I'll just read two more poems, but one of them
is kind of long.
The good thing about it is that when I finish the poem,
you'll all be fluent in Esperanto.
I wrote this when I was living abroad
in a country where I didn't speak the language
and I didn't have any friends so I became obsessed, naturally,
with Esperanto.
This is the longer one.
"Fundamentals of Esperanto."
One-- the grammatical rules of this language
can be learned in one sitting.
Nouns have no gender and end in "o."
The plural terminates in O-J, pronounced "oy,"
and the accusative, O-N--
plural, "oin."
Amiko, friend.
Amikoj, friends.
Amikon, and Amikojn, accusative friend and friends.
Adjectives end in "a" and take plural and accusative endings
to agree with things.
Ma Amiko is my friend.
All verbs are regular, and have only one form
for each tense or mood.
They are not altered for person or number.
Mi havas bonajn amikoyn is simply
to say I have good friends.
Adverbs end in "e."
La bonaj amiko estas ie.
The good friend is here.
Two-- a new book appears in Esperanto every week.
Radio stations in Europe, the United States, China, Russia,
and Brazil broadcast in Esperanto,
as does Vatican Radio.
In 1959, UNESCO declared the International Federation
of Esperanto speakers to be in accord with its mission
and granted this body consultative status.
The youth branch of the International Federation
of Esperanto speakers, UTA, has offices
in 80 different countries and organizes social events
where young people curious about the movement
may dance to recordings by Esperanto artists,
enjoy complimentary soft drinks, and take
home Esperanto versions of major literary works,
including the Old Testament and A Midsummer Night's Dream.
William Shatner's first feature-length vehicle
was a horror film shot entirely in Esperanto.
Esperanto is among the languages currently
sailing into deep space onboard the Voyager spacecraft.
Three-- Esperanto is an artificial language
constructed in 1887 by L.L. Zamenhof, a Polish oculist.
I first came across Fundamento Esperanto,
the text which introduced the system to the world,
as I traveled abroad following a somewhat
difficult period in my life.
It was twilight and snowing on the railway platform
just outside Warsaw where I'd missed my connection.
A man in a crumpled tracksuit and dark glasses
pushed a cart piled high with ripped and weathered volumes--
sex manuals, detective stories, yellowing musical scores
and outdated physics textbooks, old copies of Life, new smut,
an atlas translated, a grammar, The Mirror, Soviet-bloc comics,
a guide to the rivers and mountains, thesauri,
inscrutable musical scores and mimeographed physics books,
defective stories, obsolete sex manuals--
one of which caught my notice.
Doctor Esperanto, Zamenhof's pen name,
translates as He Who Hopes.
And since I had time, I traded my used Leaves of Grass
for a copy.
Four-- Mi amas vin, bela amiko.
I'm afraid I'll never be lonely enough.
There's a man from Quebec in my head,
a friend to the purple martins.
Purple martins are the Cadillac of swallows.
All purple martins are dying, or dead.
Brain scans of grown purple martins
suggests these creatures feel the same levels
of doubt and bliss as an eight-year-old
girl in captivity.
While driving home from the brewery
one night, this man from Quebec heard a radio program
about purple martins and the next day
he set out to build them a house in his own backyard.
I've never built anything, let alone a house,
not to mention a home for somebody else.
I've never unrolled a blueprint onto a workbench, sunk a post.
I sent the neighbor's kid pedaling off
to the store for a bag full of nails.
Never waited 10 years for a swallow.
Never put in aluminum floors to smooth over the waiting.
Never piped sugar water through colored tubes
to each empty nest lined with newspaper,
shredded with strong, tired hands.
Never dismantled the entire affair
and put it back together again.
Still no swallows.
I never installed the big light that stays on through the night
to keep owls away.
Never installed lesser lights.
Never rested on Sunday with a beer on the deck,
surveying what I had done and what yet remained to be done,
listening to Styx while the neighbor
kids ran through my sprinklers.
I've never collapsed in abandon, never prayed.
But enough about purple martins.
Five-- as we speak, Esperanto is being corrupted
by upstart languages such as Klingon, Interlingua,
Java, and various cryptophasic tongues.
Our only hope of reversing this trend
is to write the Esperanto epic.
Through its grandeur and homegrown humility,
it will spur men to freeze the mutating patois
so the children of our children's children
may dwell in this song and find comfort in its true texture
and frame.
It's worth a try.
As I imagine it, it ends in the middle of things.
Every line of the work is a first and a last line,
and this is the spring of its action.
Of course there's a journey, and inside that journey,
an implicit voyage through the underworld.
There's a bridge made of boats.
A carp stuffed with flowers.
A comic dispute among sweetmeat vendors.
A digression on shadows.
Men clapping in fields to scare away crows.
An unending list of warships--
The Unternehmen, The Impreza, The Muyarchi, Viec Lam,
The Przedsiebiorstwo, The Indarka, The Enterprise,
L'Entreprise, Entrepreno.
One could go on but by now, all the characters
have turned into swallows and bank as one flock in the sky--
that is, all except one.
That's how we finally learn who the hero was all along.
Weary and old, he sits on a rock and watches his friends
fly one by one straight out of the song,
then turns back to the journey they all began long ago,
keeping the river to his right.