Charles Simic (Serbia/US)
Por: Charles Simic
A poem about sitting on a New York rooftop on a
chill autumn evening, drinking red wine, surrounded
by tall buildings, the little kids running dangerously to
the edge, the beautiful girl everyone’s secretly in love
with sitting by herself. She will die young but we don’t
know that yet. She has a hole in her black stocking, big
toe showing, toe painted red… And the skyscrapers…
in the failing light… like new Chaldeans, pythonesses,
Cassandras… because of their many blind windows.
The Many Lauras
Alas, I burn and am not believed
PETRARCH
I loved three different Lauras,
At one time or another,
They laughed at everything I said,
While I shed tears in secret.
Even in church praying they’d smile
At the memory of me,
Even in the arms of another man
They’d hide their grins,
Or so I imagined, because I never
Laid my eyes on them again.
It was a huge city where one got lost
Easily as they must’ve done too.
Petrarch, you only loved one Laura
And wrote hundreds of poems to her.
I loved three, but only wrote one
And it’s not ever even a good one.
Swept Away
Melville had the sea and Poe his nightmares,
To thrill them and haunt them,
And you have the faces of strangers,
Glimpsed once and never again.
Like that woman whose eye you caught
On a crowded street in New York
Who spun around after she went by
As if she had just seen a ghost.
Leaving you with a memory of her hand
Rising to touch her flustered face
And muffle what might’ve been something
She was saying as she was swept away.
The Light
Our thoughts like it quiet
In this no-bird dawn,
Like the way the early light
Takes the world as it finds it
And makes no comment
About the apples the wind
Has blown off a tree,
Or the horse broken loose
From a fenced field grazing
Quietly among the tombstones
In a small family graveyard.
Sunlight
As if you had a message for me…
Tell me about the grains of dust
On my night table?
Is any one of them worth your trouble?
Your burglaries leave no thumbprint.
Mine, too, are silent.
I do my best imagining at night,
And you do yours with the help of shadows.
Like conspirators hatching a plot
They withdrew one by one
Into corners of the room.Ç
Leaving me the sole witness
Of your burning oratory.
If you did say something, I’m none the wiser.
The breakfast finished,
The coffee drugs were unenlightening.
Like a lion cage at feeding time-
The floor at my feet turned red.
My Little Heaven
Why the wrought-iron fence
With nasty-looking spikes
And four padlocks and a chain
Securing the heavy gate?
I stop by from time to time,
To check if it’s unlocked
And peek through the bars
At rows of pretty flowers
And its tree-lined promenade
Streaked with sunlight.
One little birdie hopping on it,
Tickled pink about something.
The Last Lesson
It will be about nothing.
Not about love or God,
But about nothing.
You’ll be like a new kid in school
Afraid to look at the teacher
While struggling to understand
What they are saying
About this here nothing
Charles Simic was born in Yugoslavia in 1938. He is a poet, translator, and essayist. For many years he was a professor at the University of New Hampshire. He has published several collections of poems, they are: What the Grass Says, 1967; Somewhere among Us a Stone is Taking Notes, 1969; Dismantling the Silence, 1971; White, 1972; Return to a Place Lit by a Glass of Milk, 1974; Biography and a Lament, 1976; Charon's Cosmology, 1977; Brooms: Selected Poems, 1978; School for Dark Thoughts, 1978; They Forage at Night, 1980; Classic Ballroom Dances, 1980; Austerities, 1982; Weather Forecast for Utopia & Vicinity: Poems, 1967-1982, 1983; Selected Poems, 1963–1983 (1986 Pulitzer Prize finalist), 1985; Unending Blues (1987 Pulitzer Prize finalist), 1986; Pyramids and Sphinxes, 1989; Nine Poems, 1989; The World Doesn't End: Prose Poems (1990 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry), 1989; The Book of Gods and Devils, 1990; Hotel Insomnia, Harcourt, 1992; A Wedding in Hell: Poems, 1994; Frightening Toys, 1995; Walking the Black Cat: Poems, (National Book Award in Poetry finalist), 1996; Looking for Trouble: Selected Early and More Recent Poems, 1997; Jackstraws: Poems (The New York Times Notable Book of the Year), 1999; Simic, Charles. Selected Early Poems, 1999; Night Picnic, 2001; The Voice at 3:00 A.M.: Selected Late and New Poems, 2003; Selected Poems: 1963–2003, 2004 (winner of the 2005 International Griffin Poetry Prize), 2004; Aunt Lettuce, I Want to Peek under Your Skirt (illustrated by Howie Michels), 2005; My Noiseless Entourage: Poems, 2005; 60 Poems, 2008; That Little Something: Poems, 2008.
He received several recognitions for his work, as the MacArthur Foundation's "Genius Fellowship", he was U.S. Poet Laureate (2007-2008); 1990 Pulitzer Prize; 2007 Griffin International Poetry Prize; 2007 Wallace Stevens Award; 2011 Frost Medal for lifetime achievement in poetry; and 2017 Struga Gold Crown.
Published on 29.04.2021
