eyes

  the eyelids’ scales

  let them look

  ON TROY

  1

  O Troy Troy

  an archeologist

  will stir your ash with his hand

  and a fire greater than the Iliad

  on seven strings—

  two few strings

  we need a chorus

  a sea of laments

  mountains’ clamor

  a rain of stones

  —how to lead out

  people from the ruins

  how to lead out

  a chorus from a poem

  thinks a poet perfect

  as a pillar of salt

  eminently mute

  —Song escapes whole

  It escaped whole

  on a wing of fire

  into the pure sky

  Over the ruins the moon rises

  O Troy Troy

  The city is silent

  The poet grapples with his own shadow

  The poet cries like a bird in a wilderness

  The moon repeats its landscape

  smooth metal smouldering ash

  2

  They went down gorges of former streets

  as if across a red sea of charred wreckag
e

  and the wind blew up the red dust

  faithfully painting the city as it set

  They went down gorges of former streets

  hungrily breathing into the frozen dawn

  and they said: long years will pass

  before the first house stands here

  they went down gorges of former streets

  they thought they would find some trace

  on a harmonica

  a cripple plays a tune

  about willows’ braids

  about a girl

  the poet says nothing

  rain is coming down

  TO MARCUS AURELIUS

  To Professor Henryk Elzenberg

  Good night Marcus put out the light

  and shut the book For overhead

  is raised a gold alarm of stars

  heaven is talking some foreign tongue

  this the barbarian cry of fear

  your Latin cannot understand

  Terror continuous dark terror

  against the fragile human land

  begins to beat It’s winning Hear

  its roar The unrelenting stream

  of elements will drown your prose

  until the world’s four walls go down

  As for us?—to tremble in the air

  blow in the ashes stir the ether

  gnaw our fingers seek vain words

  drag off the fallen shades behind us

  Well Marcus better hang up your peace

  give me your hand across the dark

  Let it tremble when the blind world beats

  on senses five like a failing lyre

  Traitors—universe and astronomy

  reckoning of stars wisdom of grass

  and your greatness too immense

  and Marcus my defenseless tears

  PRIEST

  to the worshippers of deceased religions