贾旺娃·德玛诗4首
A Benediction for Climbing Boys
Sometimes the chimney was hot or alight.
They sent us up anyway, mostly naked.
dreamt of the bakers on Lothbury,
of tight flues and endless winding.
there was not even four years behind him.
He was up while the chimney was cold,
before the morning fire was lit. His skinny limbs,
cramped, waited for the mason’s cutting tools.
Luck for the bride who sees us perhaps.
But we are black and blind with falling soot.
We are burnt and scraped, our knees
set to fire with brine and brush
In the fairy tales, the sweep finds love
After May day, we are turned from the table
to which we return, for the world gifts us
to keep the soot from eye or mouth
No talisman of brass cap badges
to shame the master who sends them up
to fall from roofs and chimneys
to lodge in flues and suffocate
Whose son has fire set under him
his heels pricked to mend his pace
This is the cold fate of he who is alone
whose mother has died, left his body
for the world to take and make coal
and whose back is bent in youth
his scrotum set to eat itself away
we die knowing what is denied us
we fall, we hope, to something warm
has left us invisible, sooty faced
at which penance comes knees bent
with your name as absolution on its tongue
we can only hope for something that
knows, perhaps when we do not:
something familiar and new all at once
that ink is the hangman with a forgiving noose
each one of us is born sensible
his heart incensed then falling
then the slow babble of delight
where beneath a crown heavy with words
is a seat of acacia and hawthorn
to say choose carefully the weight
of each syllable upon the tongue
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