Sappho Fragment #31 - National Poetry Day

An improvisation translation of ancient Greek poet Sappho's popular Fragment #31 in honour of national poetry day:


It’s as if he were a God, or no better
than one – at least a little lucky, no better
blessed than the best. His bravado really
becomes him there beside you...

But you – your breath’s
softer subtleties laughing, lingering – seeing you
there bewitches me right down
deep to the soul. I have no speech: it all

snapped
away, Lesbia,
while lynching my once-limber limbs stiffly
together in a rising passion-fire,

where in that heat I fountain cold sweat and
beat-beat-faster, grass-green as a lover,
going over and over with my eyes
until I’m blind; unfocussed –

oh

you cannot work in her presence.
Cannot work, never work with her:

she undoes his doings, she completely
undoes him as countless kings have come
undone before.

Cold Harbour

Up dark side walls, he discovered
drilling just after noon: he was
drilling, perpendicular
to the supporting slats. He was
perpendicular just after noon.
Evidently very
perpendicular, he loomed,

while three people might have
craned upwards
leaking cold fumes.


Simon Peter Everett, 2010 ©

I.

They will give you some advice: forget your
flowers and wasted hours. These cage you in
a curtained world where not one eye peeps in,
where you pop pills by the short windowsills
and tremble the netting. There is no breath
that cannot be seen on that pane. Deep night:
when cold moves closer to the fingertip.
When everything suspends. You were thin.

Remember the snow that night? Over those
counted spans I stood smoking as it fell.
Silence; the glint of morning felt distant.
There was sleep: settling snow slept in beds.
If you recall me there – forget that I
knew you were awake, twitching at your hair.


Simon Peter Everett, 2010 ©

The World is flat, the Wind is nothing

As if the world were flat
and there were no
obstacles to exemplify
anything, except that

The wind is sightless,
soundless and infinitely
boundless. You could take
one finger up to contest

Its prodigal behaviour,
a silent trembler on a
silent smoothness:
there is no dreaded power.

As if the wind itself were
nothing, and incurs a
reputation through each
elevation, each something.

But the world is never stark
or exact, with all beings defined
by just that – the roughs
and troughs, not by the flats.


Simon Peter Everett, 2009 ©

Broken Mooring

One side, two side, horizon of sea and sky, iodine and acetic;

a reeking binary. Three men wheeze

salt in the wind, we see them careening the hull by the gantry

and in turn hear the wet scrape.

The grinder puts it askew, too one-tone on the barnacled

carrier. We watch the boiler suits panic

about their muscles and we compare the harbour-barrier

to one turgid, steely arm.

Hot sparks leap and collide with froth-hazed sea spray

to fuse beautifully, maybe uglier

under the pressure-washer’s charge – if then they lose

us, we watch the former last;

We wonder in coming-and-goings, and lap about the dry-dock

in the comings, and think the goings

come too fast. Or if we, out of synch, could catch the runnings

or if they themselves have passed.

Sluice gates ricochet sounds behind the mainmast we cannot

understand, and the distant thunders

we assume are waves scrabbling at some remote land,

or just some other sound.

Simon Peter Everett, 2009 ©

The Underside

Funny how on the surface it’s reminiscent of dead
spidery things, or a black tossed-and-torn sail washed up at
some distant shingly mooring. It’s upside-down-topside-out-
inner-ripped; a little bird retching about. It’s got six
steel bones swinging splintered, sticking painfully out through a
billowed bat-wing. A single shaft of talon, upright-curled,
has lost its sting. All last night it was buffeted and blown
about by this carcass-chucked graveyard. Dumped by the waste bin.

What remains hidden on the underside is far away
from apparitions of broken bats, shredded sails and wings:
it is that a dark-suited working man was wandering
wetly home in the water and wracking wind of the back
street. His feet fall flat – squelch fully out – and he is face-red,
back-bent, drip-dropping and cursing and cursing and cursing.


Simon Peter Everett, 2010 ©

Remembering Birth

And straining impossibly hard
to push some blood
up to those twenty-year-old-tendrils
(the memory glands if that’s what you call them?)
there is – one assumes – some ancient residue still left
of that fateful moment.
The one where it all began.

The one that’s often enlarged by us to be more
than biology presumes.
And yes, it might well be a long shot at best
but by some reckoning
here it is: the moment of my birth
with that clinical curtness, all white perhaps.
Or stainless steel. Blankets. Foreign laps.

There sadly appears to be no supernatural thrill
in it. Or god-like endowments made.

But you know the real one is where it matters:
hidden further into labyrinthine memory,
distant, less gaugeable, untracked. Where one spirit
was flowing out of another – disembodied –
one tiny fresh body
into the greater black.


Simon Peter Everett, 2010 ©

The Crown

Up here you can see more
than in the squatting fields.
This mound assumes us,
suspended, where sky pours
over a lofty earthen table.

It is sad though. The sun
sets, orange and blood, with only
a swelling doctrine, spouting fable,
that we are a higher part
taller than our human dwelling.

But the curves of distant counties
on the prolate eye, they follow
no blue heights or red, red
Hells – It is one delicious roundness,
they espouse, there to starve us hollow.

I cannot pinch the new moon
down, or garner stars into
cupped palms, where in the dip
they cannot grasp and on the
tip they flit around –

What can be held is grit and
grain. Circular, too, translating
much the same. We’ll lay right down,
ooze with the twilight vapour;
caress the length of small, small grass

Until our bones clack together.
This is where we gorge on dust,
as dust, dusty ivory splinters, where
we are above everything, rolling around;
restless. But somehow it buries us,

Like being sealed in the crack of
a fold of paper, seeds in an endless
furrow of flecked brown –
passive when fat, thick thumbs
thumb the crease down.


Simon Peter Everett, 2008 ©

Woodpigeons, winter

Grey birds lunge their heads in a field of frost:
beads of black eye thrusting about in the white,

They stud the ground and strut, blue puff,
where it's relative to them and they aren't lost -

Nobody, I guess, could have predicted how in curious
times sight is overcast, near enough unpredictable

Without a rhythm or ordinary signal, so near
to ourselves, blacker still and seeking or furious.

At this dense depth every object interrupts,
even in the bright afternoon unfastened and clear -

But these birds have a constant flow, no fear of ice
or of blind snow and they'll oscillate until they go.


Simon Peter Everett, 2009 ©