TO THE GUILTY

Your pointless regret

doesn't raise the

dead, but at

least it

makes sure you

remember

what you

did & didn't.

30.06.2019

JUNE EVENING, WAITING FOR RAIN

The evening brings gloom

of rainclouds over the deep green

of the landscape; water

waiting to pour

over thirsting land -

and the lone spear of

light, impaling

air pregnant

with thunder to the soil.

The silence

grows louder.

30.06.2019

NOT A TRACE REMAINS

Today I have again

crossed the rushing black river

where my mind still sees the old bridge,

upstream, in disrepair as we

walked over it. Not a

trace remains, and

the new bridge haunts me with

my age; on it a faded plaque

tells the year of building:

1984. My past, collapsed down

in the cold, dark waters

where green slime covers rocks.

28.06.2019

THE PATH DIVERTED

In the sunlight of the late evening

I return, once again, through the old path;

but you are not there waiting,

and I am not coming home.

You are dead, and home is lost,

and the door opens to a tomb of days

gone since that night when it all

ended; the path diverted.

In the light of the summer night

the past lives beside the pale today;

beside but beyond a thin shroud

stronger than any wall of this crypt of mine.

Here I linger, a breathing ghost,

a spectre lost in time and space.

Here I remember, here I yearn

for what was on those uncherished years.

28.06.2019

TO MY LATE MOTHER ON MIDSUMMER'S DAY

It's the longest day of the year,

the zenith of summer,

and the bonfires lit

will burn on the tranquil

surfaces of the lakes.

The white nights of the summer

are in their height this day,

this long day full of memories

burning in the mind

which knows no calm.

It was yesterday that we lost you,

a yesterday ten years ago

and still yesterday,

forever yesterday

reflected on each day after.

The days shall grow shorter,

the white nights of summer

shall give way to the

white, short days of the winter

in their funeral shroud.

The year shall reach it's nadir

and still it will be yesterday

that we lost you,

and when the days shall grow again

it will be yesterday that we lost you.

Since we lost you, my mother,

the years have come and gone,

the years shall come and go

and it will always be yesterday

that we lost you, my mother.

22.06.2019

MOM

Ten years

and less than an hour,

and it feels

like less than an hour

when I left you

in that room,

unconscious

as you had been for days,

and back home,

almost immediately,

the phone call...

21.06.2019

RAIN AT MIDNIGHT

Rain at midnight,

beating the windows

the water from heavens

& the mind

beats itself with

a torrent of memories,

of nights of summer rain

when you stayed awake

listening to the sounds

of rain and breathing

from loved ones

who live no more.

20.06.2019

YOU

1

To ease

the pain

in your pierced heart

(as you call

your mind, the brain

giving way)

see yourself

in the world around,

from the cone

at your feet

to the dim

stars of summer above,

see yourself

in the wave

coming to the shore,

hear yourself

in the fading song

of nesting birds.

You are of this world,

of the escaping cosmos,

you are this

world and the womb

of the void carrying 

it through time.

Not an orphan,

but a parent

of the cone, the

star and the wave

and the song,

cosmos in its own mirror.

2

Like the seed

shall bring forth a tree,

the pain shall give way,

like the wave

shall reach the shore

and the lake shall calm,

like the song of the birds

shall fade in the summer night,

like the star shall disappear at

a hundred dawns

hiding in the boughs

of the tree from the cone.

17.06.2019

YOU ARE NOT AN INDIVIDUAL

You are not an individual,

you are a blood cell

in the veins of humanity.

You are not an individiual,

you are one firefly consciousness

of the universe.

You are not an individual,

on this wandering star alone

as the universe,

as the humanity,

you are born a thousand times

each moment,

as the humanity

you die a thousand times

each moment

on this wandering star,

another extension

of the universe which you are.

17.06.2019

WHERE GIANTS ONCE STOOD

Bright summer night,

mist hovering

where tall firs and pines

were felled;

a hundred years of

growth

towards the sky,

through the ocean

of air -

reaching for the

heaven, the evergreen

trees saplings

when the Great War

threw blood and

independence

over this soil.

Two hundred

prisoners-of-wars shot,

buried in mass graves

in this county alone.

Blood sacrifice

for the new White Order.

Now, mist

hovering

in the clear, bright

June night. Just

stumps

left of a hundred

years of climbing

towards the blue.

Perhaps

some

two hundred

of them,

like low

gravestones

enshrouded in

mist.

16.09.2019

EVEN THE GRIEF IS TOO LATE

My heart, burning to ashes

in the furnace of the ribcage,

how much you suffer now -

but mind, my mind in

sorrow drowning, think

of the pain of those

for whose your grief bleeds;

theirs is the silent darkness

devoid of thought, theirs

is the grave and the urn.

No libation of self-torment

can their shades evoke,

too late your conscience awoke.

For naught you drown

and burn, sinner.

13.06.-15.06.2019

JUNE NIGHT

Fog on the fallow fields

after the evening rain,

in the silence of the June night

abandoned houses rot

on roadsides, streetlights

stand as haloed saints

of a civilization leaving

coffin by coffin. A landscape

in decay, on both sides

of the skull observing.

15.06.2019

TO MY PARENTS

The old pain comes back, always new -

iron grip on my heart, pressure on my chest;

I can't breath - 

I can't live. You are

gone, you are dead, and I am lost.

Lost on this road

to nowhere; this purgatory

while alive, alive?

Alive, because I suffer.

The dead suffer

only in our minds,

where their pale second lives

are smothered, again and again.

13.06.2019

ON THE 90TH BIRTHDAY OF ANNE FRANK

1

On the 90th birthday of Anne Frank

think of two things

you human being,

you who stand for all humanity,

you who are its conscience:

2

That she could be still alive,

a great-grandmother perhaps;

could have written herself

beyond those years that now

define her to the world:

We have only what the

butterfly did just after

leaving the cocoon.

We never got to see it

transform into a falcon

soaring in the air.

3

That each day

somewhere in the world

an endangered child is writing,

perhaps with a pencil,

perhaps with a mobile phone

or a computer, her

or his story, a childhood slain

before the body might be -

a child in fear, embracing hope,

doing what Anne Frank

and many, many other children

in conflict zones have done

before and after she wrote

that slice of her life

into the pale immortality

print, myth and fame

give to the innocent slain.

It's a cry if not to the silent

multitudes of us who

could act, but won't,

then to the future to come.

4

Dear human, you

who stand for all humanity

like all of us do,

please act!

Let the children still living

in fear under bombs

and encircled by barbed-wire

become the future themselves.

Act, for her peers still living

could gain what she never

was given by this fallen humanity:

Decades of life, adulthood,

old age, to be a 90-year-old lady

looking back at those

long gone years of fear

when death hang over

every heartbeat.

Every moment that

becomes the past we

lose one of her peers

in some refugee camp

or bombed house

across the face of this

tormented planet. If

you feel sadness for her,

if you shed a tear for Anne Frank,

then shed more, for

every minute a light

goes out from a child's eyes

because we now,

like then,

didn't act until it was too late.

12.06.-13.06.2019

A LAMENT FOR A SINNER AND HIS SIN

Surely this has gone for too long,

this what they call 'life' -

a cavalcade of days in distress,

mistakes that end in funerals

which follow you from one

dreary season to another one in darkness,

evenings sitting with a cat

in an empty playground reading books

while mosquitoes buzz in the air.

Today it was Weber and a biography about Brodsky,

yesterday Grass and... I have forgotten

(if it wasn't Lowry and his Mexico

through a tourist's brief, drunken gaze)

just like I have forgotten, have forgotten

most of these last two years and five months

since that night when everything

was on balance and was shattered.

Forgot to be able to survive if

this is survival, this mummification while

still alive in a horror movie way

(you like them, my poor lost visiting star,

yet they scare you and you wanted,

but no more, for me to hold your hand

afterwards, afraid to go to sleep);

the pain that comes each moment of

waking into another pointless day,

the hour spent fighting with depression

before getting up, getting coffee

made and, back from the toilet, drank,

getting the computer open, books

perched on its side, medicine

for the crushing pain which the one

well-developed part of me, conscience, gives.

Forgot to survive, me the forgotten.

"They left you here

so that you would not be in their way,

they buried you alive, your family,

you will die alone" she says. Perhaps.

Perhaps hermits are made as much

as they choose their lot or "life",

that great charade, guides them

to their cave or anchorite cell.

Whoever closed the door and locked it,

whoever bricked the wall, here

I am like Julian of Norwich -

without the seekers outside the

cell where she slept in her own grave

atop the bones of her predecessors.

I am dying alone, with three cats,

and you, my Fata Morgana

whose fate I have stepped on,

crushing it. "I have so many dreams",

you said and each time

I remember, I have tears

in my eyes, and like a stone laying

heavy on my chest. But you, my

sad, doomed dreamchaser,

you say "You don't love me.

You don't care about me.

You care only about yourself.

Get away from me!"

So I will die alone.

But worse than to die alone

is to die with someone

who could have saved you, would

have wanted to save you

but didn't; one wrong person

to be with on that final day, one

who had three chances to save

you, but like Saint Peter the Apostle

denied Jesus three times, he

failed you three times, three times

he missed an opportunity

that would have seen you sitting

out in the early night air today,

drinking coffee in the light

of the northern summer night

with your dog on your side

in the terrace; you wouldn't

have many years to live,

in your age and condition,

but you would have had these,

you and your loyal dog on your side.

12.06.2019

A WISH

Let me sleep

a cold dream

of a mountain stream

frozen, until

the past is here again,

when the graves

are empty

and the dead breath

and ask from us,

"Where have you been?"

08.06.2019

04:00 a.m.

At four a.m.

drinking two or three hours old coffee

from an inherited mug

I watch pink clouds

through dark green foliage of trees

as lone car roars

through my memories -

so many of them, like random

photographs picked from albums

and thrown on a table, my

mind at this late hour of consciousness.

Each moment folding

to this one, where like an ancient

insect in Burmese amber

I drown beside a fallen feather,

broken.

08.06.2019

TIME AND THE HUMAN BEINGS

Time shall belong to man

- Dylan Thomas(1914-1953)

It's not time which belongs to man,

it is man who belongs to time

(and woman and child),

and time shall play

with him for a moment,

and then it shall crumble him

in its hard hand

and throw him away.

08.06.2019

A SONG FOR THE SPECIES

Ancient oceans roaring in our blood

we stand on eroded mountain ranges

sheltering the graves of aeons,

our flesh shaped by a billion births

and a billion deaths separating

us from the sea from which we came,

a million deaths and a million births

keeping us apart from the great forests

in which we first walked on two feet

on mighty branches, balancing

life and death with the abyss of space

opening under us, as now

an abyss of time gapes on all sides;

here we are, still stones in our hands,

still gazing at the stars at night

shining through the lights of our folly,

still dreaming, grasping up

from one element to another,

with individual lives falling away,

stages in the species' flight through time.

07.06.2019

WHY DO WE LIVE ON?

Life is too heavy a burden

to carry on days like these -

but death is nothing. In

the void that is death

the memories which torment us

would die with the consciousness

- and with the memories

those whose loss is the pain

which carves our mind apart

would die a second death.

We live to remember them

whose going to the emptiness

made life this unbearable grief.

In our sorrow part of them

still lingers, in our suffering.

05.06.2019

MIDDLE-AGE CRISIS

Sign of the middle-age more than the white beard

on my chin and cheeks,

or perhaps of early

onset of dementia: I am

reading the plays of Shakespeare

and enjoying them, no

longer rebelling against each page,

rushing to write with poisonous quills

diatribes against the Bard.

(Once those words, 'the Bard', made me

see bonfires of plays and sonnets.)

I am truly lost.

05.06.2019

THE UNHAPPY SPECIES

So much of their short lives

they spend making themselves

unhappy, human beings,

and the altruistic souls

they are, also others -

a human being crosses

all obstacles, goes

throught the proverbial gray stones

to keep himself lost & hopeless

and others miserable, his victims

and his tormentors,

for as he is given he gives.

05.06.2019

TO P

This June night, these

White Nights of summer hours,

dark like those

of autumn, here stand

black silhuettes against

darkest blue;

here we with words

and fears

dig graves for dreams.

There is a scent of the autumn

in the breeze that rustles

the boughs and the mind, of withering

and fading of life,

amidst the bursting life of June

lost in the darkness too great.

Part of the future that

was to be

shall not see the morning come.

Lesser beings will

face the rising disk of the Sun

with fainter hopes

and greater pain.

Here we give birth to them

from our skin.

04.06.2019

DUTCH GOLDEN AGE

Calvinist piety made the Dutch churches bare

and the bourgeois merchant fat and smug

in his ample black clothes on the canvas;

he had made himself the saint

of the new Protestant age

and as patron paid for his own adoration.

No longer he had to kneel

pious in one corner and pray

for some obscure martyr massacred

he barely knew where;

now the brush worked whole for him

- as long as the far-sailing

ships of East Indies and the Caribbean

didn't sink. Even when all was pre-ordained

fate still played dice.

01.06.2019

A LETTER TO FRANCOIS VILLON(1431-1463?)

You vanish from our view like a thief

out of a burgled house at night;

no clerk raised an alarm,

no dog of parchment barked;

you vanish, made your escape

- to the gallows, we presume.

We can't imagine you, Francois,

repenting and living to an old age

of fifty or sixty as some rural

parson or a city clerk;

we can't, we won't -

we have given you a role,

and a role comes with a last scene

to crown you with your tragic fate -

and what is a bad boy repented

but a disappointing bore to us?

Your life, Francois,

was a Brian de Palma movie:

In a long death scene it must end.

Somewhere you slowly turned

in the wind, rotting -

this fate we have assigned

to our thief, lost in the mist of time;

but perhaps it was an easier death

that came to you; in some

cheap tavern a knife

between ribs, or

feverish last days hallucinating

at a monastery infirmary,

a town hospital for the poor -

or perhaps the plague,

that came to punish the sins

of the wicked nations of Europe

again on the blessed year 1464,

covered you with boils

and took you to meet

the men you killed.

Perhaps that death

we, the adoring generations,

could accept -

even a priest on the death-bed,

if one could be found

or some saintly foolhardy Franciscan,

to hear your confession

and give you hope of Heaven

via the divine tortures of Purgatory.

That we could accept,

if some doubt could be cast,

whether you really repented,

or like Pascal thought

it wise to believe

and cast your religious dice

on the Catholic God.

As long as it was

cinematic enough

we can give you that,

de Montcorbier or Loges

or whatever your real name was.