Luděk Čertík (born 1989 in České Budějovice) studied film history and environmental studies; he works as a program director at the Prague Short Film Festival. He occasionally writes and lectures about film, mainly the work of American-born Terrence Malick, but also about artistic nature films, and also translates and writes poetry. He has published in the magazines Film a Doba, Sedmá generace, and Universum. He is a member of the organizational team of the České Budějovice cultural magazine Milk & Honey, to which he regularly contributes. The three selected poems come from the author's upcoming poetry collection Many Rivers. See also. loveinlove.wordpress.com
*** salmon set out to die upstream— you can still talk about love, it takes days, more and more stubbornly push forward, one after the other dying of exhaustion— the river fills with a river of battered bodies, bears wait at the rapids and waterfalls, snatching eager bodies into their hungry mouths, but after a while they too lose interest and just lie limply along the banks; your belly is swollen with careless abundance, and the child in you asks: who let out those scarlet lanterns? and who feeds the desire in us?
*** life depends so much on it when we walk the hills and the hills walk in us when the forest moisture beats into the sleep of the buttercups and the unspeakable sounds in the voice of the oriole
*** give the bees a drink from your heart let the tigers fall asleep on the doorstep of your dreams be gentle to life in a time of hatred be gentle to life in a time of indifference be a light where darkness prevails