The Literary Review
MY LADY HOPE
(To the memory of Anne McLaren, 1948 onward)
I dreamt of Lady Hope tonight
She smiled on me so sweetly,
Fair as in days of our keen youth
When she kissed me very sweetly.
“Where did you go, my Lady, my love,
What countries saw your features?
Your flaming gaze, your sunburnt hands,
Your reach to other futures?”
“I’ve always been here, young man of mine,
Here where the wise can see me,
You grew up & lost your keen eye
& the faint are not able to see me.”
“We all must grow up, my Lady, my love,
How can I again see you?”
“Remember how knowledge led you to love,
Hold fast to that, & you’ll see me.”
“But you’re no longer a girl, my love,
Rosy as dawn & eyes shining.”
“We all grow up, old man of mine,
I’m a woman now, eyes shining.”
- Darko R. Suvin
READING CECCO’S S'i' fosse…
(To Kasia)
If i had the power of fire, i’d blow up explosives
If that of water, I’d drown the makers of sorrow,
If the high one of wind, from people’s brains
Blow cobwebs away — open your eyes, fools,
You can’t take it with you, why strut & fret?
Omnipotent, maybe destroy this stupid
Species, for a cleaner to come from fireflies,
Electric eels or hexapods divisible
In two & three. As i’m but Darko, unreconciled
I praise women, learners, lovers, workers,
The insurgent four whales that bear the world,
With robust love may turn it upside down.
- Darko R. Suvin
A STRESS ON SUNSET: À LA LIPSKA
(-For Ewa Lipska and Marina Ciccarini
--
I frequent some prophets on whom i count…. This is nowhere written yet, tho the words are on their way already.
Ewa Lipska, Love, Dear Mrs. Schubert
)
Dear Ladies, my constant companions, whom I continually
Read with phrases from bygone years, still do you remember
The USSR? Anti-fascism? Or a dozen winged cognates, no
Longer actual or possible: student life? Honesty? A minimally
Survivable winding way of life, track path route course ford
Path ferry pontoon tunnel subway tube passage – even gateway?
Door — avenue — entrance? Anyhow, somehow or other? An America
To dream of, a rich Indies carnally delightful? Can the fires
Burning the world down still also forge? Our crimes have grown
Up, they are self-sufficient and smirk at the elders. Can we gamble
For a world beyond evil shockwaves of stupid rulers? I name
Them: big banks, Big Pharma, agribusiness, weird commanders-
In chief of capital mass murders.
And yet there whoosh some strange
Loves still down the Highway toward the Sun, spurning
Diminution. Despite the ongoing tic-tac of the grandfather clock,
Reaping, i keep all revolts burnished, hug them closely to me.
Snowstorms of memory coalesce in a monument not set into stone, for
It is still too soon to be too late.
- Darko R. Suvin
MEHR LICHT
(“More light” – reputed dying words by Goethe)
So go now canzonetta mia, into
This cruel world where you lack common
Sense, be non-profit but profitable, non-sentimental
Always sympathetic to the suffering & exploited
Courageously try to bring some more light
Air for smogless breathing, food
For starving stomachs & ganglia.
Be
Common, communist, for the commons, earthy
Be of the part of writers & readers, the bombed &
The starved, the Four Whales that hold up
The world: women, workers, lovers, liberators.
Your dress may be tattered but smile upon them
Ironically & cheerfully announcing & denouncing
Exclaiming & proclaiming WHOA:
We have
Our alternative.
- Darko R. Suvin
(Glossary: canzonetta mia = my little song, Dante’s phrase)
SONNET USHERING IN THE 2020S
(Che stai? già il secol ....
questo di tanta speme oggi mi resta!
Ugo Foscolo)
What are you waiting for? Incapable of cleanly
Living or ending swiftly, forbidden and forbidding,
Horrific another decade imposes its bidding,
A devolving society hurries, dying meanly.
Once life was adventure, knowledge, glory,
Now it’s anxiety, a wandering recollection,
Disappointment, protest and reflection,
Memory of great ancestors that in the story
Shook the earth and stormed heaven. Legacy
Here may be exemplary, a widowed wife:
By irreality find potential reality out, see
By past errors where hypothesis waging
Flowers into theory, and the tight straits of life
Can host the oblivion of disengaging.
- Darko R. Suvin
RUMINATING ON HOPES
You are gone but not forgotten
Dreadful sorry, Clementine!
My Darling Clementine
We look now to polar bears for innocence, their kills
Don’t murder for power, to honey-loving bears and gracious ocelots.
It is late now in the humans’ perversion. Things strip themselves,
You may touch their diseased skeleton. Who am I then, reading
Down streets that writhe like untuned songs, am I still
Impregnated like warm wax by the salvific hopes? Cunning
Capitalocene bombs and starvings shattered the hopings
Into garbage heaps of millions and billions of human
Corpses. I was left naked to enemies in the foetid marsh,
Nursing jealously an army of needless lesions festering,
Serving a life sentence amid cayman appetites, coral
Snake venoms. Lost hopes shattered dreams.
Anxiety keeps wringing my heart: I embrace you my love
Dead to me endless years. I remember, mouth to mouth,
Each shudder of yours. I talk with my lost hopes:
you are not guilty,
You were smothered, poor people, by smiling killers in spats.
In a perfectly sinful age they also serve who only stand
And wait, pollinating pregnant memories.
- Darko R. Suvin