Selections from a Contemporary Danish Poetry Anthology?!

"have you lost your mind?" "why are you posting this here, this isn't blogging, this is posting other people's works!" "what's with the artsy-farsty mumbo-jumbo?!?!". These might be things you are screaming right now, in vain at the screen. In my muddled world, things work just a little differently. I'm trying to get off to K.C. to go see the Violet Burning tonight, and these library books are definately overdue, and I cannot renew them anymore. Our tempermental computer does not let us use word, works, or any other random saving device, and I wanted to save at least a few of these poems without taking them to a photocopy place.........so dear readers, I shall post a few poems that I just happened to like for some reason, for our collective reading/remembernce enjoyment, since I will lose my bookmarked pages if I take them back to the library now.

"but won't it take a long time typing out all of them?"
a. silence!
b. Maybe....depending on several factors.................enjoy them or not.




Heroica by Sophus Claussen(1865-1931)

It is a fight to halt wild horses.
It is a fight to win rare women,
stately, beautiful, who offer fair resistance-
and satisfy them for their loss.

It is a fight to put life-size
figures alive onto canvas,
and a fight to conjure spirit
from compressed worlds into a tight frame.

It is a fight to fell big trees-
but also to make them grow
with wide-spread arms, strong as giants,
and roots deep in the mould- the same whether
raising a tree out of the earth itself
or an artifact of word and color.

It is a fight which delights the whole kingdom
to have checked our own strength
on the point of victory...
and a fight to grasp the current of life-
gold coins for one, song for another-
and not lose the right word when its time is there,
while it is still worth knowing.

It is a fight to keep both power and spirit,
and to suffer punishment from not fist.
If condemned, you must stand up to the sentence
with words that have five fingers on each hand.








Fear by Tom Kristensen(1893-1974)


Fear is stron as a Mongol horde.
It is ripened by immature years.
And each day my heart grows heavy,
Foreseeing the continents flooded with tears.

But my fear must be vented in longing,
In visions of horror and stress.
I have longed for the final diaster,
For havoc and violent death.

I have longed to see cities burning
And the races of mankind in flight-
A world rushing headlong in panic
From God's retribution and might.



Christ in the Grain Fields by Ole Sarvig (1921-?)

Tonight I saw the grain,
the dreaming grain,
the grain and husks of all the living,
here in these fields.

I saw it this morning about five-
pale hour when Christ came,
when children are born,
when fires break out.

It was so beautiful. Sleepers so hushed. Calm.
Christ moved like a moon through the grain.




The Cologne Cathedral by Ole Wivel (1921-?)

Automobiles speed by it.
Like a hammer blow of the past,
contrary to probability
and the law of perpetual evolution
it stands, scarred and splintered
between the streets.
A cliff furrowed with dreams
or better:
an antenna of the past
created to pick up the heavenly blessings
that we totally ignore.
We clatter at the bottom of it, move chairs,
sell postcards, shout perhaps
(as when one scratches a fingernail on a stone).
Should much rather tear it down,
blow it to pieces,
a useless symbol of inner conditions
which no one admits (shining arches that span
the space of silence). Insolent efforts
to escape the place where we obviously find ourselves
these frenzied minutes
and the morphine-high at the end.
Silence and striving in one,
rising toward that
which is impervious to analyses and proof.
And yet everyone knows
there are tones
inaudible to the ear.
(Tastebuds on the tongue are dulled
by tobacco and old age.)
The music plays above our heads
and what we see
are the empty, ingenious racks of the music stands.