Бесплатный фрагмент - At The Intersection Og Ligh and Words

An Introduction to Tanya Dean’s Poetry: Or, How to Navigate the Universe with a Bruised Heart and a Stubborn Smile

To approach the poetry of Tanya Dean is to be handed a beautifully, alarmingly detailed map of the human emotional landscape, where the continents are named “Longing,” the mountain ranges are “Resilience,” and the weather is notoriously unpredictable. It’s a terrain we all know, though we might not always admit to having gotten spectacularly lost there. These verses are not mere observations from a safe shore; they are dispatches from the very eye of the storm, written in ink that seems to be one part tears, one part starlight, and just a hint of defiant caffeine.

The journey begins, as all the best and most terrifying journeys do, with a declaration of faith. “I believe in you,” she insists, twice for good measure, as if trying to convince both the reader and some doubting part of her own soul. It’s the poetic equivalent of gearing up for an expedition while muttering, “Well, here goes nothing, and possibly everything.” What follows is a grand tour through life’s less glamorous holiday destinations: the soggy lowlands of Sacrifice, the gusty cliffs of Bad Luck, and the bewildering roundabouts of Existential Dread. Her advice for this trip? “Smile and do not try to be sad.” One can almost hear the wry, unspoken addendum: “or at least, try to look like you’re enjoying the view while your soul is quietly re-evaluating all its life choices.”

Dean is a master cartographer of inner conflict. She speaks of storms scattering dreams and souls falling off their hinges — domestic imagery for cosmic chaos, which is, let’s be honest, how most crises feel. One imagines her looking for the “rescue bridges” with the focused desperation of someone searching for a Wi-Fi signal in a remote cabin. Her philosophy is strangely comforting in its practicality: “We have to walk and don’t lose the drive.” Not a triumphant “We shall overcome!” but a gritty, slightly out-of-breath “We have to keep going, because the alternative is to sit down in this metaphorical mud, and it’s starting to rain again.”

The love poems are where the humour becomes most poignantly threadbare, revealing the profound ache beneath. “Tomorrow I will try to forget you again,” she announces, a project plan doomed from the start, like vowing to reorganize your attic during a hurricane. There’s a heartbreakingly bureaucratic approach to grief: “I will building a wall to hide with my pain… Throwing the key away.” The sheer administrative workload of heartbreak! The forms to fill in, the walls to construct, the keys to misplace. Yet, in the magnificent, illogical summit of it all, she concludes: “But anyway I’m choosing — Love.” It’s the emotional equivalent of ordering a lavish dessert after a truly disastrous meal, simply because one believes in the principle of joy.

Her work acknowledges the necessary, if absurd, defenses we build. “I have to build surviving walls,” she states, then immediately undermines the project in another poem: “I’ll get to you through any wall.” It seems the architecture of the heart is constantly under renovation, never quite meeting code, always having a secret door.

What saves this exploration from being a mere catalog of woes is the persistent, cheeky presence of light. It’s not a blinding Hollywood sunrise, but more a stubborn, self-generated glow. “Raise up your heart up to the sky,” she instructs, not to ask for a miracle, but to “ask for beauty.” It’s a subtle, brilliant shift. She’s not requesting divine intervention to remove the hurdles; she’s asking for the aesthetic sense to appreciate the dramatic shape of them as we stumble over. The promise is that “your thoughts will shine and will be wise,” which is a far better outcome than most self-help books offer.

In the end, Tanya Dean’s poetry is a chronicle of graceful, messy persistence. It’s about learning to fly and run while still nursing bruises from the last fall, about hearing the “life song” that “never ends” even when you’re desperately craving a moment of silence. She reminds us that the “pure kindness” and love are, in fact, inside us all along — which is excellent news, as it means we don’t have to go far to find them, though the journey to remember that fact is epic. To read her is to have a companion who says, “Yes, it’s terribly difficult and absurd, isn’t it? Now, take my hand. Let’s see what’s over the next hill. I believe in you.” And you almost, despite all better judgment, start to believe it too.

Siegfried herzog von Babenberg

Poetry

I believe in you

I believe in you

Even if sometime we don’t feel like living,

Life requires sacrifice and takes luck from us,

Smile and do not try to be sad, brows frowning.

Life always throwing hurdles at us

And the soul from the misery fell off its hinges

And our spirit weakens or falls

But there’s always a pass or rescue bridges.

If rain and snow whip through our life

And no one around to warm frozen hands

We have to walk and don’t lose the drive

Have to be strong and don’t bend.

The wind and the storm scatter our dreams

We knowing nothing, but feeling the essence

That nourishes soul, doesn’t let it to sleep

All our life we’re just learning the lessons.

Nothing is scary, except cold of our hearts,

Eyes made of ice and lying souls around

We, anyway, have to go trought our parts

Purity, Kindness and Love makes us proud

перевод: Таня Дин

Я в тебя верю

Я в тебя верю

Даже, если порой и не хочется жить,

А жизнь требует жертв и забирает удачу.

Даже, если хочется иногда поныть

Или паскудникам в морду дать сдачи.

Неисповедимы жизни пути

И мечты, порою раскидывает ветер и буря

Только ты продолжай идти

Улыбнись и не вздумай грустить, брови хмуря.

Если духом ослабнешь или упадёшь

Я плечо подставлю, даже, если сама слабею

Знаю, ты сильный и тебя не согнёшь

Все невзгоды переживём и любую потерю.

Если хлещут по жизни дожди и метель

И никто не согреет замёрзших рук

А душа от невзгод сорвалась с петель

Верь, изменится всё однажды, вдруг.

Оглянись и поймёшь, ты не один

Духи рода нам помогают, мать, отец..

Несмотря на лживые души вокруг и глаза изо льдин

Ничего не страшно, кроме холода наших сердец.

Надо жить, не тужить и шагать вперёд

Мы не знаем сколько ещё всего отмерено,

И не важно, что иногда не везёт,

Ты лишь знай, что я в тебя очень верю

Raise up your heart up to the sky

Raise up your heart up to the sky

And ask for beauty, not for cry.

All there haven, it is yours

To fill yourself with universe.

Will shown you the perfect light,

There harmony without fight.

Like rainbow, secrets will arise

Your thoughts will shine and will be wise

Will see mysterious, wonderful world,

All bright and warm, not dark and cold.

There pure kindness is in you,

Love always lives inside of you!

Перевод: Таня Дин

Я душу к небу обращу

Я душу к небу обращу

И громко сердцем прокричу:

Услышь меня! Я вся твоя!

Наполни вечностью меня.

Открой мне таинства твои

И звезд мерцающих огни.

Гармонией меня плени

И счастьем душу опьяни.

Таинственно-чудесных дум,

Как радугой, наполни ум.

И бесконечностью глубин

Ты ярко освети мой мир.

Меня наполни красотой

Вселенской, чистой добротой.

Любовью сердце озари

Жизнь невозможна без Любви!

The Real Love can be a whisper

Some say it’s only dreams and fake

Sometime it’s terrible mistake

Some thinks it is so far away,

Some see it near everyday

Some looking hard to find their own

Some lost believe, their hearts like stone

Some thinks it is exciting sex

Whom I believe? Believe myself!

It’s always delicate and fine

It’s ephemeral and fragile

It silently sleeps in your heart

No life without that magic part.

Nothing can blow it away on the air

If you open your heart it’s there

Quiet, vulnerable, gentle — listen!

The Real Love can be a whisper…

Stepping at the edge

We’re stepping at the edge,

Fighting with delusions in our heads

Doesn’t matter the look or age,

This life song never ends.

Step by step we go, frightened from the past

Can’t afford mistakes, games, lies,

We need to be fast.

Leave the past to the breeze,

Let the ashes fall,

Everything that’s broke,

Leave behind that all

Now’s the time to let it slide,

New way we should find

Learning to fly, learning to run,

No regrets the things we’ve done

Look up to the sky, not just the floor,

Find the answer — what all this for?

Tomorrow

Tomorrow I will try to forget you again

Till next time we meet

Not today as I’m feeling too much

After we’ve just made — Love

Tenderness to the inability to breathe

Still remember your love and kisses

Not much words or promises

Because

You may die any time…

And you don’t want any hurt from you to me

As you wishing me best in my life and be fine

I will cry…

I will building a wall to hide with my pain

I will healing my wounds, waiting for change

I will close my heart and suffer again

Throwing the key away…

The flow of desires will die

Sadness will sway in the wind..

No vibrations of music in me for a wile..

Wll be not any light in my soul..

The brilliant world will be faded in dark

Not any spark in my heart

Just a lull

As I am

Unable to change anything in you and life

And to go though it — very tough

But anyway I’m choosing — Love

Holding something we need,

It’s real life indeed

You have to decide, don’t ask me why

There are no abuse or force, but do it,

Before life passed by

Let it go or let it be.

With me or without me….

I took a little chance on fate

I took a little chance on fate

To see what real Love feels like

I have been kind without hate

I felt the taste of pure Light.

I have been hurt by someone’s words

Whom loved and lost, or never found

His words was burning me alive

He wasn’t kind or satisfied

I saw his dreams, I saw his soul

His heart was crying when alone

I saw cold ocean, angels fight

We know — wrong is never right.

I have been fallen on my knees

I’ve seen the bottom of the dark

It’s woke me up, it’s broke my heart,

It hurts, it’s tore my soul apart,

I feel no more. It is enough

Love is united — half and half

I will be back again on high

I will survive, I will be fine,

I have to learn to breathe again

I have to build surviving walls

I have to dry my weeping eyes

I’ll be busy, so darling, goodbye…

Unrealized

Snow. It captivates not merely with its whiteness, but with a kind of cold, primordial beauty that draws you into the very heart of a quiet, snowy fairy tale. And if you peer at a sunbeam on your palm, squinting, you can see an entire universe: not just the colors of the rainbow, but the very radiance of precious stones, born from nothing. Only a child’s soul is capable of discerning this absolute purity in the simple phenomena of life.

Experiencing a strange and inexplicable feeling that seized her every time she saw pure, untouched snow covering everything around with a cold and yet living shroud, Anna Sergeyevna often, with a quiet and painful reproach to herself, recalled that period of her early youth, almost childhood, when Leonid had appeared and just as tracelessly vanished from her life. She remembered him not with the lighthearted tenderness with which one usually recalls school infatuations, but with a deep, unquenched, and therefore eternally alive feeling, in which, as she now understood, lay all the unspoken truth of her first, purest love.

Leonid, the son of an engineer from the next street, was an unattractive boy if one considered his features from the standpoint of the accepted ideal. But even then, in those distant years, Anna Sergeyevna sensed that a person’s appeal lay not in the regularity of his lines, but in something else, far more important and elusive. In his broad, high-cheekboned face there was strength and simplicity, and in his gray, extraordinarily bright eyes there lurked an expression of such sincere, almost childlike directness and inner firmness that it involuntarily drew one to him and at the same time frightened. His gaze and the scarlet flush of embarrassment that flooded his cheeks when they found themselves close — shouted everything to her. About what was not yet, but already hung between them, thick and sweet like pre-storm air. He was stocky, well-built, and strong, slightly shorter than her, and this circumstance — this insignificant physical shortcoming — for some reason painfully offended her maiden pride, seeming an insurmountable barrier to that vague feeling of closeness she felt for him. She sensed in him that very moral support, that backbone upon which, as she dimly imagined, a woman’s life should rest, but upon which she — a proud, confused girl tangled in her own contradictions — did not dare and was even afraid to lean, as one fears something too great and real.

In summer, the children scattered to their dachas and the yard emptied, the lonely swings creaking plaintively. Swaying in the wind, they seemed to pine, calling for everyone to return and fill the surroundings with joyful children’s laughter. But in winter, the shared yard, deserted and dreary in summer, was transformed. It filled with shouts, laughter, the squeal of sled runners and the chime of ice crusts breaking off from felt boots. There was that special, incomparable joy of returning home with eyelashes frozen stiff with snow, with mittens turned to icy lumps, with a feeling of healthy fatigue in every limb. And there was play — the eternal, primal play of boys and girls, with chasing, catching, snowballs and tumbling into deep, soft snowdrifts, from which they would emerge, shaking themselves off and laughing. Leonid never took part in this rough-and-tumble when it concerned her. He stood apart, and his attentive, calm gaze, full of a kind of understanding and quiet joy, weighed on her more heavily than the most brazen shoves of the other boys. This gaze both attracted and repelled her. She felt that he saw right through her, saw all her petty girlish tricks, whims, and feigned coldness, and this made her feel awkward and eerie. She wanted simultaneously to run far away and to immediately return and make sure the gaze was still the same and still directed at her, and that this mute questioning, this quiet delight, had not disappeared. Her tremulous inner vulnerability, it seemed, was drawn to him against her will. In her, with her complex, reflective nature, the woman was already awakening — a woman craving and dreading true intimacy, and in him — a man calmly and confidently offering that intimacy, but not daring, by his innate honesty and respect for her freedom, to impose it. Yet they never once so much as touched fingertips. The cause was her constant inner detachment from those around her, even among familiar people, which was palpable and inspired timidity in those wishing to draw close.

Remembering that era now, Anna Sergeyevna clearly saw how her own character, her false shame and morbid pride, elevated by her into principles, systematically destroyed the happiness that was begging to be placed in her hands. She remembered how, catching sight of his figure under the window, she would deliberately slam the transom shut roughly, only to later, stealthily, peer through the gap in the curtains for a long time, her soul aching because he was still standing there, looking at her dark window. Her contradictory and independent nature always pushed her to do the opposite, as if she were afraid of breaking herself like a porcelain doll by taking a false step that would humiliate her in her own eyes. She was not ready to understand and accept this first chaste infatuation. And she rejected not only him, but his very name, Leonid. She found his name pompous and ridiculous, and this childish, absurd antipathy later grew, throughout her entire life, into an irrational, unconquerable aversion to all bearers of that name, as if the entire blame for her mistake back then was contained within it alone. Even many years later, when her grown daughter, suspecting nothing, wanted to name her firstborn Leonid, Anna Sergeyevna opposed it with such passionate, almost frantic force that the family yielded, and the boy was named Nikolai. She could explain this neither to herself nor to others, nor did she try, for she understood the utter unreasonableness of such a feeling, but she could do nothing with herself — so deeply and painfully had this long-ago, unresolved feeling taken root in her soul. The strange logic of women — unpredictable and inexplicable even to themselves.

The culmination of it all, the fateful moment that forever set the courses of their two lives in different directions, was his visit to her home. He came without warning, stood in the hallway, shifting from foot to foot nervously, but looking at her with that same direct, honest gaze.

“I’ve signed up for a club,” he said firmly, without the usual hesitations for his age. “Luge. It’s serious. Will you come with me? To train together.”

And in this simple, naive proposal, in that word “together,” lay, as she now understood, all his love, all the offering of his life, all his faithful and strong soul. That “together” resonated within her with such a sweet tremor! But then, in that moment, all her pride boiled up within her, all her fear of this simple and clear feeling, which was so unlike the vague ideals she had read about in novels. She found some absurd, offensive excuse and refused. Refused coldly, decisively, watching the light in his eyes slowly die, watching his tanned cheeks grow deathly pale. She had passed a sentence not on him, but on herself, on her future happiness, and deep down, she probably knew it even then.

Later, they grew up. The yard became empty for them. Fleeting meetings at school became rare and filled with silent, burdensome mutual understanding of all that had been and would never be again. They would only cast quick glances at each other and immediately look away, as if afraid of being caught.