Alan Rickman - WarPoems текст песни

Dogs and Bones
After a few days of war
the Sarajevo streets were a catwalk for dogs:
perfumed dogs, well-groomed dogs, dogs
with cut-glass collars
and not a flea between them. Their owners
had left them as they left
the burning city.

The trash-heaps became
a battlefield where the lapdogs lost
to an army of strays, lean-limbed
and mangy with hate.
Cowering and cleansed, the back-alley refugees
retreated to the doorways
of locked apartments, barking in answer
to each unearthly whistle
as the morning shells came in.

***

...one of those locked apartments
where we kicked down the door, searching
for a bastard sniper and found
the skeleton of an old woman fused
to a kitchen chair, yes, merged with the wood.
She had starved to death
sitting next to a pantry crammed with cans of food.

We spent a long time debating the crucial issue
of her religion. Yackety-yack. We could get no clue
from the photos that littered the place,
or the needlepoint of a knight
and castle, or the hundred
bottles of perfume placed around her bed.
Her piously folded hands remained a secret.

It was dawn before the argument died out
and we carred her into the street where dogs
were fighting amid the garbage--
nothing they wouldn't risk,
nothing they wouldn't eat. Who cares,
anyway? Who knows
whether she even believed in God? 'By God,
God will find his hands full
after this war," someone said, and we fell
silent, pretending not to see
her silly grin, and the sudden silver glint
of the can-opener on its chain
around her neck.

Goran Simic: Beginning After Everything
After I buried my mother
(under fire, I sprinted from the graveyard)

after the soldiers came with my brother
wrapped in a tarp
(I gave them back his gun)

after the fire in the eyes of my children
as they ran to the cellar
(the rats ran ahead of them)

after I wiped the old woman's face
with a dishtowel
(terrified to reveal a face I knew)

after the ravenous dog
feasting on blood
(just another corpse in snipers' alley)

after everything

I wanted to write poems like newspaper reports,
so heartless, so cold,
that I could forget them, forget them
in the same moment that someone might ask me,
'Why do you write poems like newspaper reports?'

Goran Simic: Christmas
'I'm blind,' I say. I don't speak again
for a very long time. Of course,
I'm lying about being blind: if I look
out of the window, to where
the children are singing carols, I see
how the snow seems to fetch a rainbow;
I see frozen songbirds fall
from the branches; I see a butcher haul
a slaughtered lamb down the street.

It is night. An icon burns in the stove.
There's a seamless drone from the airport
that makes me want to weep.
'I am blind,' I say, 'I am blind.'
She doesn't say a word. She beats
the Devil's tattoo on the tabletop.

'I've forgotten,' I whisper. I don't speak again
for a very long time. Of course,
I'm lying about having forgotten: I think back
to hoofprints in the snow and dogs on a leash.
It was a manhunt. I remember my father laughed
when I barked at the birds.

'Have you ever noticed how a vacuum-cleaner sounds
like a plane in take-off, or how
a TV left on too long will fix a room
with a hot and heavy smell? Have you noticed
the depth of frost?' I ask her.
'Have you noticed this incredible frost at all?'
She's got nothing to say for herself.
She might not have heard.

I won't speak again. I'll sit here and watch
the traffic lights adapting endlessly
to whatever's best. That's me, I'm just like that.
A whole universe buzzed above
the c