"Landscape with Poets"
by
Miroslav Holub
(translated by Dana Habova and David Young)
Some day when
everything's at rest,
in the curly landscape painted by Rubens
as a background for Baucis and Philemon,
poets will disperse,
in dark capes and hoods,
mute as the silhouettes of milestones,
at five-hundred-yard intervals to the horizon and beyond,
and in succession
will strum their electric guitars
and say their verse, strophe, poem,
like a telegram from one stone to another,
in succession,
like automatic keys
on a pipe organ
fingered by monsoon rains,
solitary trees will
hum boskily, sheep
sill raise shaggy heads,
Orpheus underground will sound
the upper harmonic registers
and the words that float like clouds,
across the information threahold,
up to the shallow sky,
like proteinoids and oligonucleontides,
words as honest as chemical bonds,
words with the autocatalytic function,
genomic and decoding words,
and there will be
either a new form of life
or, possibly,
nothing.
[This message has been edited by Howard (edited February 28, 2006).]