In Memoria Tenere

Cold, crisp day

milk-gray sky

sitting outside

much of snow gone

reading a book of poetry by

Joanne Kyger

I never got far before

dog sitting beside me

running around

joyful

Japan, India and Ithaca

weaved with Paolo Uccello

and Iliad

all one on this planet

even this beginning of a tooth-ache

the rusted bike beside the shed

that I used almost thirty years ago

Reagan and Gorbachev

and Nemtsov an unknown young man,

not "the man who could have been king"

(The Daily Torygraph)

on the morgue with four bullets in his back

"one for each child he leaves behind)

(Garry Kasparov)

taken by the Moloch's mouth of history

erased from that forever flowing "now"

tried to count the age of the

tree on whose stump I sit on

gave up but hundred years or so

and now that life all open

the slow growth of the 1920s

the fast growth of the post-war years

now felled

and paper in someone's hands

poetry I hope

that takes an emotional knife

and sticks it deep and twists

for all we have lost

we dying cells of the living Earth

28.02.2015

You have but a few seeds,

the season is late

and time is rare.

Plant them well.

Allow them a chance to flower.

Nothing else can be asked. 

27.02.2015

 What Matters

You don't matter, human being,

but what you do and don't do matters

because the effect

will spread down the ages.

You will shape history,

by every act towards others,

sending ripples in time forth

and this, human being,

this makes you responsible

for deeds beyond your lifetime,

for whole humanity

in the distant future.

Forgotten, dust and ash and soil,

you have steered humanity's fate.

No one will remember you,

but all will be touched by you.

27.02.2015

A Story From the Late Medieval Netherlands

To get a job for his boy

William de la Marck

got a bishop killed

and had his own head chopped off.

His boy missed the job,

all that blood for naught

until a nephew

got the mitre to display.

The Wild Boar of the Ardennes

forgot all you needed

was to ask

and pay what was demanded.

25.02.2015

Every birth is a big bang,

every death

the heath death

of a private universe.

25.02.2015

Nothing more magical

than being able to think,

to breath -

to be alive.

25.02.2015

You know that you are free

when others around you are free,

when those you identify with are free

and when those you disagree with are free.

22.02.2015

Three old Tibetan monks walking with canes

yellow and red and wrinkled and bent in the sun

smiling and one could think it's enlightenment

that secret shared in smile

but it could be the winter sun

harsh and blazing and cold

the end of the road the end of the small laboured steps

through all the dust in the world

all the chains being opened

as the blue of the sky and the lakes and the glaciers

come and embrace the fading mind

22.02.2015

Syria, today

 

Refugees frozen to death,

children burned and buried by barrel bombs,

youths headless and crucified

left to their deaths,

the screams of the living echoing

but a convoy of Turkish tanks

now making it's way

to save the tomb of an Ottoman sultan,

so that at least one dead

may rest in peace in an old grave. 

22.02.2015

The sins of the parents

are not for the children to bear

nor to repeat.

To repeat is to choose

a fate known,

that much free will is given.

Enough to turn back,

take the path

to personal errors.

22.02.2015

The physicists say to us

there is no such thing as time,

it doesn't exist

but what could hurt us

more than time

and it's passing?

No use to say to a prisoner

that the walls of the prison

don't exist

as long as to the prisoner

they are there,

unbreakable.

19.02.2015

Every human being

has a responsibility

of the whole humanity.

16.02.2015

A Fairy Tale

Bring me the head of Houllebecq

and heart and lungs too

let's make a soup of them

and feed some angry mouths

that now are fed with his words

15.02.2015

Above the forest gone

felled

entombed in snow

bright Venus

in the last light of the day

in the night's descending darkness

08.02.2015

whatever path

you take in life

they all end in

cul-de-sac

08.02.2015

The days that remain

ash and dust,

ash and dust

for wind

to blow away,

for wind to blow away

when finally sleep

closes my eyes.

05.02.2015