A Diptych on the Past as Story

Not quite entries for my growing collections of contemporary poems about late antiquity (even with the broadly definition I typically apply, these aren't about that period of history). Still, close enough to count as poems about history that I want to include on this blog, my commonplace book. I love the way Maggie Smith and Esther Jansma write about the past as a story.

Hope you enjoy.

Everything is New

 

What would happen was always there, perfectly

spelt by a cup which shattered, shards

marked with the imprint of thumbs

the shiver-script of pinsharp twigs.

It's not a tale we made up but something

that was here and is here in the traces of ditches

and posts and wood fires long gone cold.

It just needed finding, that's all.

Someone had to look at it and say: what is it

it's this, and there it was, a house with a hearth

people as ever and ever being themselves

the first time in this now and sitting

with warm hands which clasp a cup

by the fire and talking and the tick-tick of rain

is a circle of sound and nothing matters, the night

the invisible clouds, the silence of it all

outside that's sleeping or waiting for day

are the roof and the walls round the roof

and the bricks of the house already old

but new, being found again today.

~ Esther Jansma, What it is, translated by Francis R. Jones (Tarset, 2008)

 

I call them back to me

I call them back to me —

flimsy selves of the past,
some vellum-thin, clearly

unfinished. Not fleshed out,
not fully — only children

really, stopped in time, still
tottering about in their

mother’s high heels,
meaning mine?

I didn’t know them,
their little plots forgotten

just as they began
to rise. I didn’t know

what any of them,
any of us, would become

in the end, which is not yet
where we are.

I call them back.
I’m ready, I tell them.

I think I know now
where we’re going, all of us,

together. I think I know
where the story is going.

Come back, come back,
I can finish it.

~ Maggie Smith, The Bitter Southerner 2023