...I've Travelled Poem by Emanuel Pope

then I travelled a lot,

to the end of the earth and to the end

of my days,

traveling how the dragons are traveling in the summer or

how the wild dogs raged by hunger

or hare-brained fireflies through the darkness of

a carcass of a rotting horse

and I heard it covering me outwith

a relentless noise of a pairs of wings,

countless wings

and how sad I was like a white swan

at night I was dreaming such a ripened quince

hopes embracing the moon:

'There are angels, boy, ' I said to myself

'...angels coming to help you! '

besides, I was not utterly an idiot and

in the morning when I was washing my face in the spring

with my own lucidity,

I knew it was only the untamed sussuration of

lust of blood

flies, only flies,

circling my universe.

'An archangel has never put its holy ear against

a broken heart of a horse's carcase'

and travelling back on the road

with my own halves of human and beast barely

breathing within.

... I went far and away,

up to the end of the earth and till the end

my days

how, at one time, only the zealous ascetics avid for

pain used to leg it,

or hare-brained fireflies through darkness without

compassion for a rotting horse carcass

praying,

- increasing nausea -

looking disgusted at the knot in the words

as today and tomorrow insidious and cruel

whatever I ask reverberate in my bones

the wilderness and that

there is no treshold I can sit down

nor door to rest on

all the horses are tired of waiting

and the field is all snowed with bones

between corpses there is no form

of comunication

only a summary empathy, deaf

as a liquor flowing silently from on side to

another

unconvincingly like in the movies

or how we've seen happening between the world

of sea creatures and the feeble light of the moon

otherwise how they are between the world of stones the world and the world

of metals

or in-between this world and that world

that's it

... I've travelled more than enough

I would say

so much that from now on I can hear how light

is bending,

whinging like a sheet buckled in the hand of the one

who molds the earth

a box of a bitter resonance

it's hard to believe, although I don't feel any type

of pitifulness

her crying is calling me all the way

crosswise

my end is nigh.

and I began to laugh as I haven't laughed in years...





Translated by Daniela Bullas