A Wilbur translation of Vinicius de Moraes, a Brazilian poet.

Song

Never take her away,
The daughter whom you gave me,
The gentle, moist, untroubled
Small daughter whom you gave me;
O let her heavenly babbling
Beset me and enslave me.
Don't take her; let her stay,
Beset my heart, and win me,
That I may put away
The firstborn child within me,
That cold, petrific, dry
Daughter whom death once gave,
Whose life is a long cry
For milk she cannot have,
And who, in the night-time, calls me
In the saddest voice that can be
Father, Father, and tells me
Of the love she feels for me.
Don't let her go away,
Her whom you gave--my daughter--
Lest I should come to favor
That wilder one, that other
Who does not leave me ever.

Lines at His Burial,
for Joseph

A little lad
who never had
a chance to do or be.
He lived two hours or three.

So small a boat
to set afloat
upon that widest sea
we name eternity.

..........--G. J. Frahm

Maryann,

Sincere thanks for posting "Bells for John Whiteside's Daughter." Hardly a week goes by without my reciting this one to myself or to whomever is by. It is a model and a scource of inspiration.

Wiley

Another poem about a child victim of the Holocaust is Hecht's sestina "The Book of Yolek". Here's a link to an anthology that contains it; if you just insert a few words from the opening line ("The dowsed coals fume...") in the Find box you'll be taken to it. There's also a fascinating commentary by Hecht about how he came to write it.

Thank you, John, for this thread which I only now noticed. There were many poems I had not seen before which touched me to the core. Words do have power. Nearly all the moving and eloquent poems with which I am familiar have been offered already but I would like to add this one, also by Dana Gioia, for his dead son.

Prayer

Echo of the clocktower, footstep
in the alleyway, sweep
of the wind sifting the leaves

Jeweller of the spiderweb, connoisseur
of autumn's opulence, blade of lightning
harvesting the sky.

Keeper of the small gate, choreographer
of entrances and exits, midnight
whisper travelling the wires

Seducer, healer, deity or thief,
I will see you soon enough—
in the shadow of the rainfall,

in the brief violet darkening a sunset—
but until then I pray watch over him
as a mountain guards its covert ore

and the harsh falcon its flightless young.

Here lies, but seven years old, our little maid,
Once of the darkness Oh, so sore afraid!
Light of the World---remember that small fear
And when nor moon nor stars do shine, draw near.

Walter de la Mare


Here a pretty baby lies,
Sung asleep with lullabies;
Pray be silent and not stir
Th' easy earth that covers her.

Robert Herrick


Into the world this little babe did peep,
Disliked it, closed its eyes and fell asleep.

Epitaph,1830

For M

(“It is a failing in me
And a weakness of my faith
But when God does things like this
I don’t know what he means…”
- Priest at another baby’s funeral)

Into the river then
With your fragment of shadow
And your long light
Which will not succumb

But will forever cast the shadow
Of the man that you will never now become

To be the atom in the eye
That saw the world turn once

To be the seed that waits
Eternity to grow

Somewhere is a garden
Where a tree that never leaves
Is ever bare

And where your fragment of a shadow
Never fades and never follows
But is ever there

--Is this yours, Philip?
It's very fine work.
Best regards,
David

This always struck me as a great one:

Death of a Son

(who died in a mental hospital aged one)


Something has ceased to come along with me.
Something like a person: something very like one.
And there was no nobility in it
Or anything like that.

Something was there like a one year
Old house, dumb as stone. While the near buildings
Sang like birds and laughed
Understanding the pact
They were to have with silence. But he
Neither sang nor laughed. He did not bless silence
Like bread, with words.

He did not forsake silence.
But rather, like a house in mourning
Kept the eye turned in to watch the silence while
The other houses like birds
Sang around him.

And the breathing silence neither
Moved nor was still.

I have seen stones: I have seen brick
But this house was made up of neither bricks nor stone
But a house of flesh and blood
With flesh of stone
And bricks for blood. A house
Of stones and blood in breathing silence with the other
Birds singing crazy on its chimneys.

But this was silence,
This was something else, this was
Hearing and speaking though he was a house drawn
Into silence, this was
Something religious in his silence,
Something shining in his quiet,
This was different this was altogether something else:
Though he never spoke, this
Was something to do with death.

And then slowly the eye stopped looking
Inward. The silence rose and became still.
The look turned to the outer place and stopped,
With the birds still shrilling around him.

And as if he could speak
He turned over on his side with his one year
Red as a wound
He turned over as if he could be sorry for this
And out of his eyes two great tears rolled, like stones,
and he died.


--Jon Silkin

Indeed it is David. The baby was real and not mine. It was written, ultimately, in response to a poem (translation) by W S Merwin: "Little Soul".

Unfortunately can't post that poem for copyright reasons but I could PM it, or you may already know it.

Philip