God knows who first thought up that gloomy image and spoke of the dead as living shades straying about amongst us.

            And yet those shades are really here --
            you can’t miss them.
            Over the years I’ve gathered around me
            a numerous cluster.
            But it is I amidst them all
            who is straying.

            They’re dark
            and their muteness keeps time
            with my muteness
            when the evening’s closing in
            and I’m alone.
            Now and again they stay my writing hand
            when I’m not right,
            and blow away an evil thought
            that’s painful.

            Some of them are so dim
            and faded
            I’m losing sight of them in the distance.
            One of the shades, however, is rose-red
            and weeps.
            In every person’s life
            there comes a moment
            when everything suddenly goes black before his eyes
            and he longs passionately to take in his hands
            a smiling head.
            His heart wants to be tied
            to another heart,
            even by deep stitches,
            while his lips desire nothing more
            than to touch down on the spots where
            the midnight raven settled on Pallas Athene
            when uninvited it flew in to visit
            a melancholy poet.

            It is called love.
            All right,
            perhaps that’s what it is!
            But only rarely does it last for long,
            let alone unto death
            as in the case of swans.
            Often loves succeed each other
            like suits of cards in your hand.

            Sometimes it’s just a tremor of delight,
            more often long and bitter pain.
            At other times all sighs and tears.
            And sometimes even boredom.
            That’s the saddest kind.

            Some time in the past I saw a rose-red shade.
            It stood by the entrance to a house
            facing Prague’s railway station,
            eternally swathed in smoke.

            We used to sit there by the window.
            I held her delicate hands
            and talked of love.
            I’m good at that!
            She’s long been dead.
            The red lights were winking
            down by the track.

            As soon as the wind sprang up a little
            it blew away the grey veil
            and the rails glistened
            like the strings of some monstrous piano.
            At times you could also hear the whistle of steam
            and the puffing of engines
            as they carried off people’s wretched longings
            from the grimy platforms
            to all possible destinations.
            Sometimes they also carried away the dead
            returning to their homes
            and to their cemeteries.

            Now I know why it hurts so
            to tear hand from hand,
            lips from lips,
            when the stitches tear
            and the guard slams shut
            the last carriage door.

            Love’s an eternal struggle with the angel.
            From dawn to night.
            Without mercy.
            The opponent is often stronger.
            But woe to him
            who doesn’t realize
            that his angel has no wings
            and will not bless.

tr. from the Czech by Ewald Osers

...

Note: I have been reading the poetry of Seifert this weekend. Earlier this afternoon when I spoke with my sister, she informed me that one of my uncles (one of my father's younger brothers, barely fifty) had passed away after a massive cardiac arrest. I should have known earlier but I was drowning in work during the week when my sister called to tell me about this.

And so I have been thinking that one of the things of being an emigrant is that news of vanishings of familiar faces - I had met with this uncle only few weeks ago when I was visiting folks in India - in those other countries, travel to you like sudden dreams, which shock you, and leave you feeling helpless. And poems, such as the one above, are what you can have by the way of consolation, almost.

[A] People on the sidewalk too are just so many leaves: here now, absent one day.

[B] After a long period of time you meet a short lived flame.

She still is as delicate as the stem of a blue iris you once gave her.

As you talk amiably, you try not to run your fingers gently over her bent neck.

You absolutely mustn't do that for remember you weren't burnt to absolute tinder back then.

In the carousel of autumn, a bird of time spins and spins.

Questions, meant to be lived under, remain open like mouths of shells.

Lost lovers, sometimes, are shadows of cypress trees on moonlit windows.

The airelist heart, emptied of itself, finally has become a banyan tree,

whose rooms of root you enter and leave. And in them, pages

of half-read books flutter open to breathe in bearings of your horizon-bound passages.

I have dwelt in the cave of silence for days, painting its walls with the ocher of words.

And now this talk. So if someone asks why do I write now, what true answer to give?