The death of a poet of whom UD had never heard – Viola Fischerová – has UD grazing among her few online, translated poems (she was Czech). A series of excerpts from a collection of poems about being an old woman and mourning the death of passion is surprisingly and beautifully frank.
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And all around they cultivate
the parks and gardens
Beyond the window where only
a week ago
and yesterday
all her greenery was whole
a wall of concrete gapes
A headless row of shrubs
pruned for the beauty of spring after next
birdsong from nowhere
Weeping a little she secretly plots revenge
She’ll abandon the lot of them!
Even without leaves
it buds and sprouts underground
her sweet once-wood
It stretches its roots toward her
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Time yet and now
almost at the end they come
their anointed worthy of love
only in sleep
While they
at nights fish from streaming water
their silver white and shining
years
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As if it was a matter of where
and how she spends the ageing time
of drawn-out summer afternoons
whether she wanders
under the royal oaks
in gilded gap-filled memory
or in cafés where she grew up
eating up what is and is not
for herself
or else
if on a bench on the green
of an unknown village
she gently puts down roots
into the dust and the clay
to the age-old pealing
of pungent smells
from stables and cowsheds
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A couple of days ago the buds burst
now the swollen tips of branches
gush down the avenue
Bared into nakedness
childhood reeks in the sun
of powder and urine
A heavy slow stream
falls
into the furrow of water and foams
Bodies hate
the rights they once had