Celan Poem by Agus R. Sarjono

At the heart of a bloody history
I found Paul Celan secretly taught
the mother of time and the seeds of night to walk.
But the night and time had stopped inside a puddle of black milk
where the bodies of gray-haired women were grievously laid.
Whose sharpness of ax it is,
if not His Excellency The Duke of Emptiness?
He collocated the golden death with the lips of love
Bodies of romance with tombs of laughter
Hips of laments with the napes of life
He arranged them in pairs
like arranging those that were not your eyes
not my eyes and not his eyes
in the fluttering braided shawl
dark and gloomy
like opium and memory.

Poor mothers who had never returned home,
lovers who had been burnt and buried in the vastness of the sky,
were digging wells of wounds in the heart of memories
where guilt was incarnated into black milk
milked by those who survived,
who had escaped and fled to seek refuge.
In that same place, Isaac Bashevis Singer
struggled to abolish slavery from himself,
writing the enemy in a love story. But the trauma
and the past were like an ex-wife
always forcing to reconcile

Exuces are the maestros of memory's twilight
Even at the orange moments
in the artery of life pulsating vibrantly,
there are always excuses to be unhappy.

Translated by Nikmah Sarjono