Calendar Poetry from the Czech Republic


August

  by Karel Toman (1877-1946), translated 
  by Jirina Fuchsova


The murmur of grain fields
fragrant like bread
permeates my garden closed to the world.
The peaceful song of the harvest
walks through the fields
and under the blazing sun
man wipes from his brow
the sweat of finished labor.

From afar
I hear the screeching of barn-gates,
the sound of the gnashing teeth.
An invisible robbing hand
leans against a weapon
waiting.
And yet I keep quiet.
I shall not cry out into the silences.

Above us, keeping guard,
sunflowers, the clocks of our solitudes,
bow their heads.


 (Excerpted from: "Writing Across Cultures"
  by Edna Kovacs. Blue  Heron Publishing, Inc.
                  Hillsboro, Oregon 1994)

The poem "August" is excerpted from Czech poet
Karel Toman's sequence of calendar poems titled
The Months, translated by Jirina Fuchsova.
Karel Toman, who published his first verses
in the nineteenth century,was a poet of personal
and social protest; an alienated and disinherited
wanderer from his native land, who returned,
in the maturity of age, to the themes, scenes,
and traditions of his home - that cultural
continuity that runs like a golden thread
throughout Czech literature.