Ten poems by Radek Štěpánek

Radek Štěpánek (*1986), poet, editor, fisherman. He was born in Prachatice, and today lives with his wife, poet Tereza Bínová, and their daughter in Brno – Bystrice. He studied media studies and journalism at Masaryk University in Brno and later received a master's degree in Environmental Humanities there. He is considered a central figure in Czech environmental poetry; he has published a total of nine poetry collections. He works as an editor at the Brno-based Host publishing house. He reads his columns on Czech Radio Brno. The poems listed here are from the author's collections Court Creek (2010), Great intercourse (2020), Pag County (2013), Here are the men. (2018) and Spider web frame (2016); he also published a collection Fly over the sea above Bezdreví (2012) and a trilogy of long poems Erosion (2018) – Thaw (2019) – Whirlwind (2021).

***

God please give me sight and speech
like a fish in a spring
that will let him know the sea

Give me a hearing.
in this deaf world
and palms to caress
and did not tighten

Give me so much time
How much does the mayfly ask of you, Lord?
Give me a home and peace in it

Give me strength, both the graft and the rootstock.
to work a miracle together

Please give me sight and speech.
because I am a fish too
which travels

***

So joyful again
like a child
running in the flowers
He tramples everyone
Everyone kisses
I want that! Mom
I want that!

***

How much does it cost me strength?
to move?
Perhaps exactly that much
how many water meters
to stay in place
when the surface
the wind blows

Broken memory

It was August and hot air was falling into the streets
grain dust. A green grasshopper jumped out of the wagon behind
she was carried by a tractor onto the road, which he threw her against
air flow driven by another car.
At that unexpected moment I saw her fall, in vain
A fan of wings was spreading. A slapping sound was heard
and then silence. I tore my hands from my parents' palms
and bent over the broken shell. And then I
cried to the whole city and shouted to the whole world, seen
for the first time in such completeness.

I may be the last – and that's why

The coast is being demolished by excavators, the Tatra mines are bringing sharp pieces of limestone from the mainland. Every day a piece of the cliffs disappears. Gravel covers them, just as mud once buried today's fossils. No one will ever write a poem about them again.

I can't count.

I would like to count them again, every day.
I do; today there are thirty-six. Thirty-six nuts
in black wrinkled skins, thirty-six
fists clenched in silver branches completely
of a fallen January tree. But I know that
It's not everything, I need you to be a nutcracker
Looked from the other side to tell me how much
You see nuts, and even then it won't be everything.
I also need birds flying over the yard, I need
They are heard, I need their croaking to know,
What do they think about all this? I need,
so that one of those crows would sit on the branches, bring
one of the nuts into the sky and dropped it from a height
on the asphalt. When he does, the picture will be more complete
and there will be one less nut. I will just
have to start counting again. In order for the image to be
true, I must not be alone in it: entrance
into the picture, say for example that you can't even see a tree
nor birds, only then perhaps about the tree and the birds
I'll find out more. Come in here, everyone, tell me,
What is my world like?

Stogaj

(To Andriana Škunka)

In the meadow behind the beach, a bora is blowing in the sedge, but we continue on in a stony silence that remembers times without humans. Between the limestone rocks, sandstone boulders crumble and slopes of green clay exposed by the rain are full of remnants of life from the times before the flood: the sea has always been here, since the creation of the world – and it will be at its end. In front of the mound of fingers of rocks that hug the coast, even the forefinger of Stogaj, raised in warning, has turned to stone: sixty meters of its weight shows a different face on each side. Between the Three Brothers in the bay below, the ragan, the strongest wind on the island, nests. Its thunder is not enough for our ears. It tears the tops of the waves from the sea and throws their debris in our faces. And yet it heals more than it wounds. A person who wants to stand, kneels at the foot of Stogaj.

Cloud

A cloud flies across the sky, a metal dragon from ancient myths, a long-extinct lizard with a crocodile's head on a swan's neck. Its belly tears open against a ridge, and from its entrails bursts the same lion that once became a National Geographic star: the sky is a stormy desert, sand pours into its mouth and eyes, and this is the king of beasts. With a flowing mane, it strides fearlessly towards the future, where it will soon take its place in myths and tattoos alongside rhinos, sharks, and perhaps even the gray angels of the Yangtze River. All of them disappeared from the world before I could grow up, and before I grow old, the time will come when I may believe that even then they were just a fairy tale that made the world younger. Theirs will be eternity in the impermanent shapes of clouds, elevated above all the tingling of life.

It just depends on when you enter.

The great stone at the threshold remains, the surrounding walls still stand: enter the ruins, step over the primrose. The vault of the steeples shadows human footprints, life swallows up other life and every pain is a memory of birth. Layer upon layer, the furrows of erosion bite ever deeper, to offer everything past to the future. The soft and fertile floats away with every heavier rain and hardens when it clears. Only the jagged bare rock remains, a thought hardened to bone, but even that will receive a touch that softens it again. The ruins are fertile soil. They quickly settle. And if people ever return, they will reconquer their space.

***

To have the courage of a blade of grass: it stands straight before it is cut