Some Poems by Erik Stinus

August 22, 1934 - November 13, 2009

In about 1969, a friend, Mogens Brynjolf, introduced me to Erik Stinus and his wife Sara in Copenhagen.   I'd met Mogens in Lagos, Nigeria where we were both volunteers and would-be poets at Yaba Technical College.  As Erik had spent much time in Africa there was a connection.   Subsequently, we hatched a scheme where I would try and get Erik's poems published in England.  I got a folder of his typed translations.  I think he depended on Sara's English to help him with these drafts.  She was originally from Mumbai India.  I did succeed in getting one of his poems After the Rains published in an British poetry magazine (Workshop New Poetry, 1972) but, unfortunately, no more than one!  When I married and left the UK to live in the US we lost touch.

Now, via the web, I find both Erik and his wife are dead.  Erik died in 2009 from cancer.  Sara, Erik's muse, died in  January 2006.  Mogens died in 2006.  His artist brother, Jorgen Brynjolf, died in 1993.

But I still have that folder of Erik's poetry.  The full contents can be seen on my Academia site.

And I still have numerous numbered lithographs and etchings by Jorgen Brynjolf hanging on our walls, including all 10 original raderinger af Jorgen Brynjolf from Forord Til En Fremtidig Bog, by Isodore Ducasse Comte de Lautréamont, oversat af Karen Stougard Hansen, Stamattina, Kobenhavn 1968.

As Erik published multiple volumes of poetry in Denmark, I expect all of the poems that follow are copyrighted accordingly in their Danish version.   These English versions are mostly the work of Erik and Sara with a few changes that I've made.

http://da.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erik_Stinus

Colony

Through seven years

the heavens threatened us

with their tyranny

Through seven years

we had no courage to turn around

and lament the burning villages

Through seven years

the heavens waited

for man to cease praying

Through seven years

starvation squeezed the country

the dead were forgotten in fear

Now from the depths of the forest

thunder is sounding

A spear - quivering - is planted in the soil

                                                Erik Stinus

                                                  Koloni, from Graeneland

Five Ephemeras in Memory of a New Year

        i

the sky is hazy   neutral    a fragile slope

calm after a violent nightmare

leaning over the sea it is stretching

and nearing   happy and surprised

that reality is coming to meet it

these green trees    those poor men

schoolgirls carrying books in their arms

the dark bound them to blindness

the morning dissolves all shadows

all eyes are seeing

        ii

look at these eyes

roses and cherry blossom

ships and birds   fading stars

and the torch procession

these red faces wearing no masks

but singing   and with their songs

conquering the false darkness

the churchyards and the crematoriums

to preach the gospel in a new way

        iii

since you led me into the desert

telling me about the secret life of stones

since you showed me the lone fertility of the oases

I'll whisper to you

that I don't like to see women in uniform

because I want beauty to be immortal

that men in khaki would be more useful

playing cards and drinking beer

that I want the music to return

the music of the waterfall

and the colors of the rainbow

of the swamp   the colors of nakedness

and of love

       iv

today all has recovered its voice

we need no longer speak our mother tongue

                                                            to be understood

water lilies have tongues

chestnuts have tongues

all dumb things speak and listen

and winding concrete roads

cannot frighten us with their autumn

their heartless mirrors and headlights

        v

I am standing at the bulwark

singing for you

day and night

singing your own songs to call you back

I see you once more at your stage entrance

the snow of spotlights lying on your shoulders

birds of sorrow

sitting on your head

and you ready to re-conquer

the indifferent darkness of your audience

with your love

                                                Erik Stinus

The Invisible

The dawn is a gaping face when

darkness slips out of the forest like a snake

Drowning voices

enter distant jungles

reach ships and strangers

They swarm on the stairs of the sea

where shadows escape with dragging skirts

and slime green shoes

                        with the steep and wakening taste of smoke

from cupola cabins

                        remembering endless roads of drought

                                    and churchyard nettles

            In the universe of numbers

Who is it that waits behind those wireless voices?

Who is it that shouts under bewildered steps?

                                               

                                                Erik Stinus

Rain

rain like rain

green rain greener in the dark

birds never tired

birds impossible to strangle

in the distance cars gash the air

smell of earth       just a touch

in the green    green    darkness

where your face lights up

behind veils of soft insects

layer on layer of protection

in the dark which does not darken

   

in that invisible blackbird  

in that starling on the housetop   

a collision of transparent umbrellas

&  the grass that grows

tight around your limbs

as I do

and we together

together

like rain    like rain

                                                Erik Stinus

After the Rains

How can one hold

blue waters   brown lands

sail around

travel across?

I'm halted by birds on the wind  

by a mountain never closer

yet covering half the sky

and that tiny human being

on its back

his sharp-edged plough

so insignificant

Stillness

green   golden

animals have left their tracks

But what halts me now

is a flute

the only sound on the planet

   steppe and desert   ice-cap

   Congo forest and hills of China

transformed into an ocean

tranquil   transparent

but gliding

across this ocean

wordless and warm

this flute is like a boat

                                                Erik Stinus

(an earlier version published in

Workshop New Poetry, editor Norman Hidden, 1972)

EPIC

     i

his canoe moves on the river

the forest is a tunnel

deer and stars hunt across his forehead

birds flicker in his larynx

a web of malaria over his temples

salt fever deep in his chest

& the quick drums of love

in the green dark of his body

at the tunnel's exit     a village

a chick beneath hen's wing

in each hut flutes that cry

or have they all departed?

the river is a beaked lizard

the water's teeth tear the water's tongue

who is it that waits on the further side?

a blaze of fire scorches his eyes away

he had just begun to sing

monument:   a boot on the throat

     ii

between his tongue and palate

was choked a canoe song hunting song...

from his lips sprang a cry of distress

                                    & that cry   Freedom

& his name now must always signify

the world's two temples:    craters    hospitals

all the propellers and sounds of the country

                                                (a cuckoo too)

beginnings of grass beneath gravel and concrete

dangerous vibrations of metal

that river's dead children

      against whom you cross yourself in vain

soldiers absorbed in their helmets but lacking

the sharpness of Hamlet

priests of a new age in yellow mantles from beyond the rains

a sea which ashes defile

long mouth organs of  wharves

& the teeth of the crocodile

but yet my voice has time to stay

above the sad crops of these lands

to defend them against the fire's evil name

                                                Erik Stinus

The Casuarina Tree

The Casaurina tree

sent forth crows into the world

Now they are returning.

Well    that was the world

and they talk about it length

in order not to hear the night

rising from the earth

a huge damp silence

They still can see the sun

through lacy slender twigs

and below them this hotel

the only building on the plains

(that's where the cars go to sleep).

A guest if yet awake amidst

white and empty beds    around him

softly steals a peopled void

A train whistles

and on the tossing earth

he staggers into sleep

where a face he knows awaits him.

He can almost reach it.

That  then  is the world

The Casuarina tree

gathers coolness around itself

                                                Erik Stinus

The Hope

This minute has no future

my words are grey words

Dozing   I see years and months dissolved

pictures like laundry spread in the grass

White and blue clothes

which once we wore and shall wear again

You   in the shining costumes of my dreams

I   dressed in the silk of your thoughts

Our words are grey words

without a future

But for one moment

we destroyed all evil

We have grown stronger than our enemies

they shall see us return with a new hope

A fervid dream

without a past

                                                Erik Stinus