Poems to Harold Pinter for Pen

POEMS TO HAROLD PINTER FOR PEN, RICHARD McKANE

FOR HAROLD PINTER LINES WRITTEN

ON HIS RECEIVING THE NOBEL PRIZE FOR LITERATURE

from TRAINS OF THOUGHT

BY RICHARD McKANE

I thought I deserved a Guinness, myself and I:

the Turkish poet Attila Ilhan hears the death knell and dies,

another writer wins the Nobel Prize,

and printerless my poems lie.

The clue’s in the rhyme, for it’s Harold Pinter:

you published our Nazim Hikmet when it was without a printer

and Tarkovsky with Greville Press too.

If I had a hat I’d take it off to you.

We drink at the fountain of our language:

I communicate with Kurds and Chechens,

but not in their mountain languages,

though I’m unusually close to them in Turkish and Russian.

And today interpreting I was so very tired

that I spoke a whole sentence of Russian to a Kurd,

somehow for a moment I was cross-wired,

up till today, Harold, I was mightily afraid of you, upon my word.

But as I talked this fear through standing with the psychiatrist Jack

in the waiting room at the Medical Foundation,

he said ‘it might be a totally different emotion’,

a shiver down my legs: ‘Could it be love?’ he said – I was taken aback.

You are expert in countering psycho-ops,

because you put yourself in the firing line.

I may not totally agree with you on America the cop,

but I totally concur with you against leaders who shoot lives and lines.

Silences you command, yet break your ban.

I’ll carry with you the can

of rights not worms but words and we both can

build bridges that span our span.

In my grieving for the Turkish poet Attila Ilhan,

I find interleaving this happy news,

but you’ve been dreadfully ill as a man,

but your writing from the front is ageless news.

I played a small part in translating

some of your poems into Russian.

At The Pushkin Club we did an evening,

your poet’s voice of authority was never Prussian.

In character or out of character

is the complex of the playwright,

not always the poet – but then you’re an actor

as well and to add that is only right.

So why did I used to say I feared you most,

haunting me with the fear of God, my father and the Holy Ghost?

It seems I, at the same time, used to put you up on a pedestal,

raising you way above the passing pedestrian.

Is it because I feared the Unknown in you?

At our meetings I had the impression of phenomenal concentration

in your eyes – someone was watching you –

I mean me – there was a soulful penetration.

I’ve missed another late train.

I’ll have to get down to some translation

for an hour at the station. I’ve showed my hand, and it’s plain

that I’m writing this in a tired state of elation.

That’s nothing new – I can pluck words from my subconscious.

These days you’ll be permanently holding the conch,

yet I have a strong hunch you’ll remember us:

for you and we interpret human rights and don’t lie on the couch.

Richard McKane