Sonnet: The Ruins of Balaclava
by Adam Mickiewicz (1798-1855)
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Oh, barren Crimean land, these dreary shades
of castles―once your indisputable pride―
are now where ghostly owls and lizards hide
as blackguards arm themselves for nightly raids.
Carved into marble, regal boasts were made!
Brave words on burnished armor, gilt-applied!
Now shattered splendors long since cast aside
beside the dead here also brokenly laid.
The ancient Greeks set shimmering marble here.
The Romans drove wild Mongol hordes to flight.
The Mussulman prayed eastward, day and night.
Now owls and dark-winged vultures watch and leer
as strange black banners, flapping overhead,
mark where the past piles high its nameless dead.

Adam Bernard Mickiewicz (1798-1855) is widely regarded as Poland’s greatest poet and as the national poet of Poland, Lithuania and Belarus. He was also a dramatist, essayist, publicist, translator, professor and political activist. As a principal figure in Polish Romanticism, Mickiewicz has been compared to Byron and Goethe. Keywords/Tags: Mickiewicz, Poland, Polish, Balaclava, Crimea, war, warfare, castle, castles, knight, knights, armor, Greeks, Rome, Romans, Mongols, Mussulman, Muslims, death, destruction, ruin, ruins, romantic, romanticism, sonnet, depression, sorrow, grave, violence, mrbtr

we told you so,
years ago,
we said we know
the weather flow

you said:
let's put on our balaclava
our ear-muffs and our blinkers
let's hear no more of this palaver
of know-alls and world thinkers

for several decades
we show'd graphs 'n grades
as world decayed
it's no charade

you said:
let's put on our balaclava
our ear-muffs and our blinkers
let's hear no more of this palaver
of know-alls and world thinkers

we gave you ample warning
of the global warming
of the storm that's storming
the troubles that'll come swarming

you said:
let's put on our balaclava
our ear-muffs and our blinkers
let's hear no more of this palaver
of know-alls and world thinkers

and now it's here,
you see the fear,
the effect severe
for your near and dear

let's put on our balaclava
our ear-muffs and our blinkers
let's hear no more of this palaver
of know-alls and world thinkers

it's too late now to turn back
we're on a one-way running track,
humanity's tired of your wise-crack,
there's gonna be a counter-attack.

altogether now:
let's put on our balaclava
our ear-muffs and our blinkers
let's hear no more of this palaver
of know-alls and world thinkers.

it's scary what people want to hear,
i feel, nothing at all, to be honest,
whenever i think of fame
i feel all famous people speaking the words:
don't become even by our standards moderates...
szlafrok: bathrobe -
              szuja: lizard-like-homeless person -
then again chattering ratty too -
does that mean: if i write i'll
get a penny for a structure where a brick is
worth just as much to the letter, the word
           or the line or the paragraph?
                  cukier: sugar...
   for every brick i'll get a penny's worth?
      writing discourages you from dreaming...
only the most adapted
                   who get encouraged by
   advertisement and who fake writing will ever get
the technicolour coat of Joseph...
         writing erodes your perspective of dreams,
it actually censors your ability to do so...
    i hear them, make novels from their body-language...
        and get an itch... nothing finicky... just
barring without baritone...
      poet's alphabet st. - barring without baritone...
antinomy of anecdote... false impression memorisation,
nothing rubric bound nothing alphabetical,
         nothing Pythagorean...
      antinomy... and there was me thinking of
antimony...                  there's no cascade of the sound
encoding of b or of a...
    there's the alphabet... and then there's
the dictionary... na na mmm, ma ma nun..
                    so cool with it, fit-bit....
      or should i claim you a toyo-bot?
           a ******* Hamleys' jack-in-the-box
     chuckles?
            either way... it's all a strategic **** -
or a macaque - or mà-cá-qé!
         herald the surgeon!
             grave a in the first syllable?
a delay... let's term yhwh as surd invocations -
           mà! (and yes, exclamation marks
are part of the necessary progress -
   unless you'd prefer anti-German anti-compound
allocation of a word to be turned into syllable mince...)
         mà! alternatively that's non-ambiguous -
what's ambiguous is the second syllable...
   mà!... cà!     màcà!        it's almost like holding-off
*******...          màcà!
      and then there's the qé!        or for optical reasons
as well as for reasons for the priestly monopoly
written as macaque - my-khaki-haka...
  (haka is a dance in rugby by the new zealanders,
   and khaki is diarrhea brown, diluted brown) -
   it's almost Spanish in a sense, huh?!
   well, because it's not exactly queue -
  or: que(h)? i.e. qweh?
well yes, it's a monkey, a tiny little bonsai
of a gorilla... cute... funny... loves tea-bags
and sugar... great company on a hot Kenyan night,
gets pestered with slingshots by the courtesan
   "bodyguards" of a tourist hanky-panky free whiskey...
  the time those kenyan entertainer girls
came up to me i sorta wished to play the
white-guy-****-history-joke...
stood my ground, went to sleep on one of the lounge
chairs one night... could have been stolen by pirates...
and i kinda wished it, but it didn't happen...
   still, the application of diacritical marks to
define syllables... the grave mark above vowels is
a bit like "holding back"...
         for some reason i first wrote mà-cá-qé...
but i realised... the avalanche only comes with
the acute marking above eh!....
        grave markings means restriction, a holding back...
and by this i mean that when the acute stress is
added, no number of optically adequate spellings
can erase it...
     in this case qé for what's encoded as -que -
   and still the four surds appear whether invited or
uninvited - softened laugh, eh? as in the asphyxiating
form of breathing, and then relaxed: ha ha ha ha!
       then again, i'm wrong,
they call them macaque: ma-ca-qac....
         so as a good revisionist does:
                grave and acute without a macron:
      má-cà-qàc - ma-cac-cac - not ma... ca-que!
   macaque!          Fawlty Towers and Mánuèl...
i know... nothing - hairspray romance,
and a horse called dragonfly...
   macaqué! olé!              
                          mácáquè -
    for the love of u - or parabola...
                 truth be told? i'll never know!
why? because no one taught us the rules of how
or when to apply such demands!
   let alone semicolons or commas...
                   macaque - barbarism sentenced to:
ma       ca              qak
                or simply my kayak...
**** me... it's still a monkey whether you like it or
not taking a **** and calling that chocy part of
its inverted intestines' toad-stool.
  let's just call it a mácàq monkey... because
the -ue suffix is just getting unbearable, like
an umbrella unfolded in one's **** -
   and applying diacritics to a suffix of pure-vowels
is beyond missing an ******, and making
rationale (the part where you miss stating an olé -
the part where rational is elongated into rationál
or the non-diacritical addition of -e)....
and then they worried why people never punctuated
correctly... maybe because people never applied
diacritical marks that they went beyond,
and didn't punctuate correctly?
                       humpty-dumpty hmm hmm:
                   eggs St. Benedict's, and a falafel Sunday!
me? trying to invoke a vocab that transcends
the ******* cool, however condescending i can be,
without trying or eating rye bread to boot,
    and then wear a balaclava calling it a Gucci neckwear,
drinking rather than throwing Molotovs.

when i was smaller i was very aware of how
a better, older me would look back
and look down
with malice and shame and see
what a pitiful creature. i. was.

at the time i was the sole object
of my own derision, a grim facsimile
of a human boy, and as i aged myself
in my mind i grew bigger and stronger
and meaner and more beautiful
and i. feared. him.

if i were to meet the boy i was four years
ago he would hate me, sweating under a
black balaclava, laces tied thrice to avoid
getting caught in the gears on his bike, helmet
on his belt, utterly ready. to. run.

i am glad i am not him anymore and
he. knows. it.

what's with this hobby of keeping friends?
i've got two friends that
only say meow...
          and i'm kinda not rooting for
a Colombian hottie for a wife...
                 i abhor this idea of a "loner",
i haven't heard any monks being called that...
  but then again monks do live in a monastery...
why do people always seek each other's
company? what's wrong with liking your own?
it really bothers me... i mean, by current
standards of denoting this man a loner
would make Spinoza laugh...
                  is it because you need to be the quintessential
hermit living in a clay urn or in a hole
in a desert?
                              each night i drink something,
without fail: i feel better for it...
               i'm hoping it'll **** me...
but so many times people who don't known
how to drink get so ******* melodramatic
that i think about ensuring they are banned from
abusing the amber...
                        i hate melodramatic drinkers,
you either utilise the sedative of the amber to
an overcoming potential... short: Kant's
transcendental methodology... you you won't
drink and whine... or bash people about...
and that, i must say: is a rare art.
     1 litre of amber and i'm as silent as a mouse...
i'll say it again:
    there are too many melodramatic whinge-bags
out there... i don't get them...
    i mean i get them: but i abhor them...
                i could really do with a pupil,
nietzsche would do, about time he stopped dropping
those barbiturates and learned to dance!
         tanz! tanz herz im freuer!
yes, sometimes the trip was long
the N86 from romford to goodmayes and
into the brothel near the train station...
but every time i played a folk song,
usually dikanda's ketrin ketrin i'd sit on the bus
for about 40 minutes... aflame...
                i find that prostitutes are only fed the myth
of a tender touch and a complete lack
of experimental perversity... even a kiss is
the beginning of their myth-making...
   ordinary girls are fed the myth of movies,
and how it all works out...
    each time i went to the brothel i sat for the journey
time like a Sufi meditation with the
              dervish dance in my mind...
                 and that's the truth... mind you,
i have a grandfather that supports my work
and buys me cigarettes... then again he lived in a time
when he could age and get a state-pension,
as he does... he's not ailing in any sense, and he lives
in a post-communist country... and i just spent
3 weeks over there... which means my state-sponsorship
in england has amounted: that i could take out
110 quid and give it for a *******...
                and i could remember myself aflame...
  on a bus with a dervish dance in my mind...
           drunk, as usual: but that's the fun part of it...
i could wave my *** at all those
melodramatic drunks you get at parties and in other
public places who suddenly speak and only moan
how unfair it all is...
                      first time i went? well... i did go to
uni after all, the sacred land of getting a good score
for later life... what a sahara when it comes to ***!
   like with prostitutes it still turns out to be a case
of hard facts and harder choices...
                  money...
                        and­ the white historians and who else
in the etc. cul de sac are wondering why our ethnicity is
in decline... it's quiet a thing to be bemused by the freedom
of women and not addressing the point fairly...
                   the women are so free i had to find my own
freedom with a *******...
                         i got bored of too many darwinian examples
being incorporated into the act... once it's the peacock,
next it's the mantis and the black widow...
of sure... there's so much to gain if endorsing some sort
of chivarly, when next door lives a babe with a sugar daddy...
   ***-starved ******* can go elsewhere,
       wild-eyed logic and no manifesto...
literally: there's no hope for a manifesto here...
             there's no manifesto...
                    this is absolutely not a manifesto...
         i'm actually happy that as an ethnicity we're in decline...
  i found talking to other ethnicities a bit restrictive
and boring... i had to censor vocab fluidity with dams
and other ****** architectural constructs...
    so i looked at the shows on television,
a bunch of child-genuises were on...
   i never thought that spelling was like arithmetic...
   but it is... it is, oh hell it is...
  the judge says the word in that odd jumble that a word
is when you have alphabetical distinctions
   in vowel, consonant and syllable form...
    but the languasge is so different, after all
language is not really an optical language as such,
mathematical language is truly anti-phonetic...
and it comes down to the simple example:
      spell the word: onomatopoeia
  start saying the alphabet and it sounds nothing like
this word put together,
   the syllable ono-                
                       then -ma-
                               -to-        and now the tricky bit...
peya...          but what of the grapheme œ?
                you'd really be able to break your tongue
on that syllable suffix...
                       and when the children started spelling
the word: it look as if they were going cross-eyed
   trying to translate the sound into image...
    mathematical language doesn't have that problem,
do the following airthmetic (e.g.)  
   1 + 2 - 5 + 6 - 4 = ?
                                          0...
but that's different when you are told to spell the word
   renaissance -
                                  doubly more difficult if
you are told to create syllables without diacritical mark
distinctions...
               back to drink, like being asked for
a wine connoisseur's palette, when the wine you've been
given has been diluted...
   or in this case fudge packed so there are no
clear distinctions, too much french influence
      and siamese twin graphemes seperated...
excess vowel that i've heard means: kissing...
i'm sorry how the story goes,
i just can't be forced to **** a kenyan penny-picking
                tragedy with my humour...
        i'm bewildered by the arithematic
and the "arithmetic" of putting words together...
                  the internet has quietly become a war
for a freedom to talk... it's more a freedom to think
than talk...
                  and god forgive me feeling so obscure in
what i wanted to think, but given the social structure of
events happening, i had to do a minority report on
it being said, and me not typing this on
a medium of defeat, that i ended up on a warring stance...
i mean, i can understand obscurity per se,
i can't see how i can attach myself to it on a basis
of a phenomenon...
                          so unearthed we are from a structure
that a rebellion against
                  the szlachta was viable...
what the hell grows on concrete? coconuts?!
      i already said: this is hardly a manifesto...
and i truly demand it to be thoroughly agreed to...
                   then comes the shortcoming
barrage of: i knight you the nigh of not worthy...
                        and then the recycling process
bombards you with: many more squint-eyed *****
to come where you did, come from.
       urbanity has forsaken man attached to an organism,
but is feeling it right now,
                 he's attached to an inorganic farbic of testament...
i haven't walked the soil or toiled in it
to feel it's breath between winter or summer..
           i once had so much one-dimensional inclusion
in this world, then my sight was diverted,
and i came across the numbers, who took to being
***** whales and gulped me in one cascade of
the feeding...
              and i was told to walk it alone.
once actors were abhorred by society,
but then there was no office folk to compete for
utility biases when it came to giving gratitude to
pristine plumbing...
                          back when man was highly
economical... and thus actors had to be abhorred...
  to create a tsunami of sadism to keep them
staged... and true enough:
         if christ was crucified in the colliseum
there would have been fewer than none churches to
establish that event... given the colliseum is
made into a subject-trophy cabinet of holiness -
               and how the colliseum did morph...
it's sad talking about being human as excluding humanity,
as it's sad talking being human by including humanity...
               but thankfully (or not)
there's still that case of the arithmetic of the two tongues...
        say the word colliseum
                             co- -lli- -se'um.
      i mean, that means something...
  take to numbers and of the 26, care to call c = 3
               18 + 33 + 24 13 21
                            +                      2 1 2 = 5
                                                    4 3 1 = 8
                            + 58
                                    = 109
    
kabbalah is *******... mysticism was squandered with
gematria... but islam has no alternative either...
sure... if you have to establish a mirror image
of having a care for theological parasites...
   then you turn a into 1, and b into 2 and z in 26...
and then fiddle about until you get a *******'s worth
of bashing about because you couldn't write
a play entitle Macbeth...
               did any of these holy alternatives die
in Auschwitz? most of them living in America didn't
serve in the Israeli army...
                 who wonders whether they died in
Auschwitz?
                 no! they didn't!
       they were bemused by this correlation of
numbers and letters, thankfully we already can read
the opposite of the kabbalistic practices
prostate in the Deutronomy...
           say 10 a thousand times... adds a few more zeros
but leaves the 1 intact...
            please enlighten me as to who wrote the first
koranic recitation if not khadira? please! for the love
of god tell me it wasn't khadira!
         oh wait... given the hispanic um...
it's khadija - the h is silent and the j is actually a hatch...
          a bit like in the west, with y and j trying to
be a grapheme... a load of ******* *******:
and yes: i have to be crude on the matter...
   so we have the first verse written by a woman...
  or was it a bit like saying...
Aisha wrote surah no. 114... i can just picture it...
the young wife said to her ageing husband:
pray with these words, you lecherous *****!
say: say it you ageing carcass!
i seek refuge in the lord of manking,
the sovereign of mankind...
      the god of mankind...
     from the whisper of the retreating whisperer
(gabriel must have left him once the 13th wife arrived,
of god! the symmetry with jesus' disciples!)
     who whispers into the ******* of makind
(evil is in the brackets) -
from among the jinn and mankind.
conscience really can be a ****** to master.
but the geometry of the koran (glutton the q if you want,
makes no impressions on me) -
is that it starts thick... ends up anorexic...
           so much to say at the start,
but then shrinks... it's beautiful in that sense...
given the miracle of muhammad was that he was
illiterate...
  so someone had to write the words for him...
            i'm guessing khadija wrote the best part of it...
i like to think of her writing the first revelations...
    but i also like to muse that aisha wrote the latter
half of the: how do they stress the ******* q k c so much
that it sounds like it's not coming from the mouth
but coming from the nose?! qu-ran... i need
a hanky and snorkel that **** out... qu sneeze! i-ran...
          it's glutton and it's nasal, and it's almost like:
the back of the throat... and then comes the la la la all-hubris
in that song five times a day...
                but seriously... you tell me the man was illiterate
an this book exists... so who wrote it?
   women!
                                         the merchant of mecca in
Finland... left the scandinavian penninsula after one year
and never came back...
                   but how can you have so much
at the beginning and so little at the end?
   a different woman, who was literate (and the man
wasn't) wrote what needed to be said...
    i just look at the surah an-nas as a way to suggest
that the prophet: al suma mal ley *** blah blah
had been asked to repent... repent you paedo!
          that's crude, i know... and i'm drunk,
i'll wake up sober tomorrow and cook a pork curry
and think about leather shoes and shoelaces and belt...
and how camels are dirtier than pigs and how you
can eat almost all of pork offal and when i see a camel
i just think of chewing tobbacco and spitting into
a copper tin... or camel-jockeys...
        or how i think arabs are cursed with oil
and dyslexia and diabetes... how most of them will
end blind or amputee due to their diabetes...
      how a lot of them would like something more
than turkish coffee and baklava, and how
it stops looking cool after a while...
           arab oil, dyslexia and diabetes...
which probably means a palestinian balaclava
at the end of the sequence...
   i'll never know: i'm not planning to have
a stop-over shopping spree in Dubai, any time soon.

Today is the day. As in customary, we shall start with the weather: The morning is clear and cool, the sunshine weak but well-meaning, the wind sweet but sharp and the trees green and chatty.

This day has been a long time coming. This day has. For too long it has skulking amongst the future pages of some misplaced internal diary. It's long shadow has been edged with fear, dreaded like an exam. Said fear melts away like yesterday's clouds, replaced by sunny optimism, for this date is now set in stone, frozen hard over night it now stares me down with oblique neutrality.

I'm not going anywhere, it whispers softly. You're fears are misplaced. Your fear of me is a your fear of death. Useful up to a point - but essentially irrational. Whatever will be will be and it will today.

The morning gather pace and after momentary brief salutations and briefer negotiations the train is boarded. The destination: no one knows. We know the names but they seem oddly sterile now, the sound cold hard lumps in our mouths, currency worn smooth: Edale, the pennines, the peaks, Absorbic. Citric. Folic, Formic Carbonic. Sulphuric. Deoxyribonucleic, Lysergic. Acid.

The absurd signposts of anonymous hamlets lazily swing by with increasing rapidity, blurring into one like the blades of a helicopter.

Post-industrial scabs and sores instantly give way to merry bucolic splendor as itchy, thick balaclava of the city in torn away. Laugh about nothing as we are hurled headlong into some postcard image of an England long lost between 'then' and 'now' where trees sing, walls are dry-stone and happy cows and sheep await noble, happy deaths; all wrapped in honey-coloured sunshine.

Rolling mounds of soft green matter undulate gently to a halt, and we emerge intrepid coloniser of a galaxy far far away. Locals eye us warily, the hot sun looks down angrily now. The baking mud coughs dust in our eyes and yellow spears of dead grass stab our tender shins. The warm fuzzy nostalgia that we are draped in gives way to...something else. Illogical patterns snake across verdant valleys, breathing and twitching. Harsh blue sky melts into hazy horizon, like oil on water. Panic sets in.

Pleading looks are exchanged and whilst reassurance is sought, none is found. Each gaunt face is scoured for hints of strength. Leaderless we wade through a sea of shimmering heat, collecting beads of sweat, losing hope of succour. We seek solace in plastic pound-shop distractions, only to find we are rendered too numbskulled to operate children's toys. Terror turns to horror. The yawning maw of madness, death is now so close we are caressed by it's putrid breath...

Release! Baking savannah morphs to cool,  mottled-green grotto and everything has already changed. All is bathed in verdant peace and ears can feel the cool lapping of a friendly stream.

Spirits, faceless vagabonds,
Cowardly ghosts that wreck havoc and destruction,
Spill innocent blood across our nation,
Now they starve us of goodwil and much needed funds.

I'm old fashioned enough to remember when turquoise was not for boys, a nice enough colour and with healing properties apparently, but it's not for me.

I dress in grey,
battleship grey to
match my face on
any given day
and
it seems I've been
given
lots of days,

She says,
that I should mend my ways,
wonder if mending the car
counts.

RUNNING THROUGH HISTORY
( for Grandfather Sheedy )

I, a creature of flesh
& mud.

Mostly mud I
train...run...running

across Curragh
Plains...pain. . .pain.

School cross country
running is - not:

my forte.

I, being constantly told I
am not my grandfather.

Obviously.

I plod after grandfather's
famous footsteps

inheriting only his calf muscles
but not...his stamina.

I am all skin & bone
merely my mind keeping me going.

Grandfather Sheedy is
running on into history.

I, the clod forever
running after his fame

into many a Curragh
sunset.

I run back through
time.

"In the year of the world
4608. . "

The Annals of the Four Masters
a running commentary in my mind.

I run through
my mythological past

the ghosts of kings famous
before time began.

Cobhthack Gael is still
killing Laoghaire Lore.

He highfives me as I
stagger past.

St. Brigid casts her cloak
it covers the entire plain.

I greet and thank her
with a wordless nod.

The Curragh Camp of today
coalescing into being

thanks to the Crimean
Campaign.

I recite Tennyson to
startled furze bushes.

"Furze bushes to the left of me
furze bushes to the right of me. . ."

into my mind rides
the 17th Irish Lancers

leading the Balaclava Charge

their mascot terrier Jemmy
following close behind

barking at the Russian guns

surviving it all
to roam around where I am

raoming now.

My Uncle  Tossie's
familiar greeting

"How ya...howya...how ya
are ya winning...are ya winning!"

Grandfather and Uncle
Balaclava dog & mythological

kings and saints

all urging me on
claiming I can do it.

I can & I will
...come. . .last.

Me the non-runner runner

driven by
history

Eyes glued shut to keep the night out and there's no use having a light so you put the light out until the morning cuts in and you have to go out,
yes!
the day breaks in like a burglar
creeping,
like ivy up a pergola.

There is frost on the roofs of the vehicles
that hang on the roadsides like icicles
and I think,
Extremities
was not a Greek philosopher.

I pull the ripcord and float down quite casually
into a Tuesday or it may be a Wednesday
either way
it's just another day to get through.