[诗歌] What Did the Children Know and When Did They Know It?

alvinwoolf

  What Did the Children Know and
When Did They Know It?
                     by Dana Roeser
                   from Antioch Review
                      Summer 2006
                    

               I kept the secret well.
A tsunami had struck Southeast Asia
        and 43,000 people were killed. That's

               what they said at first, somewhat
loudly, somewhat pointedly, somewhat unmistakably,
        on the radio, on the day after Christmas.

               But the girls were playing
Yahtzee, or watching that hilarious Fawlty Towers
        video for the nth time, or

               practicing their dance steps, or doing
each other's hair, or toasting smores through the
        side door of the woodstove,

               the Christmas tree winking
at us from the other room, not yet as dry
        as tinder, and though

               I didn't turn the radio off — and
it kept going on and on, the steady accretion of
        horrific detail — it somehow

               couldn't compete with their
industrious pursuit of the funny video, or the
        violin, their absorption

               in the smores, or whatever
it was that they were doing. I didn't
        turn it off; I let it talk

               alongside them, wondering
when they would notice, sort of incredulous
        that they hadn't, but not wanting

               to stop them, to say something.
Now, reading the Wall Street Journal
        today, a week later,

               I realize that they, like the antelope
stampeding the shoreline in the state
        of Tamil Nadu — ten minutes

               before the tsunami hit — or the elephants,
leopards, deer, and other wild animals
        who escaped unharmed in Sri Lanka,

               had already found high land,
a little island, that
        would not break. You see,

               I wasn't just keeping
the secret of the tsunami. There was something
        else in the house. How often

               I'd wished they'd overhear,
preferably my side of the story, so that I would not
        have to know alone. But my girls had

               already proceeded inland.
They were balancing on their new exercise
        balls from Borders, watching John

               Cleese, as Basil Fawlty — with the
woman in the video, \"olly,\" the maid, who in real
        life was, for a long while, at least,

               his wife — his helpless antics
in the face of events that he couldn't control,
        events that became all the more

               idiotic and perverse, as he
tried to twist them in service of his petty pride
        and vanity, and we all died

               with laughter watching him,
balancing on our balls, holding our secrets
        in our mouths like big marbles.

alvinwoolf

关于诗人Dana Roeser的有关介绍请看：http://www.readfree.net/bbs/htm_data/27/0608/207589.html

alvinwoolf

像这一首一样，国外的诗歌现代意识比较强，有时代气息和现代西方人的生活观念在，而现在中国有些诗人在自己的诗作中还沉浸在唐诗、宋词之类的意境中不能自拨，显得有点俗套和观念的滞后。以后将再选一些现代国外诗歌让喜欢诗歌的人欣赏。