Spell of the Orange-Tree
The orange-tree is growing,
the orange fruits are showing
and glowing in the dark.
The moon’s translucent fire
is woven into wire
by spiders on the bark.
The silver light is flowing,
the silver web is growing
and glowing in the dark.
The secret saps are welling,
the golden spheres are swelling
to fortify the heart.
Christina Egan © 2016
Photograph: Morocco. Christina Egan © 2012
Toys
I
scanned
the
scattered shapes
heaped around me and picked out
the flowers and fresh fruits and fleeting clouds filled
with sun and added some slanted squares of marble and slate and
trunks of birch-trees and fashioned my finds into this
spinning-top. Just don’t ask what
it means. It’s a toy
I made for
you !
***
Baskets
The most delicately plaited words
still awkward, thick like things.
Bent over pads of paper,
the poet labours, late,
dexterous, impotent
to convey music,
silence…
peace.
Christina Egan © 2012
Bowls
Like bowls of ordinary wood,
robust, adept, like workers’ tools,
these hands seem empty. Yet they are
filled to the brim, invisibly:
with jewel-like ideas the one,
the other with tranquillity.
Christina Egan © 2012
Roman bowl. Photograph from the
website of the Museum of London.
Motionless Fire
(May Tanka)
A motionless fire,
the azalea unfolds, flares,
and slowly burns out.
From the mud it wrestles force,
colour, and returns to mud.
*
Pink snowflakes drifting?
Forgotten miracle of
the cherry blossom!
Every spring, the petals sail
into death so serenely…
Christina Egan © 2016
Photographs: Pink azalea.
Christina Egan © 2016/2017.
This is the Suburb
The houses lined up like birthday cakes:
brick cubes covered in cream-coloured paint,
brick cubes covered in brick-coloured paint,
giraffe-neck chimneys as quaint decorations.
The gardens stretching like flower-boxes,
each bush in blossom a witness to life,
the trees at the corners picked from a toy box,
perfectly round and perfectly green.
This is the suburb. If only you saw it
the very first time, descended from Mars,
flown in from the desert, arrived from abroad,
you’d clap your hands in wonder and joy!
Christina Egan © 2017
Photograph: Christina Egan © 2013.
England’s endless rows of terraced homes and front gardens, the brick walls and painted ledges and long chimneys — insignificant or actually invisible to their inhabitants — beg to be photographed by the strolling visitor or newcomer.
The all-year-round greenery and the abundant flowers in England — even around the giant capital city — will amaze those whose home countries are hotter and drier or else colder and harsher, or whose cities have less green and more stone.
I have read that an immigrant from Bangladesh asked herself if English people are poor because many did not paint their brick houses! I have heard of other Central Europeans who, like myself, took the spring flowers in front of public buildings for artificial ones!
Jetzt und jenseits
In der Stille, in der Helle,
wo die Kerze steht und blüht
oder Welle über Welle,
Wolke über Wolke zieht,
in der Stille, in der Hülle
des Gewölbes oder Walds
quillt der Friede, quillt die Fülle
jetzt und jenseits unsres Alls.
Christina Egan © 2015
Now and Beyond
In the stillness, in the light,
where the candle blossoms bright
or where wave flows after wave,
cloud on cloud and breeze on breeze,
in the stillness, in the cave
of the vault or wooded pond
flows the fullness, flows the peace
of the now and the beyond.
Christina Egan © 2015
In the Hebrew bible, ‘peace’ (‘shalom’) is defined ex positivo, as it should be, not ex negativo: it means abundance and fulfilment, not absence of war or conflict.
Similarly, in the Christian tradition, ‘quiet’, ‘silence’, ‘solitude’ often imply awareness, peace of mind, presence of God, rather than absence of sound or lack of company.
Photograph: Beach of Wyk on Föhr, Germany. Christina Egan © 2014.
Suburban traffic jam
It’s raining, the traffic is creeping,
the morning is seeping away…
The bus windows seem to be weeping
at boundless suburban grey.
Yet should a grenade or a comet
now strike us, as if to sift –
I’d meet my death as a poet,
I’ve smiled and I’ve breathed and I’ve lived!
Christina Egan © 2015
Vorstadtstau
Es regnet… Minuten verrinnen
im Vorstadtstau, Stoßzeitstau…
Die Autobusfenster verschwimmen
im uferlos traurigen Grau.
Und sollte der Tod uns jetzt lichten
– Granate oder Komet –
so hab’ ich gelächelt, gedichtet,
so hab’ ich geatmet, gelebt!
Christina Egan © 2015
These thoughts came to me on a bus near the spot in London where a man was shot dead by gangsters in 2015; no one has been charged with the crime. In 2016, another man was shot dead nearby by police. Later that year, another man was stabbed to death just down the road, near Wood Green Station.
Moreover, many terrorist attacks have happened in Europe, and many more have been prevented in London alone; but more are bound to afflict us.
House of Books
(British Library)
On the grey carpet,
grey shapes intersect,
shadows of shoulders,
of hands, of heads:
minds overlapping
for a moment.
From the white walls,
rapid shuttles ricochet,
shiny yarns interweave:
threads of voice,
trains of thought,
embroidering the air.
Built of a million bricks
glowing at the ashen junction
is the House of Books;
built of a million minds
is the fabric of the pages,
of the screens, of the scrolls.
Christina Egan © 2017
Ripples of People
(Spring Equinox)
*
Ripples of people,
uneven waves, sudden whirls,
fast currents of cars:
a wayward river within
a canyon of grand buildings.
*
These neat white windows,
row upon row, road after road,
a thousand eyes
trying to catch light, praying
to touch the feeble sunset.
*
Christina Egan © 2013
These tanka were written in Knightsbridge, London,
in the last days of March — after equinox! —
when after months of dull and dark skies,
you may still be desperate for light and warmth.
For similar poems in German, see Alles drängt vorwärts.
Photograph: Deptford Broadway, London.
Michael Oakes © 2016
Friday in Lent
Friday morning.
The city is busy and tired
under the closely curtained sky.
The headlines shout out:
Things fall apart,
trains, towns,
countries, couples.
Life hurts.
The day is a prison, a lenient one,
with gardens and books as windows
and magical messages beamed onto screens,
with the freedom of speech
and the purple pursuit of the heavens.
Christina Egan © 2001
Purple is the colour of Lent, representing suffering; you will find churches decorated —and their statues covered up — with purple fabrics. Purple (violet, lilac, mauve) is a slightly melancholy colour, but it also has dreamlike and spiritual qualities. My ‘purple pursuit’ has all these shades of meaning; ‘the heavens’ could refer to religious faith or simply to a decent and fulfilled life on earth, as in ‘Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness’.
Friday is the time when Christians remember Jesus’ passion and keep some fasting, a miniature Lent within each week… or at least the time when they do remember their faith during Lent. The positive messages on your screen could come from a friend — or from God, if you believe in Scriptures!
For a German and English poem about Lent, go to Fastenzeit / Lent.
I Peel Potatoes Round and Round
The pots and pans are stacked away
The fruit and flour packed away
The spoons and ladles tied away
And half my life is lied away
I peel potatoes round and round
And see the muddy peelings mount
I peel and chop and boil and feel
My lifetime passing with the peel
The dust and crumbs are sucked away
The sheets and covers tucked away
The mud and mildew brushed away
And half my life is washed away
I am a woman and a wife
And all of you deny my life
Cast speeches of equality
And stifling silence over me
The socks and shirts are stacked away
The boots and woollens packed away
The shears and shovels tied away
And half my life is lied away
I am a woman and a wife
And all of you deny my strife
Is this two thousand seventeen?
My shackles hurt me more unseen
Christina Egan © 2016
Photograph: Christina Egan © 2013.
Pretended liberation of women = Double shifts for women = New servitude of women
Read more in the essay The Tea Turned Cold in the Cup at FEMINISM.
Christina Egan 