The Conquerors

Everyone forges his fortune –
but destiny twists the metal
and, since the necessary
way is of fire, always,

when we are hot with desire
it smelts new alloys in us,
then, cooling, cracks us open
like eggshells, for the flights

of gold or grey winged eagles
or, like redundant casts
of statues to dead heroes
we would no longer recognise.

So we, who scoured pit and forest
carrying coal and wood
to stoke our own fevers
and seal ourselves inside them,

who set out brave to burn
and conquer, have come to this:
to know ourselves no more
than husks of futurity.

 

The corners of the mouth

I called: No, not this brine
leaking through cracked vessels
of pitted clay,

nor these hollow woodwind calls
from outworn flutes, seeping
in mortal echoes,

nor flesh and blood memorial
weaned or wound imperfect
from human hands,

but a cup of rock or bone
unmarrowed, non-porous, durable
against gales,

a black ring to bind speech, carved
in jet or onyx, to contain
the unsayable,

and a voice pure as impossible
harmony of human
made angel.

Copyright © Richard Burns, 2006.

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For more than twenty years Richard Burns has maintained a close involvement with life, culture and politics in the Balkans. He lived and worked in former Yugoslavia between 1987 and 1991, immediately before the wars that broke the country apart. Out of this have come two books: first, In a Time of Drought, published in Serbian in 2004, recipient of the international Morava Poetry Prize in 2005, and published in English by Shoestring Press, Nottingham, in November 2005; second, The Blue Butterfly, published in 2006 by Salt Publishing, Cambridge, as the second volume in Burns's ongoing series of Selected Writings. The twin taking-off points for this book are a massacre of 2,800 men and boys, perpetrated by Nazi occupiers outside the town of Kragujevac, Yugoslavia, on 21st October 1941, and the descent of a blue butterfly onto the poet’s hand as he waited to visit the memorial museum at the site of the massacre, on 25th May 1985. The poems here are from The Blue Butterfly, which was published in late 2006.