Koşuk of the Konik, a poem by Alistair Noon

The koniks don’t neigh but skitter and dodge
across the reclaimed sewage park,
their part of the sand’s post-glacial splodge
our ancestors mapped as the Brandenburg Mark,

a wire-ringed paddock we've left these guys,
who stand aloof as the ninja flies
land on their feet, their black disguise
nothing for horses’ eyes to mark.

Although their skins are tones of grey,
one’s chromosomes came out all bay,
but muted shades will still convey
mutated grace as well as Franz Marc.

Rainclouds resemble their sagging paunches:
a signal out of their genome launches
pale lightning down their well-honed haunches
to give the koniks their common birthmark.

They look as if they’ve just concurred,
one homely and harmonious herd
unbothered by the fall of a merd
to earth that reels of steel wire mark,

quite unlike Rilke's bar-gazing panther,
or keepers shut in with a Leopard panzer:
they seem to be more of a coelcanth, a
pebble let go at the tidal mark.

The paddock does without a padlock:
the konik needs no clothes or clock,
just grass and a trough. The fence is a shock,
a neural scar its defining mark.

This world is small, so why think big?
Under its solemn black legal wig,
the equine head will study a twig
and leave a meticulous dental mark.

***

Alistair Noon's poetry collections include Earth Records (2012) and The Kerosene Singing (2015), both from Nine Arches Press. Concert at a Railway Station (2018), his translations of the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, was reviewed in the TLS. ‘Translocal Underground’, a short film about him by filmmaker Paul Cooke, appeared in 2018. He's lived in Berlin since the early 90s.

Zadonsk – a poem by Osip Mandelstam

Painting: A Wooded Marsh by Jacob van Ruisdael

Introduction by Alistair Noon:

Between 1934 and 1937, the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam lived in internal exile in the city of Voronezh, roughly half-way between Moscow and the Black Sea and not far from the Ukraine (the local accent shares features with Ukrainian). He was accompanied by his wife Nadezhda Mandelstam, who was to play a crucial role in the preservation and posthumous publication of his late work, including the poem translated below. He had been arrested and sentenced after he had written and read, at a private reading in Moscow, a poem that has become known as the Stalin Epigram. Not long after his internal exile ended, he was re-arrested and transported to the Soviet Far East, where he died in 1938, in a Gulag transit camp.

Constantly having to change their accommodation owing to the acute shortage of housing in Voronezh, the Mandelstams were able to spend the summer of 1936 in a small town nearby called Zadonsk, after friends including Anna Akhmatova and Boris Pasternak had collected enough money for them to do so. The Mandelstams rented a room from a farmer on Karl Marx Street No. 10, outside of which stood a poplar. While there, Nadezhda Mandelstam returned to painting watercolours (she had studied art in Kiev), and news of the first show trials, inaugurating the Great Terror of 1936 to 1938, came over the municipal loudspeakers.

Jakob van Ruisdael (c. 1629–1682) was a Dutch landscape painter.

***

“Zadonsk”

Like a vinyl-thin Gillette
that gently shaves off hibernation,
let's ruffle the memories we've kept
of that summer we lived half-Ukrainian.

Honouring Ruisdael's paintings,
you treetops whose titles are known
give dishevelled woods their saintly
name-days. One bush was a start, alone
in the amber and flesh of red loam.

That land has an upward tilt.
I was glad to see its clear layers,
be lord of the land's simplicity
I grasped in its seven chambers.

Its hills would fly to their target
far off, like loose stacks of wheat.
Across the steppe, the boulevard
laid a chain of tents in the heat.
Hotfoot to the blaze went the willow,
and the vain poplar stood up...
The stubble's camp was yellow,
the frost would steam in the rut.

And the mongrel Don, once again,
was a glittering silver, ungainly,
scooped water by the half-bowl,
then got lost – yes, that was my soul –

when the weight of evening was eased
down onto the brutal bunks,
and we heard the carousing trees
burst, like hawk-moths, from the riverbanks.

15 – 27 December 1936
Osip Mandelstam
Translated by Alistair Noon

***

Alistair Noon's translations of Osip Mandelstam, Concert at a Railway Station, appeared from Shearsman Books in 2018. His own poetry collections include Earth Records (2012) and The Kerosene Singing (2015), both from Nine Arches Press. He lives in Berlin.

Sorbs, a poem by Alistair Noon

Spreewaldkanal by Lübbenau – Photo by Dr Seuthberg – Used under CC-BY-SA 4.0

We meet where slow green water meshes
with swatting meadows. In Slavic shirts,
they hail our raid into well-drained marshes.

Traditional business here's to steer us
beneath the boughs and along the arms,
then serve us gherkins and farmyard stories,

to oar us up for open canoes
before we wrong-turn a channel
their land was left, and soak our knees.

Their teenagers bus to school in Cottbus,
grow up to squat the Berlin tenements.
Their roads are damp with moorhens and coots,

but expect their verse to trill with jays,
their dances to settle as colourful flocks.
They've cultural centres and anthologies.

And while the halls of greater states
proclaim their headlines and daytrip anecdotes,
right of the decimal point, the stats

ripple whenever they do the math
and discover Texas. Quaintly dressed,
the local tale is a pregnancy myth:

they got their Bible, but pools evaporate
where enlightened princes ban your books.
Now they build budgets and write their rights,

the woodlands where their nucleotides hid
are cleared for cattle, and only clutter
where leaves flop over our twig-dodging heads.

***

Alistair Noon's poetry collections include Earth Records (2012) and The Kerosene Singing (2015), both from Nine Arches Press. Concert at a Railway Station, his translations of the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, was recently reviewed in the TLS. ‘Translocal Underground’, a short film about him by filmmaker Paul Cooke, appeared last year. He's lived in Berlin since the early 90s.