Reading Romain Gary(1914-1980) At My Old Home

I sit on the red-painted floor in the now almost empty room

where I once, as a child afraid of the night, held my mother's warm hand

each night as I fell asleep. Now,

from a dusty book-shelf I pick up a book by Romain Gary,

one I never finished, and read how his mother - so proud of him -

embarrassed him before his air force comrades in 1939,

announcing  'You will be a second Guynemer!'

So lucky those of us, who still can be

embarrassed in public by loving mothers

bursting with their pride towards us,

the undeserving... It's evening, the shadows

gather, grow larger. The sea, harsh

like the reality we encounter after leaving the years

when our mothers could still protect us from suffering,

hits the coast at Big Sur. He has twenty-one years

to live, that son of a proud mother, who

once wore the air force leather jacket. On

that December day still

to come there was no proud mother
 to hold his hand as he faced
the night.

30.06.2017

Hinc illae lacrimae

On this quiet June evening of bird-song

and faded sunlight

I feel you close to me, all my

loved ones I have lost to time,

marooned in our own islands of space-time.

I now feel you all close to me,

your presence beside mine,

a memory of the unity we shared,

a promise of the unity we will share

as time shall release me from it's

forward rushing stream.

28.06.2017

Tempus edax rerum

Long since we, ridden of illusions of

life's vast horizons,

found the walls of our cell.

The years have come and the years have gone,

and we still rattle the bars of time's prison,

our only escape to eternity's mass grave.

27.06.2017

Vesper

The long rain has ended, the birds

are chirping and singing, hidden

in the green. I sit on the veranda, drinking

coffee as the mosquitoes gather like

the clouds in turmoil above. It's

evening; from the hidden road, the

rumble of traffic, the voice of civilization

muttering to itself. I let it all flow past.

27.06.2017

Exeunt omnes

Time is not a thief that steals the days,

it's the master that drives a young horse to the field

to plow it at the sunrise,

and brings an old back at sunset, after harvest;

time is the master that takes his shotgun,

goes out with the old horse, the old family dog

for the final walk, the worn hand caressing

the aged skin and fur. The final kind

words, to us.

27.06.2017

The True Cancer: The Fate Of Liu Xiaobo

Freedom of expression is the foundation of human rights, the source of humanity, and the mother of truth.

Liu Xiaobo: I Have No Enemies: My Final Statement(2009)

They worship him, those Occidental lands,

in their eloquent rhetoric

of pre-obituaries they are pouring out;

but not one trade deal will they cancel,

not one signature will be left unsigned

for his sake. Words are

cheap, cheap and plentiful. Actions,

actions carry a price that goes unpaid.

Cancer will eat him, there will be

the most modest of funerals,

and the Occident will claim him a martyr to democracy

and a hero of freedom, and then,

and then they will take their pens

and sign the trade deals and the business agreements,

there will be handshakes

and "The question of Liu Xiaobo was raised in private conversation

with the president, the prime minister, the minister..."

26.06.2017

In memory of the 146 burned to death in Pakistan today

An inferno, they describe it, like something Dante

wrote in his Divine Comedy.

You are poor, you

are needy - thus

you are condemned to be burned

alive with the

click of a cigarette lighter,

all 146 of you.

The oil is insured. No loss is suffered.

What the flames devour will be repaid.

The property is sacred.

25.06.2017

The morning that never comes (to us)

There will come a morning

quite ordinary remembered by a few,

when we no longer will make our

way to the kitchen to put on the coffee machine,

switch on the radio and the computer

to assure ourselves of the continued existence

of the world while we drifted

in Morpheus' bosom.

No quick attempt to capture on

pen to paper the misty fragments of sleep

vanishing in the light of sensory intake,

no little haiku written to carve

our presence to that day's fabric.

No, it will be the morning of frantic

relatives and neighbours ringing the mobile

and the bell, of yawning medics

at the end of a long shift exchanging

a few words with the police among

what we called home and beside

what remains of life: Those stubborn

cells refusing to believe that the
mind was us and nothing more.

25.06.2017

My soul is in the sky

Thunder, announcing the displeasure of forgotten gods,

creeps closer. The dark green,

under the turmoil of the clouds gray and blue of all hues,

showered by swift, hard rain,

come and gone. The

wind arrives to make

dance with the trees and bushes in their green foliage,

such harsh merriment. The slower,

longer rain begins, those

tears that arrive on their own, unannounced,

not knowing if its for us, or

those who have departed, left us

solitary under the wrath of thunder, wind and rain.

25.06.2017

Naked I came out of my mother's womb

How many lives lost on Midsummer night?

The divers in their wet suits

under cloudy skies, in dark waters

hit by droplets of rain

searching for flesh caressed by the

waters of the womb, 

which gave birth to all life

and now took it away.

25.06.2017

In the evening light, the tall grass growing wild

The grass in the front-yard has grown tall;

I haven't mowed it -

why reduce life, when we

have just lost you? Among the grass,

flowers have come and gone,

like slow heart-beats scattering

their seeds. Death

will claim all of this,

yet before the void

there will be abundant life, uncontrolled.

21.06.2017

Ad perpetuam rei memoriam

These empty days,

these hollow days

with their long hours

voids in time

leading nowhere,

the bare bones of existence

built on the bones

of loved ones

under the long, green grass.

A limbo, a purgatory of regret.

18.06.2017

AT THE THRESHOLD

Eheu fugaces labuntur anni

- Horace(65-8 BCE)

Let us seek solace from the past,

take the path to it's changing shadows under the canopy

of half-remembered trees,

the glittering water of a stream emerging,

carrying, polishing pebbles with it's swift movement.

We once kneeled beside it, feeling

it's cold water, but when and where

eludes us, a drifting leaf torn asunder.

The worn hands of time shaping

us as it shaped the landscape around us,

never-tiring, every result

good, complete, perishable;

leaving us with these flakes from the sculpting,

bright, faded.

13.06.2017

1793: Ode to revolutionary terror

Every royal is born

for that moment

when the rickety wagons

carrying them

at last clear their way

through the screaming mob

and the guillotine,

it's blade shining,

emerges; the stage

on which the last

act is to be played in.

08,06.2017

THE FALL OF ICARUS (1917)

In the serene blue

the flames eat the canvas and the wood

one last movement of the stick

the land of mud and trenches becomes the sky above

undo the belt

into the blue

away from the burning star

Icarus falls

a moment of awe

he feels like he flies on his own with wings on his back

a moment in the blue

weeks and months

one more crushed body

rotting sinking in to the mud between the trenches of ant-men

08.06.2017