Status Updates From The Poetry of Jaroslav Seifert

Remembrances, however, have a woman’s skin.
When you taste them with the tip of your tongue
they taste sweet
and have an exciting fragrance.
So there!

Remembrances, however, have a woman’s skin.
When you taste them with the tip of your tongue
they taste sweet
and have an exciting fragrance.
So there!

Beautiful as on a jug a painted flower,
heavy as our guilt that will not go away
— never can its memory decay.
At the end, at our final hour
we shall slumber in its bitter clay.

Beautiful as on a jug a painted flower
is the land that bore you, gave you life,
beautiful as on a jug a painted flower,
sweeter than a loaf from fresh-ground flour
into which you’ve deeply sunk your knife.

Countless times disheartened, disappointed,
always newly you return to it,
countless times disheartened, disappointed,
to this land so rich and sun-anointed,
poor like springtime in a gravel pit.

A scent-filled autumn sky: below it
a city with an ailing poet,
a window to the evening sun.
Here is a helmet, sword and gun.

This city, true, is not where I was born,
its rivers flow along without concern,
but once below a bridge there I had wept:
a pipe, a pen, a ring are all I kept.

It was autumn. Foreign troops
had occupied the vineyard slopes,
emplaced their guns among the vines, like nests,
and aimed them at the Gioconda’s breasts.

We saw a sad impoverished land,
soldiers without legs or hands
but not without a spark of hope,
the fortress gates were swinging open.

Deep-red apples curve down the royal trunk like a harp, fitted by autumn with cobweb strings, ring and sing, my player!

We are not from a land where oranges grow, where round Ionian columns climb the vine that’s sweeter than the lips of Roman women; ours but the apple tree, fiercely bowed down by age and fruit.