Peter Laugesen, Denmark

Por: Peter Laugesen

Sailor´s Home

   the sea
 is an endless raft
of empty bottles and containers

              stones and dust
                                figures
               
                                    the door open
                                   onto the wet night

                                  heaps of sound

Sailor

He stumbled
over an upstroke
and flopped down
into an inkwell

It was cold
and dark

It was filled
with meaningless
demands

He was a little guy
who did his best

His ship a wooden block
with a nail for its mast

He has knitted a sail
out of striped remnants

It is his sea
He will sail out there

Landlubber

I don´t know  anything about the sea
my upturned boat lies by the lake in tall grass
It´s ten years since I last
sat on it with a beer
Maybe I should just ever so quietly
let it sink down on the bottom
before it´s eaten up by time

Night steamer

Poets are the sailors of language they never forget
They bid farewell on the quay and turn their backs
They go on board the ferry without waving
You never see them again and that hurts
It is for ever and you´ll soon forget them
But they never forget for ink is the great ocean
They lie on the top deck gazing up
At the stars from a bench stuffed with lifebelts
They have opened it and seen it is empty
They hear the rattle and din of rock ´n roll
Beneath the saloon music two decks below
They drink with commercial travellers in the saloon
And listen to waves of despairing smutty stories
But they never sleep in cabins never go down
In the corridors with their stained red carpets
They go ashore  at a different quay and vanish in snow
But they never forget for the poem is
An unbroken line hurled out from the first inkwell
Until the pen runs dry and the writing runs out
Where everything is for ever on the deck under the stars
Where the sailor of language sleeps and the poem is a ferry
On the black sea of blood where it steams ever and on

The great oak book

The dug-out is heavy
with light and written in pencil
out from the shore

The wind
ruffles its leaves
with rhythmic breaths

One day a last
stormy reader
will blow it away
over the mirror of lakes

Peter Laugesen. First book, “Landskab” (Landscape”) 1967. Since then more than 60 books of poems, essays. Translated Charles Olson, Hugo Ball, Antonin Artaud, Pierre Reverdy and Swedish poet Gunnar Björling into Danish. Many dramatic works and translations, among them William Shakespeare´s “Richard the Third” and “Love´s Labour´s Lost”. Latest collection of poems “Brev til en Maler” (“Letter for a painter”), 2017. Art criticism and essays in catalogues, collaborations with musicians and painters in exhibitions or on stage. Pictorial works in public places.  Published several cd´s and lp´s. Received many prizes, among them the great prize of the Danish Academy of Literature, 1992. Since 1995 a member of the Academy.   

-Peter Laugesen: Burning signals of two painters de Louisiana Channel
-Peter Laugesen & Singvogel: Film GeigerRecords
-Lyrikporten - Peter Laugesen Lyrikporten - 28 danske digtere
-Poem by the Danish writer Peter Laugesen johnirons.blogspot.com.co

Published at April 27th 2017