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[Pearse Hutchinson: gedichten]
Young death
Death is younger than life,
Death is a child with a child's cruelty;
where life and man play symbol
in a bull-ring, and burros
are driven hard by needy commonsense,
death like a child rubs cats the wrong way,
pulls the wings off nondescripts and flies,
and maltreats heroes and mystics like
Death is younger than life,
without the inspiration of a sapling
or the stripling's lyric knife.
So death is green and rotten -
like a stagnant pool, a bad potato -
with envy; grey as Lucifer's was gold,
for in death's envy no pride alerts.
Death is a young man with every known disease,
a grey-faced skinnamalink with a false beard,
a shadow-boxer. Death is young with a bad conscience;
a name that means and fills.
Death's only creation is delirium.
Life is both prolific and subtle,
therefore death is furious that this old fogy,
this ancient, life, should have the alkahest.
Therefore death crouches, between bluster and whimper,
in his own old contra-color manse,
counting his joyless winnings like a miser
who has realised the existence of purchase
after nothing is left in even the jenny-a'-things.
Lisbon: April 1951.
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Footnote
How much, indeed, the rich must regret
losing luxury, whenever the great
impulse of anger spins them against the rocks,
like empty bottles on a classic sea.
To feel the soft gloved hands they wielded so wearily
shoved with gradual force away from the wheel
(and realise that's for a lifetime)
by stronger fingers that cannot be tired -
they have forgotten such a word
in the big new gay gust of purpose:
justification of decades' futility,
no more mere cantankerous
muttering into tankards in taprooms -
indeed, such feeling and realisation
must, for the rich, as they crumble like pastry,
fall and wither like petals from big flashy roses
too long left in a bowl on the lid of the piano,
be grave as Oberammergau and touching as a tale by Ouida.
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The nuns at the medical lecture
The nuns at the medical lecture have rose faces
like babies surprised into wisdom, the clerical students
passing the pub look slightly scared, but mainly
serene, the cultured ancient cod in his lamplit room,
lined with the desert fathers and the village idiots
and the palace pornographs, warms the port in his palm
and remarks that passion rages most after innocence
because it is innocent, and rages to corrupt;
the young spongers gape, consoling themselves
for the gap between drinks by considering sagacity,
we all sometimes talk like a tenth-rate
so understanding confessor.
Always the maligned force that carries light
achieves its kind revenge, and the velveteen shield
of every proud prig erupts in termed lunacy;
the man in dark glasses was, fancy, at the very same
college a vague few years ago, and buys the boy
a pint; the foreign landlady sends in coffee
at odd hours and doesn't charge it;
the brilliant friend suddenly weeps, and pity
does the trick; the adolescent skeleton
mariconettes in front of the glistening wardrobe;
the nun fingertips her scraped pate with pride,
and the masseur, the barber, the preacher, and the prior ...
So like whiskey creates anger, and love creates greed,
as the lizard creates the sun, and the bull sand,
we have created your sin, we conceived
the death of your innocence.
With all our aging need, we have corrupted you,
as the air corrupts the bud into flower,
as the fountain corrupts the air.
Let us go, and you in front with sackcloth and ashes
over silk, and lament the beautiful ivory death
all would have walked thru had we not met -
in a carnival of personal pronouns, a battle of flowers
and roots, wear this laughter to shreds.
Madrid: July 1951.
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Animals
Y quitarás, piadoso, tus sandalias, por no herir las piedras del camino.
Enrique González Martínez
Do not in an April shower run out to hold an umbrella over a bee.
Stephen MacKenna
In Dublin the dog-show, on Patrick's Day,
is a place you go for liquor,
the pubs being cleverly closed for the national feast.
A grandmother lush to her collie was told by an aged servant:
Mistress dear you'd make the beast a Christian!
This pious peasant thus became
my favorite character in the drab Flemish tapestries of family history.
Everyone to his fancy, who am I to talk?
become an authority if you want to
on the douroucouli and the cockateel.
Senescent ladies, who must never be called women,
stand up for donkeys, that would not stand for them;
on gentle inclines, if you look hard enough, you'll find them, looking hard,
but Vereinsmeierei attacks them on gruelling hills.
Once I knew a man who'd sit up every night
boasting, and enumerating bestiae.
Cellini understood animals and how to use them:
fox, bird, and fish were decorative, ‘crows’ desirable -
both more than could be said for the shoe-bill.
The sage, unsentimental Spaniards
give bravery its only virtue on the sand;
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bulls had to be made, for this greatest ritual,
for the ‘moment of truth’ in this black mass of death.
If a dithery one in a purple hat
comes to the door with anti-scientific leaflets,
forget Pavlov, set the elk-hound on her.
This less or more cleans out my lore.
Nothing can be so boring,
I suggest you agree with me, as animate non-humans,
except the failures they fascinate.
Since it appears improbable that God is an animal,
despite his brutality and recurrent imbecility,
we need not fear his vengeance any more than usual.
NOOT VAN DE REDACTIE. Het leek ons wel belangwekkend om naast de in dit nummer opgenomen verzen van jonge Nederlandse dichters bovenstaande nog ongepubliceerde gedichten te plaatsen van de jonge Ier Pearse Hutchinson (geboren 1927 te Glasgow), van wie in verschillende Engelse en Ierse tijdschriften gedichten en essays verschenen. Verzen van hem staan ook in de ‘Faber Antholog of Contemporary Irish Verse.’
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