Poem of the Week

Not that there is always a 'poem of the week' - sometimes there are several, sometimes there is none. I like to be irregular in my habits.... predictable only in my unpredictability.

I have been meaning for a while to post something else by Vasco Popa. This is from the beginning of his sequence of ghoulish nursery rhymes, 'Games'. I dedicated another of these, 'Ashes', to my friend The Poet a month or two back.

I first came to know these poems when I was about to start my teacher training at the University of Durham. I actually cited this as one of my inspirations in one of the first essays I wrote on that course (I had a wonderfully laidback, wilfully eccentric supervisor, who gleefully encouraged such artistic meanderings off the strict path of academic rigour), since it seemed highly appropriate to the ruthless self-examination we were all putting ourselves through as we tried to prepare mentally for our first forays into the 'battlefield' of the classroom.


Before Play

Close first one eye, then the other
Peek into every corner of oneself
Check that there are no spikes
No thieves, no cuckoo's eggs

Shut both eyes together
Crouch and jump
Jump high, high, high
To the top of oneself

Then fall
Under one's own weight
For days on end, fall deep deep deep
To the bottom of one's abyss

He who is not smashed utterly
He who remains whole
And gets up whole
He plays

From 'Games', by Vasco Popa (tr. from the Serbo-Croat by Anne Pennington)