WIERSZE

DO I BELIVE?
Noela Cowarda
(Alan Rickman recytował ten wiersz podczas Stars Shine For Autism Christmas Concert 13.12.2004)

Do I believe in God? Well yes, I suppose, in a sort of way;
It's really terribly hard to say.
I'm sure there must be, of course,
Some kind of vital, motive force,
Some power that holds the winning cards
Behind life's ambiguous facades,
But whether you think me odd or not
I can't decide if it's God or not.

I look at the changing sea and sky
And try to picture eternity;
I gaze at immensities of blue
And say to myself "It can't be true
That somewhere up in that abstract sphere
Are all the people that once were here,
Attired in white and shapeless gowns
Sitting on clouds like eiderdowns

Plucking on harps and twanging lutes
With cherubim in their birthday suits,
Set in an ageless, timeless dream
Part of a formulated scheme
Formulated before the Flood
Before the amoeba left the mud
And, stranded upon a rocky shelf
Proceeded to subdivide itself."


I look at the changing sea and sky
And try to picture infinity;
I gaze at a multitude of stars
Envisaging the men on Mars,
Wondering if they too are torn
Between their sunset and their dawn
By dreadful night-engendered fears
Of what may lie beyond their years
And if they too, through thick and thin,
Are dogged by consciousness of Sin.


Have they, to give them self-reliance,
A form of Martian Christian Science?
Or do they live in constant hope
Of dispensations from some Pope?
Are they pursued from womb to tomb
By hideous prophesies of doom?
Have they cathedral, church or chapel?
Are they concerned with Adam's Apple?
Have they immortal souls like us
Or are they - less presumptuous?

LA MUERTA
by Pablo Neruda
(Z "Prawdziwie, głęboko, do szaleństwa")

Si de pronto no existes,
si de pronto no vives,
yo seguiré viviendo.

No me atrevo,
no me atrevo a escribirlo,
si te mueres.

Yo seguiré viviendo.

Porque donde no tiene voz un hombre
allí, mi voz.

Donde los negros sean apaleados,
yo no puedo estar muerto.
Cuando entren a la cárcel mis hermanos
entraré yo con ellos.

Cuando la victoria,
no mi victoria,
sino la gran victoria
llegue
aunque esté mudo debo hablar:
yo la veré llegar aunque esté ciego.

No, perdóname.
Si tú no vives,
si
tú, querida, amor mío,
si tú
te has muerto,
todas las hojas caerán en mi pecho,
lloverá sobre mi alma noche y día,
la nieve quemará mi corazón,
andaré con frío y fuego y muerte y nieve,
mis pies querrán marchar hacia donde tú duermes,
pero
seguiré vivo,
porque tú me quisiste sobre todas las cosas
indomable,
y, amor, porque tú sabes que soy no sólo un hombre
sino todos los hombres.

SONET 130. WILLIAMA SZEKSPIRA
(Alan Rickman recytuje ten sonet na płycie “When Love Speaks”)

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips' red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damask'd, red and white,

But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound;
I grant I never saw a goddess go;
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground.
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.

FOR MARIA WITH LOVE - FERN HILL BOBA THOMASA
(Alan recytował ten utwór w czasie uroczystej gali, zorganizowanej przez RADA w celu uczczenia pamięci Marii Bjornson. Marzec 2003)

Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
The night above the dingle starry,
Time let me hail and climb
Golden in the heydays of his eyes,
And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns
And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves
Trail with daisies and barley
Down the rivers of the windfall light.


And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns
About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,
In the sun that is young once only,
Time let me play and be
Golden in the mercy of his means,
And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves
Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold,
And the sabbath rang slowly
In the pebbles of the holy streams.


All the sun long it was running, it was lovely, the hay
Fields high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys, it was air
And playing, lovely and watery
And fire green as grass.
And nightly under the simple stars
As I rode to sleep the owls were bearing the farm away,
All the moon long I heard, blessed among stables, the nightjars
Flying with the ricks, and the horses
Flashing into the dark.


And then to awake, and the farm, like a wanderer white
With the dew, come back, the cock on his shoulder: it was all
Shining, it was Adam and maiden,
The sky gathered again
And the sun grew round that very day.
So it must have been after the birth of the simple light
In the first, spinning place, the spellbound horses walking warm
Out of the whinnying green stable
On to the fields of praise.


And honoured among foxes and pheasants by the gay house
Under the new made clouds and happy as the heart was long,
In the sun born over and over,
I ran my heedless ways,
My wishes raced through the house high hay
And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows
In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs
Before the children green and golden
Follow him out of grace.


Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me
Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
In the moon that is always rising,
Nor that riding to sleep
I should hear him fly with the high fields
And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

WAR POEMS
(Alan czytał poezję Goran Simica w czasie
The International Writers' Season of The Orange Word, 12 grudnia, 2001 roku, w Apollo Theatre)

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.

DOGS AND BONES

After a few days of war
the Sarajevo streets were a catwalk for dogs:
perfumed dogs, well-groomed dogs, dogs
with cut-glass collars
and not a flea between them. Their owners
had left them as they left
the burning city.
The trash-heaps became
a battlefield where the lapdogs lost
to an army of strays, lean-limbed
and mangy with hate.
Cowering and cleansed, the back-alley refugees
retreated to the doorways
of locked apartments, barking in answer
to each unearthly whistle
as the morning shells came in.
***
...one of those locked apartments
where we kicked down the door, searching
for a bastard sniper and found
the skeleton of an old woman fused
to a kitchen chair, yes, merged with the wood.
She had starved to death
sitting next to a pantry crammed with cans of food.
We spent a long time debating the crucial issue
of her religion. Yackety-yack. We could get no clue
from the photos that littered the place,
or the needlepoint of a knight
and castle, or the hundred
bottles of perfume placed around her bed.
Her piously folded hands remained a secret.
It was dawn before the argument died out
and we carred her into the street where dogs
were fighting amid the garbage--
nothing they wouldn't risk,
nothing they wouldn't eat. Who cares,
anyway? Who knows
whether she even believed in God? 'By God,
God will find his hands full
after this war," someone said, and we fell
silent, pretending not to see
her silly grin, and the sudden silver glint
of the can-opener on its chain
around her neck.

CHRISTMAS

'I'm blind,' I say. I don't speak again
for a very long time. Of course,
I'm lying about being blind: if I look
out of the window, to where
the children are singing carols, I see
how the snow seems to fetch a rainbow;
I see frozen songbirds fall
from the branches; I see a butcher haul
a slaughtered lamb down the street.
It is night. An icon burns in the stove.
There's a seamless drone from the airport
that makes me want to weep.
'I am blind,' I say, 'I am blind.'
She doesn't say a word. She beats
the Devil's tattoo on the tabletop.
'I've forgotten,' I whisper. I don't speak again
for a very long time. Of course,
I'm lying about having forgotten: I think back
to hoofprints in the snow and dogs on a leash.
It was a manhunt. I remember my father laughed
when I barked at the birds.
'Have you ever noticed how a vacuum-cleaner sounds
like a plane in take-off, or how
a TV left on too long will fix a room
with a hot and heavy smell? Have you noticed
the depth of frost?' I ask her.
'Have you noticed this incredible frost at all?'
She's got nothing to say for herself.
She might not have heard.
I won't speak again. I'll sit here and watch
the traffic lights adapting endlessly
to whatever's best. That's me, I'm just like that.
A whole universe buzzed above
the control tower: isn't that strange?
Fish in the depths are strange--the way they live.
The smell of hay in an orchard
is too strange for words. Now and then,
someone winks from the bottle:
the genie, the Puck of plum brandy.
'Can you see me?' I ask. 'Can you see me any jot
of me, any tittle?' She nods, but of course
she's lying. As if I cared, as if
she could understand the half of what I say.

BEGINNING OF EVERYTHING

After I buried my mother
(under fire, I sprinted from the graveyard)
after the soldiers came with my brother
wrapped in a tarp
(I gave them back his gun)
after the fire in the eyes of my children
as they ran to the cellar
(the rats ran ahead of them)
after I wiped the old woman's face
with a dishtowel
(terrified to reveal a face I knew)
after the ravenous dog
feasting on blood
(just another corpse in snipers' alley)
after everything
I wanted to write poems like newspaper reports,
so heartless, so cold,
that I could forget them, forget them
in the same moment that someone might ask me,
'Why do you write poems like newspaper reports?'

THE SUN RISING
by John Donne
(Ten wiersz Alan czytał podczas " Love Letters", imprezy charytatywnej organizowanej przez Arvon Fundation i Anthony'ego Minghellę. Luty 2005)

Busy old fool, unruly Sun,
Why dost thou thus,
Through windows, and through curtains, call on us ?
Must to thy motions lovers' seasons run ?
Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide
Late school-boys and sour prentices,
Go tell court-huntsmen that the king will ride,
Call country ants to harvest offices ;
Love, all alike, no season knows nor clime,
Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.


Thy beams so reverend, and strong
Why shouldst thou think ?
I could eclipse and cloud them with a wink,
But that I would not lose her sight so long.
If her eyes have not blinded thine,
Look, and to-morrow late tell me,
Whether both th' Indias of spice and mine
Be where thou left'st them, or lie here with me.
Ask for those kings whom thou saw'st yesterday,
And thou shalt hear, "All here in one bed lay."


She's all states, and all princes I ;
Nothing else is ;
Princes do but play us ; compared to this,
All honour's mimic, all wealth alchemy.
Thou, Sun, art half as happy as we,
In that the world's contracted thus ;
Thine age asks ease, and since thy duties be
To warm the world, that's done in warming us.
Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere ;
This bed thy center is, these walls thy sphere.