The Daughter I Never Had
I see her now and then, most recently
Below Munich’s famous clock belfry.
She had the same Kirghiz eyes with
The same arresting blue-grey tint,
The same impish way of placing
Her defiant hands on her hips.
The same luminous, wry,
Fresh apple blossom smile
I would never fail to recognize.
The same born tomboy’s disgust
For her blue and white checked
School jumper and collared blouse.
Pushing away a scolding hand
And vehemently objecting to
Her mother’s gentle reprimand,
Straddling her pedal bike
And arching her head backwards,
Her snub nose pointing to the sky,
She rolled her blue-grey eyes
And swished her blonde locks like
A wild pony’s mane, from side to side.
…..
This poem is from the book Life is Memory/Memory is Life: New Poems and Translations by Gregory Maertz (Finishing Line Press), and can be found at https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/life-is-memory-memory-is-life-new-poems-and-translations-by-gregory-maertz/
Gregory Maertz is a professor of English at St. John’s University in New York City. Educated at Northwestern, Harvard, and the University of Heidelberg, he developed expertise in British and German nineteenth-century poetry, philosophy, and prose fiction as well as German visual art from the 1920s through the 1950s. An immersion in the German language and culture has been central to Maertz’s academic career, resulting in the publication of several books and many articles. Maertz has also lent a hand in organizing major international art exhibitions around the controversial theme of cultural production in Nazi Germany. The decision to begin translating classic German poems—by Goethe, Rilke, Hofmannsthal, and others—was inspired by a desire to return to the literary enthusiasms of his youth. The inclusion here of fictional or pseudotranslations from imagined German, Ancient Greek, and Hawaiian sources represents an experiment in literary and historical speculation. Maertz’s new collection was written at his home in Griggstown, New Jersey following visits to Honolulu, the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides, Cambridge, Massachusetts, the village of Obereggen in the South Tyrol, and Munich. Others were inspired by his travels throughout Europe and a long residency in Heidelberg during his student days. Formally in dialogue with traditional poetic genres like the sonnet and the ballad, Maertz’s new poems adapt these forms to commemorate deeply personal experiences and feelings. Maertz’s first book of poems, The Charisma of Animals (2023), may be purchased from Finishinglinepress.com and his other books are available on his Amazon author’s page.
The Paddock Review 