THE ROAD OF BEING
WITNESSES OF A TIME

Poetry

Germain Droogenbroodt

Translation by the author and Stanley Barkan

Compiled and edited by Jyotirmaya Thakur

PREFACE

Poetry and Humanity

                              or:

 Poetry: redressing the unbalanced

by Germain Droogenbroodt

The German philosopher Martin Heidegger claimed, that the language is the home of being, of existence and that human beings should learn again to life in it. Unfortunately, nowadays we see that the majority of people abandoned the house they should live in. As a consequence, the poem, by far the purest form of the language, suffers from the same abandonment. Alike the language it remains home but for an extremely small minority, and the poet, the philosopher Diogenes alike, errs with his lantern through the crowded streets of this world, searching for a human, for more humanity. 

According to Aristotle, being is the most universal concept and Heidegger, even more than other philosophers in search of the sense of it asked:  but the being (das Sein), what is being? It is itself, its pure existence, he replied. However, are human beings still their selves, do they still dispose of their own being, of their own, personal existence, or have they become hardly more than puppets on the New World Order’s string, of digital indoctrination?

Through the ages, the philosophers alike, poets have been in search of the sense of human existence on this planet. And the poem, what else is the poem than the poet´s tool to search for the sense of our being in relation with our fellow-humans? Writing, wrote the Spanish poet José Ángel Valente, is not the reproduction of a pre-existing experience, but the process and the creation of it. Therefore, as a multiplier of emotions, the genuine poem goes beyond all possible human feelings. As yet, one cannot expect the modern poet to be an optimistic visionary, but he can be a contemporary Diogenes, using his poetry as a lantern, a tool to find in the brainwashing light of media & multinationals, the real, the illuminating light.

It is not obvious to speak in a not too pessimistic way about “Poetry and Humanity” in these times where the world is lead – or rather mislead – by liars, demagogues and extremists. The world is full of ice and winter, estranged the god of love and mercy. Power-mad men opened Pandora’s box, Chaos, the Greek goddess of disorder reigns and her daughter Nyx, the winged goddess of the night rides across the sky throwing her dark shades on the earth.

Unfortunately, poetry, even less than before, can make the world more human, it merely can describe the nature of human beings, as Homer, the first great Western poet did. We can but relate the human Odyssey, which hardly changed: in spite of so many ages of apprenticeship and defiant technical progress. Day by day we are confronted with merciless cruelty, with hate, murder and death which irrevocable appears to be human’s destiny. Allow me to recite a poem by the great Austrian poet Ingeborg Bachmann describing better than any other modern poet today’s reality:

Every day

The war is not anymore declared,

but continued. The outrageous

became ordinary. The hero

absents himself from the battles.

 The weak has been moved

 to the firing line.

The daily uniform is patience,

the distinction the shabby star

of hope above the heart.

It is extended,

when nothing happens anymore,

when the drumfire dies down,

when the enemy becomes invisible

and the shadow of never-ending arming

covers the sky.

It is extended

for deserting the flags,

for the bravery towards a friend,

for the betrayal of unworthy secrets

and the rejection

of whatever command.

Ingeborg Bachmann

All poetry did and can do, is to be an obstacle: Do not sleep while the vindicators of the world are busy, warned the German poet Günter Eich, be suspicious against their power which they pretend to acquire for you! Take care that your hearts are not empty, when they count with their emptiness! Do what is useless; sing the songs they do not expect from one’s mouth!

Be sand, not oil, in the driving gear of the world.

These two examples show that poetry can warn, criticize, resist when humanity is threatened. Especially in Latin-America a large number of poets wrote critical, revolting poetry. Although not of mass destruction, the word is a weapon. Leaders know it. As soon as they have grasped power they grasp the writers, imprison, or intimidate them. Poetry is a mirror in which human life is reflected in all its facets: it’s ugliness but also it’s beauty, its greatness. As in Homer’s Odyssey poetry speaks about death but also about human courage, about love, about hope, about the gods, the universe. Poetry describes what we are, as the Persian poet born in Afghanistan, Maulana Rumi did:

We are the mirror and in the mirror the face.

Continuously, minute by minute, we taste eternity.

We are the pain and what cures the pain. We are

the sweet, refreshing water and the jar that pours it.

Poetry also warns humans to respect the environment as goes in a poem by Günter Grass:

Our garbage

I looked for stones and found
the survived glove
of synthetic material.

Each fingerstall related.
No, not those stupid fisherman’s stories,
but what will remain:

Our garbage
beaches long.
Whereas we, passed away
of no one’s bereavement we will be.

To those in distress, poetry can be companion and consolation as described in a poem by the Austrian poet Chritine Busta:

Information about poems

Sometimes, a poem is
a timid hand,
stretched out in the darkness
to a fellow human.

Hello you, I am here.
I rejoice, I suffer,
I am thoughtful just like you.

I am tired
and neither can sleep.

Of course no other art form may express the greatest of human feelings: love or its loss. I recite a short poem by the great Icelandic poet Stefán Hördur Grimsson:

Midwinter song

So hard they can be, the shadows of the night
that the heartbeat of my love
becomes heavy and dark

So hard they can be, the shadows of the night.

But even when the hour comes that we have to leave this vale of tears
and a god or the cosmos calls us back, poetry offers gentle words to depart. The Korean poet Sin Sôk-chông did it with an impressive beautiful poem, entitled:

When you call me

When you call me
I will come to you
like yellowed ginkgo leaves
float in the autumn wind.

When you call me
I will come to you
like the new moon silently sinks away
at night, when the mist descends above the lake.

When you call me
I will come to you
like the sun of an early spring penetrates the grass
when white herons sing in the azure sky.

Sure, poetry cannot change the world, but how poor humanity would be, without Homer, without  Li Po and Tu Fu, without Shakespeare, Dante and Petrarca, without Basho and Issa, Goethe, Baudelaire, Tagore, Mandelstam, Neruda, Lorca and so many other poets who offered beauty, faith, solace and hope, victuals for the human being on his journey to his irrevocable disappearance from this world.

Allow me to end this paper with a poem from my poetry book “Counterlight” :

Plea

Oh angel of dawn
bind up with healing bandages
the deep wounds of the night

remove the sting
from the naked heart

pour out the horizon
in golden cups

say

that not may submerge

the light.

Introduction

Waiting for Better Times

The Road of Being, Germain Droogenbroodt’ s latest poetry book, represents a new inflection in his already long career, with sixteen poetry collections published, several of them published in thirty countries. Although in the three parts that make up the set we will find diverse thematic approaches and interests, they all converge in that backbone that constitutes a concise and suggestive style that makes Germain Droogenbroodt’ s poetry unmistakable.

            The first block with which the book opens, refers to the mostly meditative part of his previous poetry, where the light of dawn, the flight of the birds detached from the earthly, the opening of the flowers, the miraculous beating of the heart... lead to a serene and peaceful panorama. And like that same dawn, territory of the unpredictable, of what is always to come, so the poet, "with words / that only silence / knows how to express," also does not know in advance the verses that will appear. To create is to obtain that vision, that luminosity, that illumination, which poetry offers and which is not only "a shelter for the word." A vision, with our eyes closed and turned inward, that allows us to see with total lucidity the external reality. The poem then becomes that bridge that reintegrates the inner with the outer, the poet, the human being, with nature.

            In Witnesses of a Time, not by chance the central part of the book, at the antipodes of all the above, we look at the crude reality in which we live: human alienation (entertainment) and control (surveillance by digital devices) in this technocratic world, in which also vanity and hatred so thriving in social networks represent the agony of discursive communication, of argumentation or even of personal thought itself: others (a robot, a chip) end up thinking for us. And with this agony, democracy is wounded and looks into the abyss of totalitarian horizons. Depersonalization, environmental deterioration, anxiety and mental illness . . . lead us to ask ourselves "But is life / that is no longer dignified / still life?”

            In Without Return, the third and last part of the collection, we find poems that allude to the passage of time and our futile resistance to stop it, to the ephemeral and the changing, to our vulnerability and the ups and downs of life, to its fleetingness, to the non-return of what has already been lived, except in memory; to the autumn of man and his unavoidable path towards death. A death that, beyond the inequalities in which we live, definitely makes us all equal. Death sometimes also painful, and in the most absolute loneliness, as in the case of those killed by covid in the hospital: "None knocking at the door / nobody you expect, / no one, except death.”

The book closes with several poems about the invasion and war in Ukraine: all the horror of extreme violence and destruction in the image of a rope around the neck of the dove of peace, our most human helplessness, our immense fragility.

            After reading, it seems evident that the poet shows us by contrast how is the reality in which we live today and how it should be for it to be a dignified life. Thus, while man's search should lead him to the light (as expressed in one of the opening poems of the book), the reality we are witnessing leads us, through the subway tunnels of the technocratic mole, to the most fearsome darkness. Although if there is one thing Germain Droogenbroodt does not lose, as poets have never lost, it is hope: just as "that after the rain, / the sun will shine.” Man continues to trust and hope -like the winter birds- for the arrival of "better times." That is his last verse in the book, his augured horizon, the greatest longing in these rather dark times. Such is, or should be, The Road of Being.

Rafael Carcelén

THE ROAD OF BEING

THE GOAL

The shortest road
is not always the best road
leading to the goal.