Last postcard from Hong Kong

  Hong Kongs just nu hetaste poet lever i England. Sarah Howe tilldelades T.S. Elliot prize tidigare i år. Jag blev inte övertygad av bokens förtjänster när jag läste och recenserade Loop of Jade i januari. Nu har jag läst om några av texterna, de som berör livet i Hong Kong, och jag måste säga att de växer vid omläsning.

  I kalendern tar ytterligare en talangfull, svensk poet plats. Jag citerar Oscar Nilsson Tornborgs presentation från Författarcentrums hemsida.
"Född 1977 i Göteborg. Bosatt i Lund sedan 1999. Poet, skribent, skrivpedagog och fil mag i litteraturvetenskap. Debuterade 2011 med diktsamlingen Vilse (FEL Förlag). Utkom i oktober 2012 med sin andra diktsamling Undertexter (FEL Förlag). Medverkar med ett stycke efterpoesi i Charlotte Qvandts diktsamling Klarnar du (FEL Förlag, 2013) och har tidigare även medverkat med dikter och/eller artiklar i tidskrifter som Ord&Bild, Pequod, Lyrikvännen, Res Publica, Rymden och OEI. Arbetar som lärare och handledare vid Skurups folkhögskolas skrivarlinje. Utkom i januari 2016 med diktsamlingen En dag har stormen redan dragit förbi, på Sadura Förlag."

***

  Följande går att läsa om Sarah Howes debutsamling i urvalsantologin Eight Hong Kong Poets.
"There is a Chinese proverb that says: ‘It is more profitable to raise geese than daughters.’ But geese, like daughters, know the obligation to return home. In her exquisite first collection, Sarah Howe explores a dual heritage, journeying back to Hong Kong in search of her roots." Source: Eight Hong Kong Poets (Chameleon Press, 2015)

Jordan Valley Park, Hong Kong

Crossing from Guangdong, by Sarah Howe
(from Loop of jade. London : Chatto & Windus, 2015.)

Something set us looking for a place.
For many minutes every day we lose
ourselves to somewhere else. Even without
knowing, we are between the enveloping sheets
of a childhood bed, or crossing
that bright, willow-bounded weir at dusk.
Tell me, why have I come? I caught
the first coach of the morning outside
the grand hotel in town. Wheeled my case
through the silent, still-dark streets of the English
quarter, the funeral stonework facades
with the air of Whitehall, or the Cenotaph,
but planted on earth's other side. Here
no sign of life, save for street hawkers, solicitous,
arranging their slatted crates, stacks of bamboo
steamers, battered woks, to some familiar
inward plan. I watch the sun come up
through tinted plexiglas. I try to sleep
but my eyes snag on every flitting, tubular tree,
their sword-like leaves. Blue metal placards
at the roadside, their intricate brooch-like
signs in white, which no one disobeys.
I am looking for a familiar face. There is
some symbol I am striving for. Yesterday
I sat in a cafe while it poured, drops
like warm clots colliding with the perspex
gunnel roof. To the humid strains of Frank
Sinatra, unexpectedly strange, I fingered
the single, glossy orchid - couldn't decide
if it was real. I picked at anaemic
bamboo shoots, lotus root like
the plastic nozzle of a watering can,
over-sauced - not like you would make at home.
I counted out the change in Cantonese.
Yut, ye, sam, sei. Like a baby. The numbers
are the scraps that stay with me. I hear
again your voice, firm at first, then almost
querulous, asking me not to go.
I try to imagine you as a girl -
a street of four-storey plaster buildings,
carved wooden doors, weathered, almost shrines
(like in those postcards of old Hong Kong you loved) -
you, a child in bed, the neighbours always in
and out, a terrier dog, half-finished bowls
of rice, the ivory Mah Jong tablets
clacking, like joints, swift and mechanical,
shrill cries - ay-yah! fah! - late into the night.
My heart is bounded by a scallop shell -
this strange pilgrimage to home.

(...)

***

  Starka barndomsminnen genomsyrar den långa dikten "Islands". Jag har valt ut det tredje delavsnittet.

Islands (extract), by Sarah Howe
(from Loop of jade. London : Chatto & Windus, 2015.)

(..)

I often did. Waiting for the shadowed moon to rise
into the windowframe, a pale, dependable friend.
It took my mother many months to eat the gifts
of mooncakes; four cloud-encrusted islands drifting
in their silver tin. She would take a slice
each afternoon with cups of wine, the kind we
heated in a beaten kitchen pan. An autumn treat
accompanied by cooling evenings, too rich
for more habitual food. She cut into the patterned
casing. Full moon, half moon, quarter moon.
I loved the unexpected orb inside: a golden
yolk set in a firmament of lotus paste. They glowed
like all those tiny suns trapped in lanterns
at the festival, speared on slim red candles.
Their charring wicks were cedars twisted in the wind.
I had a paper globe. Its redness smouldered
like a burnt-out star. Other children had the shapes
of animals, crimson cellophane on wired frames -
the undulating waves of dragons, sharp-beaked
cranes, all in profile like the oval forms of fish.
In the blackness of Victoria Park their skin
was gleaming gelatine, the hatching chrysalides
of ghostly moths; a single, silver sequin
marked each winking, convex eye. The ruby
stain of lamplight over water. Fishlines trailed
from them, metallic ribbons - some fluttered off
like slanting rain to settle in the shrivelled grass.
The procession trod them in the moonlit dust.

A pink house and a bunch of rambutans

  Det blir en kombination av webbmagasin och Asien-tematik i dagens inlägg. Jag hade utlovat att sista besöket i Hong Kong skulle ske genom den asiatiska tidskriften Cha. Men samtidigt har jag dåligt samvete över min halva sågning av Sarah Howe, tidigare i år. Så rubriken London-Hong Kong får en Sarah-epilog imorgon. Årets sista Utblick postas på söndag.

  I Lucka 14 hittar ni Joar Tiberg. Han föddes 1967 och är uppvuxen i Oxelösund och Luleå. Numera bor han i Stockholm. Tiberg debuterade 1995 och har utgivit ett tjugotal böcker i olika genrer. 2010 utkom diktboken Ansvaret Ansvaret Ansvaret Ansvaret och 2013 kom Tung trafik och lilla vägen. 2016 utger Joar Tiberg Atts jord. Hans dikter har översatts till danska, franska, norska, kinesiska och japanska, och även tonsatts av den norske tonsättaren Frode Haltli. Källa: Albert Bonniers förlag

***

  Jag börjar med att återge tidskriftens historiska bakgrund:

"Cha, founded in 2007, a decade after the handover, is the first Hong Kong-based English online literary journal; it is dedicated to publishing quality poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction, reviews and photography & art. Cha has a strong focus on Asian-themed creative work and work done by Asian writers and artists. It also publishes established and emerging writers/artists from around the world.

  The journal had a launch in Beijing on 31 August 2009 by Royston Tester. The March 2013 issue was launched on 7 March by guest editors Kaitlin Solimine (prose) and Marc Vincenz (poetry). The event was co-hosted by the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University."

*

  Cha är verkligen ett öppet webbmagasin, till skillnad mot flera av de kandidater som var påtänkta för onsdagsrubriken. Jag har studerat deras senaste utgåvor men också tittat i deras kompletta!! arkiv. Jag fascinerades av en dikt, vars text andas Japan (ej Hong Kong), och som är skriven av en författare bosatt i Canada. När jag läser hennes text får jag surrealistiska bilder i huvudet.

Nagoya Castle

A Samurai's Pink House, by Sonia Saikaley

(Published in Cha: An Asian Literary Journal. November, 2011.)

In a shroud of blackness, I peer out my window

across the road, a pink house stands abandoned. 

 

Shadows stir behind broken shutters

I wonder if it is a samurai ghost,

 

a seppuku victim still oozing blood turned pink

stucco cracked with battlefield or earthquake scars

 

along my own belly remind me of

the child whispering sensei behind a plum tree

 

a slice of pale orange fruit in her small hands

I almost wept thinking of the youngster

 

lost in my diseased womb, cut out years ago

a flash across the way, I imagine the samurai's sword

 

over belly flesh, in the lonely house

slivers of moonlight shimmer on the moving blade

***

  Även nästa diktexempel är svårtolkat, och jag har fullständigt absorberats av de fyra textraderna:

My memory a plot of land

I plant my secrets

So some may later blossom

Words traceable to their seeds

  Andrea Lingenfelter är en poet, översättare och forskare på kinesisk litteratur. Hennes översättningar inkluderar The Kite Family (2015), en samling av surrealistisk kortprosa av Hong Kong-författaren Hon Lai Chu. Andrea Lingenfelter bor i San Francisco.

Forgetting, by Andrea Lingenfelter

(Published in Cha: An Asian Literary Journal. March, 2016.)

"Remembering is difficult, but forgetting is even harder." 

                                            —Shang Qin (1930-2010)

The neighbor's kitchen garden

Grows inches every day

I pass by feathers of fennel

Pea vines still climbing but

Soon to tumble

Is it clematis that resembles

Purple starfish with pink and white mouths

And barbs at every point?

My memory a plot of land

I plant my secrets

So some may later blossom

Words traceable to their seeds

This low alley, its heavy air so

Proximate to water

The lake’s swampy edges a blur

Of duckweed and sodden grasses

By the time I return from this walk

I will have forgotten

The lines my footsteps tapped out

The massive waxy leaves of a plant I can't name

The throaty belligerence of crows

An old chest of drawers

Left beside a driveway

***

  Cha-avsnittet avslutas med en text om en välkänd (numera även i Sverige) asiatisk växt.

Rambutans, by Shuli de la Fuente-Lau

(Published in Cha: An Asian Literary Journal. March, 2016.)

My father didn't know any

better, so he chose the biggest bunch of them all.

That is how the story goes, the one reminisce of light,

in a courtship many dusty years ago, before the

empty stomachs, and the stale darkened bedrooms,

before the fights and the silences, and all

those words thrown against walls, before the disease,

and the staggering walk, before the trajectories

that refused to bend towards the same horizon but

somehow found themselves aligned, taut with dusty

rubberbands,

like the branches of those rambutan, bound together

in the biggest bunch that made my mother's eyes 

as wide as her stammering heart, looking, looking at the only

man who brought her her favourite.

Short cuts through London

  En sista London-antologi tar plats i söndagsbloggen. Men vilka pärlor den innehåller!! Det finns åtskilliga texter som är värda att servera.

  I adventskalendern gör vi ett nytt besök i lönnlövets land, Kanada. Yvonne Blomer är Poet Laureate i Victoria, British Columbia. Hennes verk har två gånger nominerats för the CBC Literary Awards och hon har medverkat i The Best Canadian Poetry (på engelska) samt i antologier och litterära tidskrifter i Kanada, Storbritannien och Japan.

***

  Poems of London : the capital in classical verse innehåller flera av de största brittiska författarna. Men framför allt har redaktören Hugh Morrison lyft fram delikatesserna ur Londons skönlitterära textflöde. Allt jag kan säga: Smaklig spis!

*

  Jag inleder med en text som verkligen känns genomarbetad. Den är inget ögonblicks verk. Dikten är författad av George Eliot, pseudonym för Mary Ann (Marian) Evans, född 22 november 1819, död 22 december 1880.

Sherlock Holmes museum

In a London Drawingroom, by George Eliot
(From Poems of London: the Capital in Classic Verse. Montpelier Publishing, 2015.)

The sky is cloudy, yellowed by the smoke. 
For view there are the houses opposite 
Cutting the sky with one long line of wall 
Like solid fog: far as the eye can stretch 
Monotony of surface and of form 
Without a break to hang a guess upon. 
No bird can make a shadow as it flies, 
For all is shadow, as in ways o'erhung 
By thickest canvass, where the golden rays 
Are clothed in hemp. No figure lingering 
Pauses to feed the hunger of the eye 
Or rest a little on the lap of life. 
All hurry on and look upon the ground, 
Or glance unmarking at the passers by 
The wheels are hurrying too, cabs, carriages 
All closed, in multiplied identity. 
The world seems one huge prison-house and court 
Where men are punished at the slightest cost, 
With lowest rate of colour, warmth and joy.

***

  Nästa exempel beskriver en sen natt (eller tidig morgon) i staden och är författad av Amy Lowell. Hennes texter återvänder jag så gärna till.

A London Thoroughfare. 2 A.M, by Amy Lowell (1874-1925)
(From Poems of London: the Capital in Classic Verse. Montpelier Publishing, 2015. Originally published in Sword Blades and Poppy Seed, 1914.)

They have watered the street,
It shines in the glare of lamps,
Cold, white lamps,
And lies
Like a slow-moving river,
Barred with silver and black.
Cabs go down it,
One,
And then another.
Between them I hear the shuffling of feet.
Tramps doze on the window-ledges,
Night-walkers pass along the sidewalks.
The city is squalid and sinister,
With the silver-barred street in the midst,
Slow-moving,
A river leading nowhere.

Opposite my window,
The moon cuts,
Clear and round,
Through the plum-coloured night.
She cannot light the city;
It is too bright.
It has white lamps,
And glitters coldly.

I stand in the window and watch the moon.
She is thin and lustreless,
But I love her.
I know the moon,
And this is an alien city.

***

  Sista ordet går till D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930). Den här dikten kräver att man håller tungan rätt i mun när texten deklameras.

Parliament Hill in the evening, by D.H. Lawrence
(From Poems of London: the Capital in Classic Verse. Montpelier Publishing, 2015.)

The houses fade in a melt of mist
Blotching the thick, soiled air
With reddish places that still resist
The Night's slow care.

The hopeless, wintry twilight fades,
The city corrodes out of sight
As the body corrodes when death invades
That citadel of delight.

Now verdigris smoulderings softly spread
Through the shroud of the town, as slow
Night-lights hither and thither shed
Their ghastly glow.

A winter's tale with love and sorrow

  Idag hyllar adventskalendern Bruno K. Öijers föregångare, Dylan Thomas. Det sägs att hans uppläsningar blev nästan lika berömda som verken i sig. Efter de inledande stroferna ur en känd dikt av Dylan Thomas blir det två dikter från antologin The best of Poetry London.

***

A winter's tale, by Dylan Thomas
(First published 1945.)

It is a winter's tale
That the snow blind twilight ferries over the lakes
And floating fields from the farm in the cup of the vales,
Gliding windless through the hand folded flakes,
The pale breath of cattle at the stealthy sail,

And the stars falling cold,
And the smell of hay in the snow, and the far owl
Warning among the folds, and the frozen hold
Flocked with the sheep white smoke of the farm house cowl
In the river wended vales where the tale was told.

Once when the world turned old
On a star of faith pure as the drifting bread,
As the food and flames of the snow, a man unrolled
The scrolls of fire that burned in his heart and head,
Torn and alone in a farm house in a fold

Of fields. And burning then
In his firelit island ringed by the winged snow
And the dung hills white as wool and the hen
Roosts sleeping chill till the flame of the cock crow
Combs through the mantled yards and the morning men

Stumble out with their spades,
The cattle stirring, the mousing cat stepping shy,
The puffed birds hopping and hunting, the milkmaids
Gentle in their clogs over the fallen sky,
And all the woken farm at its white trades,

He knelt, he wept, he prayed,
By the spit and the black pot in the log bright light
And the cup and the cut bread in the dancing shade,
In the muffled house, in the quick of night,
At the point of love, forsaken and afraid.
(...)

***

  Det blir faktiskt ett nytt diktexempel från Elaine Feinstein under rubriken "London-Hong Kong". Därför kör jag en repris på de korta biografiska data som jag publicerade 16 oktober.

  Elaine Feinstein (f. 1930) är en poet, romanförfattare och levnadstecknare. Hon har fått många priser, bland annat en Cholmondeley Award for Poetry, Society of Authors', Wingate and Arts Council Awards, the Daisy Miller Prize för sin experimentella roman The Circle, och en hederstitel från University of Leicester. Hon har rest över hela världen för att läsa sina dikter, och hennes böcker har översatts till de flesta europeiska språk; också ryska, kinesiska, japanska och koreanska. Hennes tolkade dikter av Marina Tsvetajeva, en New York Times Book of the Year, har förblivit i tryck sedan 1971. Källa: Carcanet Press

*

A visit, by Elaine Feinstein
(Published in Poetry London, Autumn 2003.)

I still remember love like another country
           with an almost forgotten landscape
of salty skin and a dry mouth. I think
           there was always a temptation to escape
from the violence of that sun, the sudden
           insignificance of ambition,
the prowl of jealousy like a witch's cat.

Last night I was sailing in my sleep
           like an old seafarer, with scurvy
colouring my thoughts, there was moonlight
           and ice on green waters.
Hallucinations. Dangerous nostalgia.
          And early this morning you whispered
as if you were lying softly at my side:

Are you still angry with me? And spoke my
            name with so much tenderness, I cried.
I never reproached you much
           that I remember, not even when I should;
to me, you were the boy in Ravel's garden
            who always longed to be good,
as the forest creatures knew, and so do I.

***

  Även kvällens tredje poet har förekommit förut i bloggen, fast då får vi gå tillbaka till januari 2015. 
  Alison Brackenbury föddes 1953 i Gainsborough, Lincolnshire . Hon läste engelska på St Hugh College, Oxford, och har arbetat som bibliotekarie vid en teknisk högskola (1976-1983), sedan har hon arbetat som kontorsassistent (1985-1989). Från 1990 fram till sin pensionering 2012 var hon direktör i familjeföretaget som sysslar med metallbearbetning. Källa: Poetry Archive

*

Northern Lapwing

Lapwings, by Alison Brackenbury
(Published in Poetry London, Spring 2008.)

They were everywhere. No. Just God or smoke
is that. They were the backdrop to the road,

my parents’ home, the heavy winter fields
from which they flashed and kindled and uprode

the air in dozens. I ignored them all.
‘What are they?’ ‘Oh – peewits – ’ Then a hare flowed,

bounded the furrows. Marriage. Child. I roamed
round other farms. I only knew them gone

when, out of a sad winter, one returned.
I heard the high mocked cry ‘Pee – wit’, so long

cut dead. I watched it buckle from vast air
to lure hawks from its chicks. That time had gone.

Gravely, the parents bobbed their strip of stubble.
How had I let this green and purple pass?

Fringed, plumed heads (full name, the crested plover)
fluttered. So crowned cranes stalk Kenyan grass.

Then their one child, their anxious care, came running,
squeaked along each furrow, dauntless, daft.

Did I once know the story of their lives,
do they migrate from Spain? or coasts’ cold run?

And I forgot their massive arcs of wing.
When their raw cries swept over, my head spun

With all the brilliance of their black and white
As though you cracked the dark and found the sun.

Torn shoes and bicycle-love

  Tredje besöket i Hong Kong. Jag har valt dikter ur boken Eight Hong Kong poets. En av författarna i boken är Tammy Ho Lai-ming som är en av grundarna och tillika redaktör för den litterära tidskriften Cha. Jag återkommer till den tidskriften i mitt avslutande Hong Kong-avsnitt.

***

At risk, by Tammy Ho Lai-ming
(From Eight Hong Kong poets. Hong Kong : Chameleon Press Book, 2015.)

And so it is true.
My shoes are torn and my toes show.
I'm not worried about the toe nails:
Long, hard. They follow nature's law.

People have already noticed me.
An unwanted street decoration.
I see from here where I squat
The sky is dimmed too early,
And children gather to eat ice-cream,
Their fingers chubby, neglectful, white.
I am vacant. They are full.

Listen! Are they gone? Now, the wind.
The wind is movement of air.
It is reciting something. You must believe me.
It recites people's secrets, sex, memories.
I don't want to know.

Tonight, I won't sleep, to match the stars.
And I pray for a quiet night.
Don't send me rain, don't send me men,
Don't send me rhythms or a dirty hand.
Don't.

***

  Hennes poesi har nominerats till Pushcart Prize tre gånger och Forward Prize, och hennes översättningar har dykt upp i World Literature Today, Chinese Literature Today och Pathlight, bland andra ställen. Hon har en MP från University of Hong Kong och en doktorsexamen från Kings College London, och hon är för närvarande biträdande professor vid Hong Kong Baptist University, där hon undervisar poetik, skönlitteratur och modern dramatik. Källa: World Literature Today

*

Newest, hottest, tallest the most London
(From Eight Hong Kong poets. Hong Kong : Chameleon Press Book, 2015.)


You are my newest boyfriend
(the hottest, the tallest, the most
London) who is now in France.

You told me in an email (written in
haste, in an internet cafe):
Last Friday you spent three hours
on a bicycle. You put my photos
on the wheels; and I was traveling
with you. Crazy curly-haired you.

You liked the red ones.
You said I was at once like a playful
angel and a shameless whore.
(I deplore the comparison!
I'm only an innocent girl.)

When you stopped by the Seine,
some Parisians, mostly females, you said,
asked if they could buy my
photos. They took you as an artist
(a photographer?)
lost in paradise. 'No, no, no,' you said. 'The
photos aren't for sale.
My girlfriend is mine.'

Am I already?
Your girlfriend? Yours?

Then, you're my newest boyfriend
(the hottest, the tallest, the most
London) who is now in France.

***

  I författarbeskrivningen från antologin går att läsa följande om Tammy:
  Described as "a poet of tough love, tough being and with language powerful enough to match all that," Tammy Ho is also known to see "the beauty in all things, people and moments, and this beauty - in which the personal takes in the whole world - is what she celebrates in her poetry."
Source: Eight Hong Kong poets

*

Languages, by Tammy Ho Lai-ming
(From Eight Hong Kong poets. Hong Kong : Chameleon Press Book, 2015.)

South China Morning Post, an English newspaper, is delivered
To our doorstep every morning, and we let it
Stay until all other neighbours know
Our language abilities.
We dress well, even when taking out
The garbage or buying a San Miguel
From the store downstairs.
But let's not boast to our neighbours
How much more beautiful we are,
How much more intellectually-trained.

They don't care. They live less ambiguously. They speak
One dialect only. Already they are free
From feeling embarrassed when pronouncing
/r/ as /l/, /n/ as /l/ or /z/ as /s/. They don’t feel
Excluded when two real English speakers
Are in the same room, commenting on 
Memoirs of A Geisha or
Bill Ashcroft’s postcolonial theories.
We dare not open our mouths, lest our strong HK
Accent betrays our humble origin. The terrible
Flatness of our tone, the inflexibility of our tongue.

England's capital in clear view (and in fog)

  Ytterligare dikthyllningar till staden London blir det i afton. Det finns många texter att välja bland. För två hundra år sedan kunde det låta så här:

London, by Joanna Baillie
(From Ode to London : poems to celebrate the city. London : Batsford, 2012.)

It is a goodly sight through the clear air,
From Hampstead's heathy height, to see at once
England's vast capital in fair expanse,
Towers, belfries, lengthened streets and structures fair.

St. Paul's high dome amidst the vassal bands
Of neighb'ring spires, a regal chieftain stands,
And over fields of ridgy roofs appear,
With distance softly tinted, side by side,
In kindred grace, like twain of sisters dear,
The Towers of Westminster, her Abbey's pride;
While, far beyond, the hills of Surrey shine
Through thin soft haze, and shew their wavy line.
View'd thus, a goodly sight! but when survey'd
Through denser air when moisten'd winds prevail,
In her grand panoply of smoke arrayed,
While clouds aloft in heavy volumes sail,
She is sublime.--She seems a curtained gloom
Connecting heaven and earth,--a threat'ning sign of doom.
With more than natural height, reared in the sky
'Tis then St. Paul's arrests the wondering eye;
The lower parts in swathing mist concealed,
The higher through some half-spent shower revealed,
So far from earth removed, that well, I trow,
Did not its form man's artful structure show,
It might some lofty alpine peak be deemed,
The eagle's haunt with cave and crevice seamed.
Stretched wide on either hand, a rugged screen,
In lurid dimness, nearer streets are seen
Like shoreward billows of a troubled main,
Arrested in their rage. Through drizzly rain,
Cataracts of tawny sheen pour from the skies,
Of furnace smoke black curling columns rise,
And many-tinted vapours, slowly pass
O'er the wide draping of that pictured mass.

So shows by day this grand imperial town,
And, when o'er all the night's black stole is thrown,
The distant traveller doth with wonder mark
Her luminous canopy athwart the dark,
Cast up, from myriads of lamps that shine
Along her streets in many a starry line:--
He wondering looks from his yet distant road,
And thinks the northern streamers are abroad.
'What hollow sound is that?' approaching near,
The roar of many wheels breaks on his ear.
It is the flood of human life in motion!
It is the voice of a tempestuous ocean!
With sad but pleasing awe his soul is filled,
Scarce heaves his breast, and all within is stilled,
As many thoughts and feelings cross his mind,--
Thoughts, mingled, melancholy, undefined,
Of restless, reckless man, and years gone by,
And Time fast wending to Eternity.

[Poeten och dramatikern Joanna Baillie (1762-1851) växte upp på landsbygden i Skottland och tillbringade en stor del av sitt vuxna liv i Hampstead, strax utanför London. Hennes lyriska dikter tar ofta formen av meditation kring teman om naturen och ungdomstid. Källa: Poetry Foundation]

***

  Wilfred Owen, född 18 mars 1893 i Oswestry i Shropshire, död 4 november 1918 vid Sambre-Oise-kanalen i Frankrike, var en brittisk poet, känd för de dikter han skrev under sin tid i den brittiska armén under första världskriget. Källa: Wikipedia

  Men följande betraktelse handlar om Shadwell Stair. Shadwell är en del av East London, cirka 5 km öster om Charing Cross.

Shadwell Stair, by Wilfred Owen
(From Ode to London : poems to celebrate the city. London : Batsford, 2012.)

I am the ghost of Shadwell Stair.
       Along the wharves by the water-house,
       And through the cavernous slaughter-house,
I am the shadow that walks there.

Yet I have flesh both firm and cool,
       And eyes tumultuous as the gems
       Of moons and lamps in the lapping Thames
When dusk sails wavering down the pool.

Shuddering the purple street-arc burns
       Where I watch always; from the banks
       Dolorously the shipping clanks
And after me a strange tide turns.

I walk till the stars of London wane
       And dawn creeps up the Shadwell Stair.
       But when the growing syrens blare
I with another ghost am lain.

***

  Självklart måste Londondimman få sin egen hyllningstext. Den är författad av Laurence Binyon (1869-1943). Han var en engelsk poet, dramatiker och konstlärd. Hans mest kända verk, "For the Fallen" har blivit känt genom att det användas i  Remembrance Sunday services.

Fog, by Robert Laurence Binyon
(From Ode to London : poems to celebrate the city. London : Batsford, 2012.)

Magically awakened to a strange, brown night 
The streets lie cold. A hush of heavy gloom 
Dulls the noise of the wheels to a murmur dead: 
Near and sudden the passing figures loom; 
And out of darkness steep on startled sight 
The topless walls in apparition emerge. 
Nothing revealing but their own thin flames, 
The rayless lamps burn faint and bleared and red: 
Link-boys' cries, and the shuffle of horses led, 
Pierce the thick air; and like a distant dirge, 
Melancholy horns wail from the shrouded Thames. 
Long the blind morning hooded the dumb town; 
Till lo! in an instant winds arose, and the air 
Lifted: at once, from a cold and spectral sky 
Appears the sun, and laughs in mockery down 
On the groping travellers far from where they deem, 
In unconjectured roads; the dwindled stream 
Of traffic in slow confusion crawling by: 
The baffled hive of helpless man laid bare.