Poetry Matters

Poetry: Simon Pomery

Simon Pomery was born in Galway, Ireland, and grew up in the Peak District, Derbyshire. He studied English at the University of Leeds and Pembroke College, Cambridge. His poems have been published in Agenda, Poetry London and P.N. Review.

Jeremiah

'He was unto me as a bear lying in wait, and as a lion in secret places.'
Lamentations 3:10

I dreamed I went out walking in the wood
at home, a place I knew like the back of my hand,
and with my back against a tree I stood
to hear the river's source run underground.

Out from a grove of figs a lion stalked
toward me, his mane swaying and his paws
patrolling on the grass. With his gaze stuck
on mine, I sat down in that awful peace.

Imagine my relief to see him go.
Afraid to move, I watched as through the air
he vanished, and in his place a vapour strode
and settled in the likeness of a bear.

His dark claws spread like branches over me,
and as I thought of all I had done wrong
his roar gave off the stench of rotten meat;
my cries rose in the sky and turned to song.

from Divina Lux: Three poems after Seneca's Epistle 102

Nature

Observe the things around you, how they're thrown
like bits of luggage in a cheap hotel.
Keep travelling. Nature strips your body bare
at both the entrance and the end to life.

You'll take no more than what you brought here first.
The skin that holds your innards will be stripped.
The system of your flesh, the cognate blood
suffused and circulated through your body

will drain away. The soft, supportive strings
of sinews, and the bones, will fall to pieces.
You fear that day as if it is the end,
that day, the birthday of eternity.

Birthday

Cast out of your mother's viscera,
darkness and blood, the internal
mess and the warmth, she set you down.

Screaming for light, you breathed free air.
A rough hand's touch made the world real,
full of dark things, of paths unknown.

What the Soul Says

'All the years are mine. No century
is shut to the imagination's scope;
no time is closed, impenetrable to thought.

One day, I'll lose my grip on what has blurred
the human and divine within the body.
I will give up the Self and let it go.

What am I saying? I'm not apart from the gods.
I'm only weighed down to the earth, detained.
My body keeps me here. I am like the earth.'

Note to poems from 'Divina Lux'

These verse translations are from a longer sequence based on a Latin prose epistle by Lucius Annaeus Seneca (c.4 B.C. - A.D.65), the Roman tragedian, philosopher and lawyer. Written toward the end of Seneca's life, the epistles are addressed to one Lucilius, who was a real citizen and friend to Seneca, but who is not necessarily the sole addressee. Seneca most probably wanted his letters to be collected in book form, though he never saw their publication, and his frequent gestures to posterity throughout the epistles suggest he was trying, with a death-bed finality, to address the youth of Post-Augustan Rome as well as future readers across time. The title of my sequence, Divina Lux, is lifted from epistle 102 itself, as are the subsequent titles of the poems. After making literal translations of the Latin into English prose, I took freer steps toward making the poems.