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
