POETRY MONDAY
Judith Hemschemeyer
Although best-known as the pre-eminent translator of the great Russian poet, Anna Akhmatova, Judith Hemschemeyer had achieved recognition as a poet long before that. She has published four poetry collections: I Remember the Room Was Filled with Light (Wesleyan University Press, 1973); Very Close and Very Slow (Wesleyan University Press, 1975); The Ride Home (Texas Tech University Press, 1987); and Certain Animals (Snake Nation Press, 1998). A book of her short-stories, The Harvest, was published by Pig Iron Press in 1998.
It was in 1973 that she first encountered the poems of Akhmatova, becoming so enchanted by them that she studied Russian in order to translate them into English, a project that took thirteen years. Her Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova, a two-volume, bilingual, hard-cover edition, was published in 1990 by Zephyr Press, followed by three English-only paperback editions and a selected bilingual edition.
With this awe-inspiring achievement behind her, she continues to teach Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Central Florida and to provide readers with new poems. It gives me much pleasure to introduce Judith Hemschemeyer to you today with these three. The first, “Or Just Miss,” is from her new, unpublished manuscript. The other two are from her award-winning books.
–Irene Willis, Poetry Editor
OR JUST MISS
Lovely how lives of the great overlap
or just miss. Between Dickinson’s death
and Akhmatova’s birth — a three-year gap.
Dickinson’s ukase: “Tell all the truth
but tell it slant” was in capable hands.
Amherst was always Amherst,
but Akhmatova lived, and her work was banned, in protean St. Petersburg,
renamed Petrograd, then Leningrad,
as war and revolution swamped the land,
but not the soul of this “seaside girl.” She had
“the great Russian word” at her command,
and had actually, to the astonishment
of Dickinson, seen camels in Tashkent.
Would they have talked of lovers? Which hurts most?
Starvation or betrayal and disgust?
Both, though, would have marveled at the little book
a convict in one of Stalin’s gulags made
to hold Akhmatova poems he had by heart,
a fascicle bound with twine, the pages’
coarse paper somehow glued to birchbark.
“The twenty-first. Night. Monday.” the first one starts.
THE SLAUGHTER OF THE INNOCENTS
The Slaughter of the Innocents
“… Little did the clumsy customs official know that he was pawing through the luggage of the Lone Wolf, a man who had searched an entire house in the dark for an object the size of a pea — and found it!” –
Recollection from The Lone Wolf,
one of our books
What was he looking for? a pearl?
and did he find it in the button drawer
of the old, foot-pedal Singer?
Up to the wrist,
he lets three pounds of buttons
slide through his fluttering fingertips,
finds what he was looking for,
turns to go…
Lone Wolf, wait!
See the silver scissors gleaming there?
That summer Mother found out
she was pregnant once more
she grabbed them and hacked
her sweaty gray hair
straight off across the back.
No more church, no store.
She just prowled from stove to wash machine
to line
in that one square-necked, dark gray, home-made cotton dress
she wore
and wore,
stood ironing for hours at a stretch,
then made us look at, made us touch
the veins on the back of her leg,
hot black baroque slugs of blood.
Lone Wolf, try the house next door.
There are no jewels hidden here.
Lone Wolf, you still there? Listen then.
After three days of labor,
the baby finally came
and the first time I saw him —
she was in the rocking chair
surrounded by the others, nursing him–
I burst into tears.
She hadn’t strangled him!
Bethlehem.
from The Ride Home (Texas Tech Press, 1987)
IN THE ALBUM
It must have been snapped on our day
trip to Shawano,
the reservation up north. I remember
an Indian swinging his daughter
around and around him, shoulder high,
just as Dad did to me, her pigtails too,
flying behind her for all they were worth.
We’re in an excursion boat, about to set out,
Dad and you and I, and she forgot
to say “say cheese” because no one is smiling.
Dad’s squint makes him wary, or wry,
and I’m next to him, using both hands
to keep the hair out of my eyes.
You’re in the foreground, unaware of the breeze.
Framed in the wavery glare of the water,
a strand of your Dutch-bobbed hair across your face,
you, the first born, are gazing at Mother
with such rapture that even from here,
from hindsight’s terrible shore,
I half want to warn you to learn how to hide,
half ask what it’s like to adore.
from Certain Animals (Snake Nation Press, 1998)