Tuesday Poem, Patience

Patience

I can't sleep.

People chatter, dogs bark

The world blurs into the distance

Darkness walled in by stone

Beaten by voices, over and over

With fire and ashes nearby

I want to speak

My voice disappears, my strength vanishes

All right! It doesn't matter!

This world dislikes being spoken to, I don't care

The river water turns to ice

And life is life no longer

I do again what I did before

Close my ears, close my eyes

And wait for the calm that has to come.

                                                     

by Chairil Anwar, Translated by Burton Raffel and Nurdin Salam

Anwar, an Indonesian poet, was born on July 26, 1922 and died on April 29, 1949.

In writing about his work, James S Holmes says -- 

     "In his later years, at any rate, Anwar took his poetry like his life, where he found it: in anthologies or on the waterfront made little differences. And to the last he was overflowing with schemes and projects. In April, 1949, he told a friend that he wanted to go to Macassar, across the Java Sea on the island of Celebes, to note down sea chanties from the Buginese sailors. He had plans to translate Garcia Lorca. And he was thinking about the possibility of a trip to India and Europe."

     

In some way, this book came into my hands years ago. It's disappeared and reappeared a number of times, including last week when it took leave of me for a few days after I was so happy to have found it's splattered self while I was doing the systematic read-and-dismiss of books on my shelves during my vacation on the island of bed. 

Now I'm not entirely certain why his work appealed to me,(though I know why this particular poem was so relevant to my brooding thoughts which did not include any vision of the calm that had to come) but it did. As did the work of Denise Levertov. And much, much later, toward recent years, the poems of Raymond Carver.