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2007-12-20 04:13:26
From: yifeng85
(Guangzhou (Canton))
Has anyone heard about this poet? I knew him by listening to an Alan Rickman reading mp3, his war poems are so close to life and full of anger!
Here is one of his poems:
Sarajevo Spring
It is spring again. The spring is coming.
It is coming in
on crutches. Swallows nest in the ruins.
Someone has strung a clothes-line
in the graveyard
and a hundred diapers semaphore the wind.
Peace surprised us: we needed more time
to pretend we deserved it, more time
to be 'the survivors',
as if we had plans, as if we knew
what next, as if
our dreams were not all of seagulls and the sea.
Peace is like a virus, a light fever.
Peace makes our Sunday suits
restless; it makes our shoes shuffle.
Soldiers wander the streets legless on slivovitz
asking, 'What next? What next?'
They won't go home
to collect their demob papers, they won't
hand in their uniforms;
well, what did you expect?
They needed more time, more time
like the boy we carred feet first from the movie-house,
wiped out by a happy ending.
like our neighbors, who've clean forgotten
how to keep a good row going;
like our local hero, a four-hundred-metre man,
who sits all day by the running track
in his wheelchair
as if it might suddenly come to him: what next.
Soon it will be medals and flags, a coat of whitewash
for the orphanage walls. The children carry
family albums with them
wherever they go. My friend carries
a child's winter glove. I think
he needs more time for this, more time, I think
peace has made us less than ourselves, and spring
is coming hobble-
clop, hobble-clop, hobble-clop.
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