JANET FRAME

No me enamora la poesía, y mucho menos la mía.  Pero con la poesía de Janet Frame, escritora nacida en Nueva Zelanda en 1924, sentí algo parecido al enamoramiento...

Storms Will Tell

Storms will tell; they can be trusted.
On the sand the wind and high tide write
bulletins of loss, imperfect shells,
by smooth memorial of high-country trees,
sea-weed, ripped bird, fine razor, ramshorn, cockleshell.

Give us the news say the tall ascetics reading
ten miles of beach over and over; between empty shells, look,
burning from the salt press, stories
of flood: How I abandoned house and home.
Razor: How I slit the throat of sunlight.
Ramshorn: How I butted and danced at the ewe sunlight.
Cockle: How my life sailed away on a black tide.

Wyndham

The big stick
has given up stirring
the Wyndham pool.

Stones do not move here;
people sleep while
the cows make milk
the sheep make wool

and in the empty
railway houses
no Dad sits each morning
on the satin-smooth
dunny seat.

The Suicides

It is hard for us to enter
the kind of despair they must have known
and because it is hard we must get in by breaking
the lock if necessary for we have not the key,
though for them there was no lock and the surrounding walls
were supple, receiving as waves, and they drowned
though not lovingly; it is we only
who must enter in this way.

Temptations will beset us, once we are in.
We may want to catalogue what they have stolen.
We may feel suspicion; we may even criticise the décor
of their suicidal despair, may perhaps feel
it was incongruously comfortable.

Knowing the temptations then
let us go in
deep to their despair and their skin and know
they died because words they had spoken
returned always homeless to them.