Václav Z. J. Pinkava

BIO

Václav Z. J. Pinkava was born in 1958 in Prague (Czechoslovakia, as was then). He emigrated in 1969 to Britain, growing up there and completing his education at Oxford. He followed this with a career in IT management, latterly as a professional translator, having moved back to the Czech Republic in 1992 with his wife and four children.
Native in English and Czech, he writes poetry in either language whenever moved to do so, but loves translating the poetic works of others; nearly 500 English poems to date.
He has published the first ever Czech rendition of Lewis Carroll’s ‘The Hunting of the Snark’ as well as (yet another) complete set of Shakespeare’s sonnets.
Václav’s poetry samples and translations in English have surfaced e.g. in The Hypertexts and Trinacria.

 

Aftermath

The trees bear witness to a storm of ice;
past having passed, freeze-dried, a rampage trail.
Ours is the heartwood that has paid the price.

A winding trail, of hope against advice,
meandering the boughs, that bowed, to fail.
The trees bear witness to a storm of ice.

Slight upon slight, borne more than would suffice;
a freezing drizzle … heavier than hail.
Ours is the heartwood that has paid the price.

A winding trail, where chances rolled the dice
that brought calamity on such a scale.
The trees bear witness to a storm of ice.

The cold has snapped, and now the weather’s nice,
the sky’s exposed, bare; blue, to no avail.
Ours is the heartwood that has paid the price.

Adversity and strife is life’s own spice,
clear change a break, new chapter, verse, or tale.
The trees bear witness to a storm of ice.
Ours is the heartwood that has paid the price.

 

 

Minutiae

A moment is the smallest bit of time.
An atom is the smallest bit of stuff.
Those were the articles of faith, enough
to make us feel we’d crawled out of the slime.

Yet, each small moment can seem short or long
subjectively; for which there’s no recourse.
Atoms turn out to be a baffling throng
of flavored quarks, of leptons, bosons, force.

Mathematicians’ golden rules may hold
the key to understanding what is what,
or so they say. With our ‘new lamps for old’,
we’ve lost the Genie, and it seems, the plot.

One thing we know, we don’t. Feel no dismay;
last moments last, and take our breath away.

*****