Jaroslava Brozek

This quiet girl walks as if
she has a twin joined to her hips.
Her arms thin as stripped
boughs, her hair
like the stub-wheat
of an arid country.
Jaroslava walks between white pines
red
as a severed leg.
Where she walks the night keens towards morning
and sags beneath her like a black wet bread.

Lenka Nemec

Lenka Nemec:
a hood of dark hair
brows two black points
hands two white cups
ears two coiled cakes
two lips to scoop grapes
into
two by two:

at twenty Lenka already wept
and lay still among the reeds
for the emptying of her teeming breast
and draped herself in black beads

Lenka at thirty
arrayed in light
shivers between the pews
and out to the east mt wielka
dulls like a shutting book

Janusz Bartel

Janusz Bartel is staring at the plums
that hang, still tiny nubs
outside his fourth-floor window.
It’s April
and the whole apartment bloc
feels like a hotel,
the hall
littered with half-smoked butts,
cards, corpses
of mosquitos, green rinds, the cheap perfume
of blossoms.
It’s April, each bloom is a dizzy box of glass…
Janusz wrecks clocks
and rooms, leaving his prints
on the windows,
thinking of Ada while
mangling the shag,
a woman, a strange white
house to move
into, retreat from.
spring baring
its nectar-gutted teeth
through splintered glass:
the red stain in the cup
of the plum bloom pucks
its lips up, calling
an unheard name.

Sobeska Hlava

This is a woman with skin like an onion’s
and lips closed tight as a preserve jar.
She would darn patches in the clouds
if she could, weave herself a skirt
of straws that hang from the bales.
She disapproves of winter—only because
frost chips at the lindens, their colors grow dull
and meld together. Sister of wool-skeins,
handmaid of the yoke
that keeps the oxen neat
Sobeska wants the whole world under her feet—
Not choked up in her hands like a throttled goose
Or up above her head where the sun hangs loose
Casting its favor carelessly
Over the suffering linden tree.

is this a poem?

"During the Communist era, parents needed a special permission form to give a child a name that does not have a name day on the Czech calendar. Since 1989, parents have had the right to give their child any name they wish, provided it is used somewhere in the world and is not insulting or demeaning. However, the common practice is that the most birth-record offices look for the name in the book "Jak se bude vaše dítě jmenovat?" (What is your child going to be called?), ISBN 80-200-1349-0, the semi-official list of "allowed" names. If the name is not found there, offices are extremely unwilling to register the child's name."


For three weeks Marketa thought she was going to have a baby. Under her print dress, it was working as avidly on assembling itself as she worked on her sums, or at cleaning house. Marketa didn’t tell anyone. After all, words disappeared from her lips as soon as she said them, but the hollow bowl of her belly was filling up to the top. She had devised a secret name for the baby that wasn’t in the name-day calendar. There was no saint behind it and perhaps no history at all. If anyone had ever been named thus, she imagined it was a devil made all of glass, who capered about, quick as a greased whip, and glittered in the light. For three weeks, each motion of her hand—to straighten the shelves, to mark bought bolts in the books with her pencil-stub—recalled to her the pretty motion of the hand of the daughter of Pharaoh, catching up the baby from his reed basket. In her own walk she found a new consciousness, a heavy prettiness of gait, between the beeches, themselves heavy with light. But soon enough she found she was only a reed basket: shedding its pitch lining. Down it came, a thick, blackish tar. Of this, Marketa, too, said nothing: only watched the beeches part, then bend again, into a fragrant lattice, covering the continuous slow progress of the river.

back to my czech poems after a loooong while.

Click the tag 'speakers' to see the other poems in this series (zomg, this poem has been going on long enough to have a series!)

Today was a travel day, so right now I am in Portland, Maine at a friend's - hiatus officially starts tomorrow. You didn't think I'd abandon y'all when I have internet access, did you?

Love love,
Talia


Pavel Cervenka

Ah, friend, we all remember you,
we've drunk to your health,
the liquor stung our cut fingers.
Stumble-about, with red cheeks,
you tilt like a hobby-horse
and stay alone for weeks,
a gold silt of stubble on your face,
and your poor eyes two cockles split with ruin.
Friend, we remember you,
and we drink to your health.

How is it that only you
are so pinched with misfortune,
like a pill of dough in the red fingers of Dalka Rolicek,
the baker's daughter?
Our Pavel who swam the channel,
pulled the tails of goats,
gorged on gooseberries,
husked the beards of oats.

Pavel cried, "I shall ride two stallions at once!"
And took Dusana behind the stable--
soon he had a filly and a foal.
The white milk curdled on the table,
the raiska burned on the coals.
And in swaddling the little lamb
howled like a wolf.
Pavel roared awhile even under the yoke--
But to say more is not for a lighted room.
Friend Pavel, I raise my glass
to your health, a wayward daughter
still in her virgin's dress.

I realize that calling the series 'nontalia speakers' is kind of silly because it implies that all the other poems are filled with emotions and ideas that correspond exactly to my own. Which isn't true. Maybe I'll just call it the speakers series.
All these poems just prove I have read an awful lot of Kundera. I often think about "The Joke."



Leos Soucek

I wake under feverfew
bound with thick twine. God grant it so!
I have bound it there myself.
So I have stood and waited out the morning
under the moss which hangs
like the heavy brow of Gorky--
Ah, I knew a poet
like him once!
A small man, he stammered
even his own name,
but was fierce and great
when he stood still to listen.
Me--I've seen the great sea move all night,
watched the rain sieve through my roof, and cursed my poverty,
seen my children born, watched the bulls sob in the byre,
and still even the willows speak
better than I do -'the wind plays their hair like a lyre' –
the poet said,
But still God grants I lie all night
down under the yellow eyes of flowers,
down where the moon falls softly on my bed.

czech bread sounds delicious!

Opinion poll: too many ellipses?
If you are reading this, press 'follow' to your right! You get no emails, you just make me happy.

-T

Dalka Rohlicek

Ah, the days breed into the days,
The brook which fed all summer
stirs against the banks, more hungry even
than that famous miller's daughter
from whom no braided roll or chaste young man was safe--
They say Dalka Rohlicek could take a hive
from a sap-tree without fear,
and lay the combs
on new white loaves
for lovers' gifts,
a woman with flour on her collar,
a mountainous woman...
And who now bears the name
Dalka Rohlicek, unlikely
and pendulous flower,
a woman who bit
my lip, drew blood, and wept,
bewildered, at the wound?
The wind that turns the mill-wheel
calls this name, Dalka Rohlicek,
who bit into the morning like a hoska roll,
and on the mill-wheel works its toothless gums,
and the glutted river
draws its body north...

speakers series 2

Andel Prochazka

I too have been that drunk who howled at the moon
and imagined the night was appalled,
and all my recompense is illness,
and my mother tongue nearly
forgotten, my country’s name
gained and lost and regained
not by its own hand,
and the mountains black frigates
with my fate in their hulls.
Ah, my life inadequate and still
as the black cup empty on the table,
the black cup
that gave up its contents
unwillingly,
while in the room the cigarettes were brandished
and a woman who had lost her earring somewhere
found it again, cupped it in her hand, and exclaimed softly...
Golden woman, I am your
poorest child, I was hung by my heels
at the mercy of mongrels, find me again,
I am the black cup calling
and I have no tongue at all.