A lyrical gift

On every New Year’s Eve, I would send a poem to my friends. Poems by Mallarme and Bukowski for bold, creative pals. Poems by Maya Angelou, Anna Akhmatova and Adrienne Rich for the few female friends on my mailing list. Poems by Kabir and Blake for the spiritually inclined. Wallace Stevens or Robert Frost (‘The Road not Taken’) for my boss. And for introducing a neophyte to the magic of poetry - ‘This is just to say’ by William Carlos Williams.

The response was tepid. No one replied. No one wrote in to say they were touched. Perhaps, they felt I was being too pretentious. Perhaps, I was. I stopped mailing poems.

But the habit has stuck and I still feverishly scour poetry books on New Year’s Eve (this is good, since I rarely dip into poetry for the rest of the year).

Right now, I am wading through a lot of stuff by Arthur Rimbaud, the boy genius. Here’s a simple one from his amazing oeuvre.

A Sleeper in the Valley

A green hole where a river sings;

Silver tatters tangling in the grass;

Sun shining down from a proud mountain:

A little valley bubbling with light.

A young soldier sleeps, lips apart, head bare,

Neck bathing in cool blue watercress,

Reclined in the grass beneath the clouds,

Pale in his green bed showered with light.

He sleeps with his feet in the gladiolas.

Smiling like a sick child, he naps:

Nature, cradle him in warmth: he's cold.

Sweet scents don't tickle his nose;

He sleeps in the sun, a hand on his motionless chest,

Two red holes on his right side.