Nâzım Hikmet: Lion in an Iron Cage

Look at the lion in the iron cage,
look deep into his eyes:
like two naked steel daggers
they sparkle with anger.
But he never loses his dignity
although his anger
comes and goes
goes and comes.

You couldn't find a place for a collar
round his thick, furry mane.
Although the scars of a whip
still burn on his yellow back
his long legs
stretch and end
in the shape of two copper claws.
The hairs on his mane rise one by one
around his proud head.
His hatred
comes and goes
goes and comes...

The shadow of my brother on the wall of the dungeon
moves
up and down
up and down.

Tr. Taner Baybars. Published 1928, towards the end of the period when Hikmet was living in Moscow. He returned to Turkey and spent many years in prison as a Communist, which makes this poem seem prophetic.

Anthony Hecht: Lizards and Snakes

On the summer road that ran by our front porch
Lizards and snakes came out to sun.
It was hot as a stove out there, enough to scorch
A buzzard's foot. Still, it was fun
To lie in the dust and spy on them. Near but remote,
They snoozed in the carriage ruts, a smile
In the set of the jaw, a fierce pulse in the throat
Working away like Jack Doyle's after he'd run the mile. 

Aunt Martha had an unfair prejudice
Against them (as well as being cold
Toward bats.) She was pretty inflexible in this,
Being a spinster and all, and old.
So we used to slip them into her knitting box.
In the evening she'd bring in things to mend
And a nice surprise would slide out from under the socks.
It broadened her life, as Joe said. Joe was my friend. 

But we never did it again after the day
Of the big wind when you could hear the trees
Creak like rocking chairs. She was looking away
Off, and kept saying, "Sweet Jesus, please
Don't let him near me. He's as like as twins.
He can crack us like lice with his fingernail.
I can see him plain as a pikestaff. Look how he grins
And swings the scaly horror of his folded tail."
 

From The Hard Hours (1967), first published 1962. Does Hecht’s ability to maintain an informal register within strictly formal structures have any equal in English? Even the last line, a quote from Milton ("Swindges the scaly Horrour of his foulded tail") sounds natural.

Boris Pasternak: Swifts

At twilight the swifts have no power,

to hold back that pale blue coolness.

It bursts from throats, a clamour

an outpour that can’t grow less.

The swifts have no way, high

up there, overhead, of restraining

their clarion cries: ‘O, triumph,

see, see, how the earth’s receding!’

Like steam from a boiling kettle,

the furious flow rushes by –

‘See, see – no space for the earth

between the ravine and the sky.’

Tr. A.S. Kline. Published a century ago, in 1916; a rejection of the earthbound for the soaring or tumbling impulses of poetry. The translation does probably all that can be done to reproduce some of the original's tight form.

Gillian Clarke: The Stone Hare

Think of it waiting three hundred million years,
not a hare hiding in the last stand of wheat,
but a premonition of stone, a moonlit reef
where corals reach for the light through clear 
waters of warm Palaeozoic seas. 
In its limbs lies the story of the earth, 
the living ocean, then the slow birth 
of limestone from the long trajectories 
of starfish, feather stars, crinoids and crushed shells 
that fill with calcite, harden, wait for the quarryman, 
the timed explosion and the sculptor's hand. 
Then the hare, its eye a planet, springs from the chisel
to stand in the grass, moonlight's muscle and bone, 
the stems of sea lilies slowly turned to stone.

Dedicated to Meic Watts, “who sculpted the limestone hare”. Perhaps a little too lucubrated - the poem seems as trapped in stone as its subject. 

Thylias Moss: There Will Be Animals

There will be animals to teach us
what we can’t teach ourselves. 

There will be a baboon who is neither stupid nor clumsy
as he paints his mandrill face for the war being waged
against his jungle. 

There will be egrets in a few thousand years
who will have evolved without plumes so we cannot take them. 

There will be ewes giving and giving their wool
compensating for what we lack in humility. 

There will be macaws with short arched bills
that stay short because they talk without telling lies. 

Mackerel will continue to appear near Cape Hatteras each spring
and swim north into Canadian waters so there can be continuity. 

There will be penguins keeping alive Hollywood’s golden era. 

The chaparral cock will continue to outdistance man
twisting and turning on a path unconcerned with shortcuts. 

Coffin fly dun will leave the Shawsheen River
heading for the lights of Lawrence. What they see in 48 hours
makes them adults who will fast for the rest of their short lives,
mating once during the next hour and understanding everything
as they drop into a communal grave three feet thick with family
reaching the same conclusions. 

The coast horned lizard still won’t be found
without a bag of tricks; it will inflate and the first
of six million Jewfish will emerge from its mouth.
We will all be richer. 

John Dory will replace John Doe
so the nameless among us will have Peter’s thumbmark on their cheek
and the coin the saint pulled from their mouths in their pockets.
Then once and for all we will know it is no illusion:
the lion lying with the lamb, the grandmother and Little Red Riding Hood
walking out of a wolf named Dachau.

Published 1990. Interesting the way the poem moves from obvious polemic about the harm we do to individual species, to surrealism that seems at least partly based around the harm we do to one another. It's as if the feel-good comforts of concern about animal rights are slowly being pulled away from us... and what's left?

Valerie Gillies: Summer Bull

A blusterer of a bull
stayed with us that summer.
He was full of surprising moves.
One morning he ran easily as the minotaur
up the dark alley by the byre.

Hearing his locomotive sound
I came to the kitchen doorway
to see my boy standing out
in the open yard watching the hard-head
circle and cut-circle around him.

The bull tossed hens through the air,
and clipped biddies flew for the first time.
He whirled them in eddies
bore them up and over the boy
at a standstill, smiling.

Tiptoe, in profile, a Cretan vaulter
poised for the swift ton of violence
which left him untouched at the storm centre.
Only my dead thought lay on the ground
the day my dearborn kept his nerve.


From Bed of Stone (1994). Dramatic but perhaps with too much description to be fully successful. Or does it need a longer, more pastoral lead-in as contrast to the drama?