Culture & events poetry

SUMMER POETRY

VilNews will this summer from time to time publish poetry that we receive from our readers. Please send us yours!

Night Knight

by KR Slade

I finished at school then home I came.
And fourteen days past Christmas next
my father went in sleep to his grave.
When I had forgotten so long before
the stories at bedtime that he had told.
I’d always to sleep and miss some part
but waked again to hear some more;
so all the story I’d often heard but never
remembered from start to end, the all.
Wasn’t it just of our to-make-believe ?
Didn’t we laugh because it wasn’t true ?
But now I know that jest was only just
to make it less scary for then and now.
The legend that would for me come true.

Read the poem here...

Rimgaudas P. Vidziunas
Mesa, Arizona, USA

The photo is of the author, Rimgaudas P. Vidziunas, walking on the shores of the Baltic Sea. He was inspired to write poetry upon his first visit to Lithuanian in 1999

Today we are pleased to introduce you to Rimgaudas P. Vidziunas who came to the USA in 1949. Visited Lithuania 1999, 2002. BA History, University of Miami, Florida January 1970. Photographer for over 35 years.

Follow him on Facebook: "Photography by Rimgaudas". Currently residing Mesa, Arizona, USA.
Email: rvidziunas@yahoo.com

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BALTIC BEACH DREAMS

I thought I heard you dream of Baltic beaches.
Walking in the evening sunset toward the cottage
That lies among the dunes.
The storm battered rain on our face, watching the storm end. 
The return of the seagulls
Indicates the ending of the storm
And fly to greet us
As if saying all is well. 

Poet Kazys Bradunas (1917-2009)

Today we are pleased to introduce you to Kazys Bradunas (1917-2009), a distinguished Lithuanian poet who, living in exile in the US during the Soviet occupation of his country, became one of the most active figures in preserving a national literary culture.
Bradunas was born in the village of Kirsai in southwestern Lithuania, coincidentally also the birthplace of the noted prewar woman poet Salomeja Neris. A year after his birth, in the turmoil following the Russian Revolution, Lithuania declared its independence. Bradunas began to write poetry while still a schoolboy. He studied Lithuanian language and literature at universities in Kaunas and Vilnius, and his first volume of verse, The Bells of Vilnius, was published in 1943. By then, however, Lithuania’s independence had been ended by successive Soviet and Nazi invasions. In 1944, when Soviet troops reoccupied Lithuania, Bradunas left the country, living in a camp for displaced persons in Germany before ultimately emigrating in 1949 to the US.

Resident in Baltimore and Chicago, Bradunas worked tirelessly to sustain a Lithuanian literature. He was a founder of the Zeme (“Earth”) movement, which sought to create a distinctively Lithuanian poetry, rooted in agriculture and local customs. He co-edited a Zeme anthology published in 1951.
In his own verse he drew on the rhythms of folk music and used descriptions of simple, specific objects to evoke Lithuania and its culture, focusing on its rural landscapes and its blend of pagan and Catholic heritage. Naturally, given the tragic national experience, his work was often elegiac: the title of his first published volume after leaving Lithuania, The Alien Bread (1945), aptly expressed the sense of dislocation experienced by the exile and captured in Bradunas’s poetry. Nevertheless, there was at times a note of triumph in verse which celebrated the flourishing of Lithuanian writers abroad:

Exiled poets are — desert cactuses.
They receive no moisture;
Sand surrounds them, 
Yet they grow and bloom 
Spiny red blossoms. 
(translated by Jurgis Bradunas)

LET THE BLOSSOMS BLOOM

                  For Loreta and Jurgis

The river comes flowing
And brings with it a name.
Man comes forward
And brings with him a surname
A toponym appears:
A cross is constructed,
Smoke rises from a chimney.
In this way Suduva was born,
Absorbed into our hearts.

A daughter comes forward
And brings with her a fire.
A son comes forward
And brings with him bread.
At the shore of another world,
In the shade of another sky
And another tree
A table is constructed,
A loaf is sliced
Life begins.
Put your clasped hands
On the ancient table
And let the blossoms bloom.

(translated by Rita Dapkus)

SUN RITE

You brought in the sun for me
Past the smoky door jamb
Now I can hardly remember
How you knocked with a stone
At my cradle
While all around, like a dream you'd lost,
Awakened the forests of Rominta. 

Then you put the sun for me
Like a transfigured breadloaf on the table
And the linen paled.
Then life's long
Ceremony began,
In which, like the censer's grains,
Smelled the blossoms of Rominta.

Where are you now, little sun,
Snuffed, carried out, buried?
Will I touch the earth with my forehead
Asking, can I
Knock with a stone
At your coffin
There, where late in the evening
Rustle the forests of Rominta. 

(translated by Jonas Zdanys)

Enrique Ferrer Corredor

Today we are pleased to introduce you to  Professor Enrique Ferrer Corredor, a Colombo-Venezuelan who loves Lithuania:

Professor Ferrer Corredor is an author and professor with a broad academic background. He divides his time between literature, economics, political science and his love for soccer. He is co-founder of Común Presencia (literary Magazine) and, founder and director of Papeles (Papers); he belonged to many writers' workshops in Colombia and Venezuela. 

Ash of Moon, his first collection of poems, was published in 1994 and had two editions in 1998. In 2006, he published his book El público en escena (short stories). Also he has published many articles of literature and political science in international magazines. Today he is part of Word4word, a group of writers in Newport News, Virginia (USA).

Sand Time

for Inga Repšytė

Cling
to sand that goes down
between busy lips,
demonstrating
that time is measured
by the absent body

Flight
Girl, you have wasted your time with the rules;
prisons have closed their doors
and you stayed in your flight.
Roses are not amulets for the night,
cells are inhabited by Sade
where the guards come to the feast of freedom.

Geographies
My recent geography of your body speaks
Of words trapped in your skin
Of ruins and old residents
But it ignores
The music of your nights with no fate
Your ignorance against any defeat
Your fear of snakes
And a moon that sails in your belly.

Testament
My port
Is a wave
And ghosts
Eat at my table.
And if your eyes shut down
On the edge of the blade
Open my house's door
And cling to the abyss.  

Instant
Two bodies
Plough the night
A flame
Hushes the fire.