IF YOU WANT TO KNOW WHAT POETRY'S GOOD FOR, IT'S A QUESTION YOU MUST ALSO ALLOW Poem by Nachoem M. Wijnberg

Poets write less than the day is long,
even if they write as much as you, because they are so scared they want a whole army around them
before they dare to write down an order,
and even less when they remember, because night is falling, how they lost everything,
except the few words
they only understood a small part of. In the army of poets you wait, like the others,
for orders from the one the whole army belongs to,
and how would you like it deployed?

You write poems to be translated,
because your language is the language of translations, and a translator, any translator, is allowed to break poems open,
merging them together, like Fitzgerald with Omar, if the translator thinks they know you well enough
to drop a pebble in a cup
because morning has come: gentlemen, it is time for morning prayers,
meaning: for the rising. When would poetry
no longer be of any use?

Poetry does not do much, but compared to what? Poetry does not make the dead rise, lie down again,
rise again,
but sometimes it makes the rising rise. Do you already know a way
to carry on writing poems if you are no longer as good at remembering what you read yesterday
and you made them rise before you noticed what you were doing?

How you imagine them reading what you have written? In a sports centre,
where they have hastily put out tables and folding chairs,
not like for an exam,
but for a marriage market for people missing an arm or a leg or an eye, and everyone reads out loud
except one person who reads silently. People who come in can start where they like and read as fast as they like,
no two are on the same page,
like where you go for morning prayer (only because you wanted to say a prayer of mourning,
which requires others standing around you, but not them being just as far or even having already started their morning prayer),
early in the morning in a conference room,
high in an office building,
in the middle of the city.

What else do you need to know about
to write poetry? At most as much as the salt you hold between thumb and index finger
or the salt that is already in the food
and the cook doesn't need to cry over the pots. What is already in being moved or feeling compassion
or in not having everything go away at once. But when you say something
because you know something
you wanted it to be poetry and nothing else.

The poems the others left behind
when you yelled them forward,
it's already enough if you can pick them up and read part of the poem out loud to help one of them get moving again,
now in a different direction,
like a scout who has come back frightened,
or if part of one of their poems echoes in your head when you say something that is like it,
and if it's not enough, is like it in combination with part of a poem by someone else again,
and part of a poem from yet someone else that was only just translated before nobody else spoke their language anymore,
from three you make one, if you can't manage with two, or a larger number, counting back as far as you can,
and you know that it goes further.

Your scouts, the vanguard, the part of your army you still think
you will be able to manage without right at the end,
the poets from before, from further away, and those who were still here not long ago,
or might still be here now,
you arrange them as notes on the far left and far right of the page,
but what do you do if what they leave behind
reveals too soon what you and they might be planning,
you can't follow every one of them to clean up behind them,
but you can send them forward so quickly
that nothing you might be planning can be carried out exactly as written down,
and that will have to be enough,
after all you are the kind of poet for whom a few casualties more or less
on your side make little difference.