inspirations

About a fortnight ago one of the blogs that I read offered the opportunity to participate in a shared poem day. Wouldn't it be cool, the suggestion went, if we all posted a poem with words that "pulse in our blood" and posted links so we could blog-hop and read all this great stuff? Yes. It would be. And I expect that it was, but I learned about it too late to chime in. Nevertheless, here is one of my favorite poems. It was published in the New York Review of Books, a few years ago.

Basho
by Cees Nooteboom (translated from the Dutch by J.M. Coetzee)

We know poetic poetry the common dangers
of moonstruckness, bel canto. Embalsamed air, that is all,
unless you turn it into pebbles that flash and hurt.
You, old master, polish the pebbles
that you fling to bring down a thrush.
Out of the world you cut an image that bears your name.
Seventeen pebbles for arrows a school of deathly singers.
See by the waterside the track of the poet
on his way to the innermost snowland. See how the water erases it
how the man with the hat inscribes it again
preserves water and footprint, capturing the movement that has passed,
so that what vanished is still there as something that vanished.

I love that last line: "so that what vanished is still there as something that vanished"