Five Poems by Germain Droogenbroodt

 

SMART PHONE 
 
 
In the waiting room  
sits a large number of travellers. 

With one notable exception, 
all of them are busy 
with a little thing called smart phone 
that fascinates them all the time. 

With two thumbs at the same time 
they write their stories, 
meaningful or not they are written, 
and sent out into the world. 

Only one person does not write, but reads, 
he reads a book. 
 
Doesn’t he have anything to say?

WITNESSES OF A TIME 

 
Just as the rain  
erases traces left behind, 
disappears by a technical problem 
or decision of higher powers 
what we once entrusted 
to floppy, computer, VHS or CD. 
 
What will soon remain of us, only yellowed 
that once was written on paper 
by typewriter or pen—  
and of those who come after us, 
nothing at all?

 

 

TERROR

 
 
The war is no longer declared but continues.  
The unheard of has become daily. 
                                  —Ingeborg Bachmann 
 
 
Homes destroyed by missiles 
—innocent people, women, children, 
killed by the haughty madness 
of misleaders. 

Unwinged the dove, the truth,  
raped by lies.

 

USELESS PRAYERS 
 
 
So many calamities take place on earth 
continually and increasingly plagued  
by disasters and injustice, 
although millions of prayers 
are daily sent to heaven. 
 
But which God, who speaks all those languages,  
can give them a hearing, when it is man  
who disrupts even the heavenly vault?

 

HOPE 
 
 
It is winter, 
the chilly wind has torn off 
the last leaves from the trees 
which before were protection 
and accommodation for the birds. 

They shiver in the cold 
but still whistle 
because they also hope 
for better times. 
 
 
from “The Road of Being”, Southern Arizona Press, USA

Germain Droogenbroodt, was born 11 September 1944 in Rollegem, the Flemish part of Belgium. In 1987 he moved to the Mediterranean artist village of Altea and integrated in Spanish literary life. 

Germain Droogenbroodt is an internationally appreciated poet. He wrote short stories and literary reviews, but mainly poetry, so far 17 poetry books, published in 30 countries. He is also translator, publisher, and promoter of modern international poetry and translated – he speaks six languages – more than thirty collections of German, Italian, Spanish, Latin American, English and French poetry, including anthologies of Bertolt Brecht, Mahmud Darwish, Reiner Kunze, Miguel Hernández, José Ángel Valente, Francisco Brines and also rendered Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Persian and Korean poetry into Dutch. 

As founder and editor of the Belgian publishing house POINT Editions (POetry INTernational) he published more than eighty collections of mainly modern, international poetry organised and co-organised several international poetry festivals in Spain. He is co-founder and advisor of JUNPA (Japan Universal Poets Association), general counsel of the Chinese cultural Association Huifeng, International Shanghai and founding president of the Spanish cultural foundation ITHACA. He also collaborates with several international poetry associations. 

His poetic oeuvre is many-sided. After his début with “Forty at the wall” (1984), defined as neo-romantic poetry, he published “Do you know the country?”, Meditations at Lake Como (Italy), a collection of nature poems. In 1995 he was awarded a Hawthornden Fellowship (Scotland) where he wrote “Conversation with the hereafter”, awarded in Belgium with the P.G. Buckinx-Prize and “Palpable absence”, a bilingual (Dutch Spanish) collection of love poems. A critic of the Dutch Information Office for Libraries described his love poems as “virtuoso poetry”. At the end of 1998 appeared “Between the silence of your lips”, his collected love poems. 

During his sojourn at the Palace-Fortress “Neemrana” in Rajasthan, 1998, he completed the poetry cycle “The Road”, published in China as TAO, a poetic bridge between the East and the West, inspiring the Flemish artist Frans Minnaert and the Indian painter Satish Gupta, who enriched “The Road” with their drawings. This philosophical, mystical poetry has been published in 25 countries, according to the Icelandic poet-critic Thór Stefansson prophetic, philosophic poetry. In 2001 he wrote in Spanish “Amanece el cantor” (The Singer Awakes), a homage to the deceased poet José Ángel Valente, followed by “Counterlight” written in Ronda (Southern Spain) in 2002, published in Spain by Calima Ediciones, in Romania by ex Ponto, in Belgium by POINT Editions, in both Mongolian languages by GCompress Co., Ltd. Ulaanbaatar, in Arab by Albayat (Morocco), in Hong Kong by “Contemporary Poetry”, and in Taiwan by Poet Culture. Corp. The latter publication includes also “Counterlight“.