Axiom
False pride
collapses
sooner or later.
As if reality
in its innermost
structure were governed
by reason.
Despots and empires
grind to an end;
brutal murderers
and violent political
systems
last for only a time,
then the regime falls
apart from
the inside.
The dictator’s name
disappears
into the great forgetting –
faster than the representatives
of goodness
whom the heart remembers.
New incarnations
of human evil
appear –
brutality and arrogance
mate happily
with our own desire
for a jackpot.
But the new ones
and their servile
fellow-travelers
will also disappear
when
their time comes.
Trust that.
Invincible
is the marrow
which every morning
lifts us all
out of sleep
each with our own
flopping catch
of joy and hope.
© Niels Hav
Translation: P.K. Brask & Patrick Friesen
All Religions are Hypotheses
All religions are hypotheses
that God could probably do without.
The snobs maintain
that life is totally
meaningless. Well, that’s up to them.
That I am going to die was a matter of course
from day one. Everything around us
dies; some people live in apartments
festering with dead flies.
What matters is to face this
without resignation or becoming cynical.
In the midst of living, surrounded
by children’s spicy expectations.
© Niels Hav
Translated by P.K. Brask & Patrick Friesen
Words on Paper
To write is an utterly futile
activity, it’s true.
Words on paper make no difference
anywhere in the cosmos –
a book is just a book.
It’s shelved in a bookcase
among millions of other books,
until it grows mould or rots
and is thrown away and burned
along with all sorts of garbage.
To write books is only one
of many ways of understanding life.
Those of us who scribble are all
in a competition of the handicapped,
some see themselves as important,
with no reasonable grounds.
Some level-headedness is called for.
The water truck driver who flushes
the city’s sewers is more useful
than most of us;
give the Nobel Prize to him!
© Niels Hav
Translated by P.K. Brask & Patrick Friesen
Nonsense Detector
The advantage of speaking a dialect is
that words are spoken and lived, before they are
thought and written. Dialects have no other
purpose than to handle the endless stream
of things and situations reality
is screwed together from.
All talk that isn’t about real things
is actually nonsense. And pathetic nonsense
doesn’t thrive well in a dialect.
All dialects have inbuilt nonsense detectors.
That’s why very few people with political
ambitions speak with a dialect.
For the same reason it would probably be useful
to translate some new poems into dialect.
The ones that stand up to that treatment
are prob’ly not s’bad..
Of course even in dialect
it is possible to call a shovel
a spade or a spade a shovel.
But it wouldn’t work for long.
Most people who speak a dialect
have held one in their hands.
© Niels Hav
Translated by Per Brask & Patrick Friesen
EPIGRAM
You can spend an entire life
in the company of words
not ever finding
the right one.
Just like a wretched fish
wrapped in Hungarian newspapers.
For one thing it is dead,
for another it doesn’t understand
Hungarian.
© Niels Hav
Translation: P.K. Brask & Patrick Friesen
Niels Hav is a Danish poet and short story writer with awards from The Danish Arts Council. He is the author of six collections of poetry and three books of short fiction. His books have been translated into many languages including English, Arabic, Turkish, Dutch, Farsi, Serbian, Albanian, Kurdish and Portuguese. His second English poetry collection, We Are Here, was published by Book Thug in Toronto; his poems and stories have been published in a large number of magazines and newspapers in different countries of the world, including The Literary Review, Ecotone, Exile, The Los Angeles Review, Absinthe: New European Writing, Shearsman and PRISM International. He has travelled widely and participated in numerous international poetry festivals in Europe, Asia, Africa, North and South America. He has frequently been interviewed by the media. Niels Hav was raised on a farm in western Denmark, today he resides in the most colourful and multiethnic part of the capital, Copenhagen.
“…Niels Hav’s We Are Here, … brings to us a selection from the works of one of Denmark’s most talented living poets and is all the more welcome for that reason….”
- Frank Hugus, The Literary Review
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