In the Land of Cannibals - ukázka
In the Beginning
The word is rolling down the hill Tumbling, gathering Other words The word of the beginning, the ball which Once overwhelmed the world.
A ball of words hurtling through the universe Deep inside A flaming, glowing centre; The world of the dumb, The quiet, the silenced.
Lost Rhythms
Straggling souls in empty houses whose yeasty days are on the wane Gave him an inch… and a lovely, endless era sneaked out into the air.
„There might yet be a storm; the waters might rise.“
Having said that, I have cleared off, making room for all you others.
Light
„The light is peeled darkness,“ said Grandad laughing when his last hour was approaching. The hero of my childhood, dying didn’t know what he was on about.
It was a Monday and God was sharing out his loot among three eminent, palish angels.
Grandad knew he was about to go: He had a chicken bone brought in and – God in Heaven! – bit into it.
Then he started coughing.
A piece of bone plain as the skies bears a trace of days remaining.
Suddenly, all began to fade. Emet turned to met (Truth to death) The letter rolled under the doorstep.
The smell of fowl comes through the yard, the coldness of the cell.
Grandad, like a coin landed softly on the bed of the well.
Headlong
Stuff inside me like in an hourglass.
Phenomena stack up, one following the next, pouring towards the bottom And when there is just enough for me to measure The span of my desires I am swiftly turned over legs up, head down I start with nothing and the self-same events pour over me back into the chasm I start from scratch For the tenth, hundredth, thousandth time Always the same faces, the same words the sound of the same footsteps…
Kids in the Graveyard
Some of them run about shouting, playing hide-and-seek, while others, well-hidden, sleep for ages…
Post Scriptum
Tin teapot Table set for twelve.
It seems to me that what you are working on has the blurred edges of the winter of 1867.
The year Turgenev’s Smoke was published.
Man and Woman, at Breakfast
Mmm, what’s that smell?
Coffee and creams.
The caloric quarters of the morn, a belly of warmth-giving sins.
Sweet words in a jam jar.
…
The land of cannibals in bloom.
The leaf-horned beetle Euoniticellus fulvus is – so we believe – extinct in Bohemia, yet it lives on in South Moravia!
The history of wild mammals, wild belches, ecstatic sobs of panegyric…
My Africa
Resurrected glare of nights. Animals in a ring box.
Migration towards food The permeable circle of the veld.
Drink at the ford, talk about those unimportant things Drop by drop Admitting what never happened.
Old women in the river, yellow stains On the water.
…
A small hymenopterus creature – could be a giant in the other land – has cut down a lamp.
The lamp in my room – what an apparition! In mid-January – perhaps summer in the other land – I’m afraid to sit down at my shabby yellow desk.
The changes may come. I have recognized myself in the land of fear; among the others, I retain a cathedral-like graciousness.