On Vladimir Holan, the Czechoslovakian Poet

"Don't I understand that a man gives only because he was left short of something?'
"Passion Week', V. Holan
On an island in a river …
Breaking that bent ruler, the logic of expedience,
you trace — bird in a burning forest of fear —
a terminal curve.
Your mind like an arrow splits the eye of the Devil,
and men whose cruel silence speaks their
hunger for death.
A door slams in a ruined wall, and you are here —
on this island, your tower, their enemy.
Loveless waves suck at the edges of time
while Hamlet walks through the gates of imagination,
your one companion: his words —
desperate, labyrinthine —
prize grains of being from death's cool sands.
Politics, that mindless plan plotted on grey, thick carpet,
seems now, mirrored in Hamlet's eyes, a maze where
men tread knives: one false turn and fate twists home.
Fifteen years of solitude, of blind, visionary pain —
that eagle nourished on your spirit's marrow …
And now, double exile, you return home.
The state is now amused — those worms that feed
at Cleopatra's bosom. There you sing:
your words, like angels, balancing on a pinhead.
Anguish still beats within heart's passions
as salt that billows through the breaking sea;
distilled by loving art, it falls — a dew
threading the morning earth with light.
Hope thrusts against sharp echoes of dead water
running the night through. Around you,
and beyond, the river runs on towards …
You endure,
as life's seas brim within you,
on an island in a river.