แสดงบทความที่มีป้ายกำกับ Writers/Poets/Artists แสดงบทความทั้งหมด
แสดงบทความที่มีป้ายกำกับ Writers/Poets/Artists แสดงบทความทั้งหมด
วันศุกร์ที่ 23 มีนาคม พ.ศ. 2555
วันศุกร์ที่ 2 มีนาคม พ.ศ. 2555
วันพุธที่ 5 ตุลาคม พ.ศ. 2554
วันพฤหัสบดีที่ 14 เมษายน พ.ศ. 2554
วันอาทิตย์ที่ 3 เมษายน พ.ศ. 2554
วันพฤหัสบดีที่ 3 มีนาคม พ.ศ. 2554
วันจันทร์ที่ 7 กุมภาพันธ์ พ.ศ. 2554
วันศุกร์ที่ 17 ธันวาคม พ.ศ. 2553
วันจันทร์ที่ 6 ธันวาคม พ.ศ. 2553
วันอังคารที่ 30 พฤศจิกายน พ.ศ. 2553
Living Writer's - Rattawut Lapcharoensap
"In the Nineties" (after Leonard Michaels)
by Rattawut Lapcharoensap (Many thanks to John Francis Lee who kindly transcribed "In the Nineties")
http://www.robinlea.com/pub/InTheNineties.html
Everywhere you looked in the nineties something was being torn down, something new being built in its place. Canals were filled in for city roads, slums were leveled, highways completed. Buildings inched higher and higher into the smog. Offices, hotels, condominiums, banks. Foundations for the sky-train were laid and ground had been broken for a subway system, a new international airport, a 'world-class' convention center. Out of fields emerged shopping malls, housing developments, sporting arenas, parking lots. Gargantuan overpasses rose to span the city's more congested intersections. Kong Pan and Silom, Satorn and Lum Sali. The future was everywhere in the nineties, we were always being reminded of it, it was bein constructed all around us, above us, under us, you practically had to wear a hard hat to keep from being hit in the head.
Some of our parents bought their first car in the nineties, some finished paying their mortgages, air conditioners were installed, kitchen appliances were purchased : microwaves, water purifiers, food processors. We started shopping at supermarkets in the nineties, abandoned the morning markets.... For more transcription, visit http://www.robinlea.com/pub/InTheNineties.html
วันอังคารที่ 9 พฤศจิกายน พ.ศ. 2553
Bangkok Never Really Sleeps
Bangkok Never Really Sleeps
By Noel Rowe
Bangkok never really sleeps, it turns
it seems endlessly in and out of streets
that once were klongs, but now
are fierce cement, where motorbikes and cars,
quick and greedy, grasp each other’s fumes.
You lay awake and watched his back,
hoping there to find a place where beauty was
invincible, but saw instead the rise and fall of breath.
He spoke of love, water buffaloes and going home,
and if you know now
it was a lie, do not hate him, there isn’t time.
Today, when you visit Wat Phra Keo
to see a Buddha carved green as deep water,
you’ll hear the wind release the temple bells:
Ani’chung. Impermanent. There isn’t hate,
isn’t love. Ani’chung. There isn’t time.
Ani’chung, ani’chung, ani’chung.
Source:
http://australia.poetryinternationalweb.org/piw_cms/cms/cms_module/index.php?obj_id=809
By Noel Rowe
Bangkok never really sleeps, it turns
it seems endlessly in and out of streets
that once were klongs, but now
are fierce cement, where motorbikes and cars,
quick and greedy, grasp each other’s fumes.
You lay awake and watched his back,
hoping there to find a place where beauty was
invincible, but saw instead the rise and fall of breath.
He spoke of love, water buffaloes and going home,
and if you know now
it was a lie, do not hate him, there isn’t time.
Today, when you visit Wat Phra Keo
to see a Buddha carved green as deep water,
you’ll hear the wind release the temple bells:
Ani’chung. Impermanent. There isn’t hate,
isn’t love. Ani’chung. There isn’t time.
Ani’chung, ani’chung, ani’chung.
Source:
http://australia.poetryinternationalweb.org/piw_cms/cms/cms_module/index.php?obj_id=809
Songkhla
"Songkhla" by Noel Rowe
Prasit’s
1.
On land your mother owned
you’ve built your home. Inside,
where the white walls are cool,
we are drinking tea with your cousin,
the monk, who has come to talk
about the new temple being planned.
He would like, he says, to see
Australia. His eyes are restless,
but he’s been a monk for twenty years.
“It’s a good life,” he says,
“But lonely.” Up and down the drive
that holds the hot traffic back
your dogs, Diamond and Ruby, play,
with jasmine and purple of bougainvillea
looking for their chance to share the fun.
2.
The night before the festival
the women make the offerings they’ll give
tomorrow to the monks: sticky rice wrapped
in parcels made of palm leaf, ideal for travelers.
The housekeeper shows them how
to fold, turn and tie, as their mothers used to do.
Sometimes they get it wrong – these are not beautiful enough,
everyone will know what house they came from. Beauty, here,
shows respect, so they unwrap the leaf and start again,
letting me know how old this custom is and how good
because it brings people together. Songkhla, they add,
is a peaceful place and they are happy here.
Then one of them asks, “Are you happy here?”
“Yes, “ I say: because for the moment I am,
a traveller grateful for what has been offered,
a guest whose duty is to recognise the beauty here,
to know whose house it comes from.
3.
Out the back your housekeeper builds
an open fire where, late as it is,
she’ll boil the offerings, cooking rice
until it feels the flavour of the leaf.
She’s tough. Before this she worked
construction sites, hard among the men,
with three small sons she wouldn’t give away.
Yours was the last house she helped to build.
You call her Gop (in English “frog”).
Now her sons are standing next to her.
One of them has put his hand up
to stop the smoke getting to his eyes.
4.
The dark is different here, close
as the sea that is drawing over me
a memory of warm and salty skin.
Somewhere just outside the window
an unknown bird is making prayers
I repeat beneath my deepening breath.
So I sleep undisturbed, although I know
there is a gecko clinging to the bedroom wall,
ready to crack the knuckle of the night,
although I know that out on the unceasing road
there are, there always are, the motorbikes.
Their smoke no longer makes its way into dream.
If I wake at all it will be to hear your dog,
Diamond, barking, guarding you with a sound
that rings the house, resounding like a temple bell.
5.
I will abandon myself to the rhythm of a day
that starts with drums, drums drawing buddhas
down the country roads, through the city streets,
buddhas carried on the back of old and battered utes,
buddhas lifted high on trucks made up to look like boats,
boats beautiful as pieces broken off and drifting down
from a brightly papered heaven.
I will abandon myself to the rhythm of a day
displaying everywhere on yellow flags the wheel,
the wheel of dharma being set in motion, a day
remembering Lord Buddha coming down, after the rain,
coming down to earth, coming down a stairway
made for him by the King of Heaven, coming down
into the circle his disciples made warm with waiting.
I will abandon myself to the rhythm of a day, Lak Phra,
that comes, as always, after the rain and its prayers,
drawing monks with buddhas into town, monks who seem
to me correct, pious, sleek, satisfied, disciplined and wise,
until I find the one I’m looking for, the one who’s learned
how not to care, the one who’s laughing as he scrubs
my hot head with a blessing made of sticks and water.
6.
When I’m taken (as everybody is)
to see the mermaid’s statue on the beach,
the story I’m told starts to sound familiar.
One night she came up out of the sea
(the waves are gentle here) and sat upon this rock.
All she wanted to do was wash her hair, but
a sailor – he would have been
young and handsome – saw her and fell
at once and of course hopelessly in love,
so in love he tried to catch her, to hold her,
and had he done so would probably have said,
“You are mine.” And then he would have kept her
safe from harm. But she had never seen
a thing with speech and legs, and so was frightened off,
scurrying back into the surf. Never seen again.
The sailor, silly bugger, couldn’t let her go.
He spent the rest of his life combing the seas
in case he got another chance to have her hair
run between his fingers. He never stopped
to think she might be happy where she was;
as far as he could see where she had gone
was dark; she’d only have the sharks for company.
I have my photo taken sitting just in front of her.
7.
After the house was built,
before you could come to live in it,
you had, for seven nights, to stay somewhere else.
You chose the temple where, as a boy,
you were taught that nothing lasts. Nothing does:
time is a worried cloth that hangs over the place
and cannot hold itself together.
When, in the night, there is a storm,
it can’t be kept outside:
the rain comes to make you wet, the wind
to make you cold, to make you think
of poverty until to show the heavens more just
you decide to build another temple here.
That night your dreams are bound
upon a wheel of noise.
Yet the monks in the morning say
there was no storm; what you heard
was the spirits saying they were pleased.
From:
http://australia.poetryinternationalweb.org/piw_cms/cms/cms_module/index.php?obj_id=816&x=1
Prasit’s
1.
On land your mother owned
you’ve built your home. Inside,
where the white walls are cool,
we are drinking tea with your cousin,
the monk, who has come to talk
about the new temple being planned.
He would like, he says, to see
Australia. His eyes are restless,
but he’s been a monk for twenty years.
“It’s a good life,” he says,
“But lonely.” Up and down the drive
that holds the hot traffic back
your dogs, Diamond and Ruby, play,
with jasmine and purple of bougainvillea
looking for their chance to share the fun.
2.
The night before the festival
the women make the offerings they’ll give
tomorrow to the monks: sticky rice wrapped
in parcels made of palm leaf, ideal for travelers.
The housekeeper shows them how
to fold, turn and tie, as their mothers used to do.
Sometimes they get it wrong – these are not beautiful enough,
everyone will know what house they came from. Beauty, here,
shows respect, so they unwrap the leaf and start again,
letting me know how old this custom is and how good
because it brings people together. Songkhla, they add,
is a peaceful place and they are happy here.
Then one of them asks, “Are you happy here?”
“Yes, “ I say: because for the moment I am,
a traveller grateful for what has been offered,
a guest whose duty is to recognise the beauty here,
to know whose house it comes from.
3.
Out the back your housekeeper builds
an open fire where, late as it is,
she’ll boil the offerings, cooking rice
until it feels the flavour of the leaf.
She’s tough. Before this she worked
construction sites, hard among the men,
with three small sons she wouldn’t give away.
Yours was the last house she helped to build.
You call her Gop (in English “frog”).
Now her sons are standing next to her.
One of them has put his hand up
to stop the smoke getting to his eyes.
4.
The dark is different here, close
as the sea that is drawing over me
a memory of warm and salty skin.
Somewhere just outside the window
an unknown bird is making prayers
I repeat beneath my deepening breath.
So I sleep undisturbed, although I know
there is a gecko clinging to the bedroom wall,
ready to crack the knuckle of the night,
although I know that out on the unceasing road
there are, there always are, the motorbikes.
Their smoke no longer makes its way into dream.
If I wake at all it will be to hear your dog,
Diamond, barking, guarding you with a sound
that rings the house, resounding like a temple bell.
5.
I will abandon myself to the rhythm of a day
that starts with drums, drums drawing buddhas
down the country roads, through the city streets,
buddhas carried on the back of old and battered utes,
buddhas lifted high on trucks made up to look like boats,
boats beautiful as pieces broken off and drifting down
from a brightly papered heaven.
I will abandon myself to the rhythm of a day
displaying everywhere on yellow flags the wheel,
the wheel of dharma being set in motion, a day
remembering Lord Buddha coming down, after the rain,
coming down to earth, coming down a stairway
made for him by the King of Heaven, coming down
into the circle his disciples made warm with waiting.
I will abandon myself to the rhythm of a day, Lak Phra,
that comes, as always, after the rain and its prayers,
drawing monks with buddhas into town, monks who seem
to me correct, pious, sleek, satisfied, disciplined and wise,
until I find the one I’m looking for, the one who’s learned
how not to care, the one who’s laughing as he scrubs
my hot head with a blessing made of sticks and water.
6.
When I’m taken (as everybody is)
to see the mermaid’s statue on the beach,
the story I’m told starts to sound familiar.
One night she came up out of the sea
(the waves are gentle here) and sat upon this rock.
All she wanted to do was wash her hair, but
a sailor – he would have been
young and handsome – saw her and fell
at once and of course hopelessly in love,
so in love he tried to catch her, to hold her,
and had he done so would probably have said,
“You are mine.” And then he would have kept her
safe from harm. But she had never seen
a thing with speech and legs, and so was frightened off,
scurrying back into the surf. Never seen again.
The sailor, silly bugger, couldn’t let her go.
He spent the rest of his life combing the seas
in case he got another chance to have her hair
run between his fingers. He never stopped
to think she might be happy where she was;
as far as he could see where she had gone
was dark; she’d only have the sharks for company.
I have my photo taken sitting just in front of her.
7.
After the house was built,
before you could come to live in it,
you had, for seven nights, to stay somewhere else.
You chose the temple where, as a boy,
you were taught that nothing lasts. Nothing does:
time is a worried cloth that hangs over the place
and cannot hold itself together.
When, in the night, there is a storm,
it can’t be kept outside:
the rain comes to make you wet, the wind
to make you cold, to make you think
of poverty until to show the heavens more just
you decide to build another temple here.
That night your dreams are bound
upon a wheel of noise.
Yet the monks in the morning say
there was no storm; what you heard
was the spirits saying they were pleased.
From:
http://australia.poetryinternationalweb.org/piw_cms/cms/cms_module/index.php?obj_id=816&x=1
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