friday refrains · regina derieva
Friday 27 June 2008 | I like a cookie
The poem is really the thing, this week—I encountered it via the always rewarding website of poet Annie Finch and fell immediately for its Szymborskaesque (!) melancholy, its epistolary addressed-to-no-one conceit, its rhetorical unfinished-sentence syntax. Exiled first in Israel and now in Sweden, the Odessa-born baptized Catholic—possibly someday a Nobel laureate—is also known for her Russian translations of Thomas Merton.
And yet. Can it be any coincidence that our poet HAS THE SAME INITIALS as Professor Dawkins?! Look at her face. Faithless readers, I think our atheist has met his agnostic match. May their children (or memes) be many, environmentally adaptable, and above all, richly, fruitfully contrarian.
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TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN
Consisting as I do of scraps of dreams,
of lands I’ve never seen, of underpinnings,
of air and salt, of elemental things
unmeddled with by endings or beginnings,
of clay and iron, and of ocean wave
and shingle crowds of feet have trod upon,
of faith and hope, stood at the wall, to brave
the rifles, turning into heavenly stone,
of quiet and simplicity, bestowed
upon us by a woman among women,
of emptiness that stretches like a road
into a vastness where things lose their meaning,
of whisperings, of looking long at that
which goes among us by the name of God,
at death, which never was, and now is not,
at life, of which so little can be had.
—Regina Derieva, tr. Alan Shaw, from Alien Matter
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