THE RENEWING OF THE WORLD

1

I know that when I am gone,

and become dust with your bones and ash,

the summer Sun will shine as bright as then,

snows shall glitter as scattered diamonds

under the glowing winter Moon, and

rainbows shall arch across the skies

when all smells fresh after spring rain.

I know that, but I also bitterly know

that after you went, the pale Sun

has never shined as bright,

the snowfields have been dim under a lesser Moon

and no rainbow has crossed the sky

when the cold, hard rain has stopped falling

and I have smelled decay in the air.

2

The world awaits its renewal

on the day after the impaired senses

and the despairing mind

have found what they shall call peace

when they encase the remains in the soil.

The Sun shall shine bright,

rain shall fall and the grass growing

shall smell good to passer-by's,

and the snow shall glitter when the

winter Moon drowns the stars,

but I, I shall not have

back what is now achingly gone,

I shall have not peace in the grave,

for I shall not be.

11.08.2020

MONTE CRISTO

How many hours have I been

outside this summer? Not

many. I am separated from the

yellow light shifting,

wave-like, across green foliage,

and bright grass, moist from dew,

by these prison walls of my own

actions, built by my own bumbling

hands with stubborn

and fatal inadequacy. In

this foul-aired darkness I

am buried until red and brown

and pale yellow fall the leaves.

11.08.2020

AFTER THE FALLEN TREE WAS CLEARED FROM THE ROAD

In the bright light of

the October morning,

the warm blue sky drawn

over the storm-wrecked landscape

fails to cast away

the chill of autumn.

03.10.2015-11.08.2020

AT THE END OF THE LONG DAY

At the end

of the long day

the Sun, 

low, burns

the treetops,

the last light

almost reaching

my overgrown yard.

21.07.2013-09.08.2020

LIFE IS A GRIEF

Life is a grief

which breaks us

piece by piece,

with endless patience,

until nothing

is left.

09.08.2020

NRA

Some people love human beings,

some people love guns,

guns that end the lives

of loved human beings.

03.08.2020

QWERTY

An early

May morning,

my greasy hair itches

as I sit here,

typing with two

fat fingers

moving upon

the keyboard,

smelling coffee

being brewed,

and I contemplate

the action needed

to be able to drink

some of it.

24.05.2014-03.08.2020

AT PEACE

A calm, warm night of June,

alive with the sounds of birds,

I write this beside an open window,

letting my mind merge with

the sights, sounds and smells

of the summer night

I am at peace,

finally at a moment of peace

and

I could let

this moment go and on,

live my whole remaining life

frozen in this one moment

of peace,

when everything feels right

and I'm not hurting.

26.06.2013

REST BEFORE RISING AS MOUNTAINS

Life should be

a rest from death,

from the heavy soil

crushing us to dust,

scattering our atoms

and throwing them up

in mountain ranges

and beating wings

soaring above

with lungs breathing

us in, one

air molecule

after another.

01.08.2020

FOLDED LIGHT

Somehow,

after awakening to the soft light

of five am, slept again

to the fuller, deeper light

of nine am, hours

scattered upon dreamless slumber

that might have been death

if not for resurrection

to this plane of bitter heartbreak,

full of echoes of doppelgänger

light from gone years

shimmering in melancholy.

01.08.2020

FIRST POT OF COFFEE

Morning has dawned

when I make the day's first pot of coffee

as the cats meow beside their

trays still holding

last evening's food;

morning has dawned,

and I am listening to yesterday's news

of craft to Mars and Earthly turmoil,

waiting for the coffee to drip

as light dances on the wall,

late messages from a Summer

that has passed me by,

inside these walls where I wait

for days as dark as the

black coffee I now drink.

31.07.2020

THE WICKED PRIME PRIME MINISTER OF OZ

God tells me to do

terrible things,

and who am I -

a devout

family man,

to say no?

So, your Will be done,

on Earth as it is in Heaven,

For the kingdom and the power

and the glory are yours forever,

Rupert. Amen.

25.07.2020

WE CAN'T AVOID IT

We want the

cherished dead to live on

in the young,

emerging in their features,

gestures

and words,

not just continuing

a family,

and a memory 

of a life,

but the life itself

that was interrupted,

frozen in time

at a moment

we call death.

20.07.2020

#Poem #Poems #Poetry #Verse

SURFACING

The day passed

in sleep, dreamless

abyss

releasing its grip,

allowing to surface

once more

into tired, exhausted

consciousness on

the dead calm

surface of reality,

trapped like a fly

between two window-panes.

18.-19.07.2020

THE PRISON OF THE MIND

How bitter

this prison

built from

life with

our own

hands is

to inhabit.

Caged denizen

of our own

edifice, condemned

by our own

deeds and

the sentence

we gave:

Life,

to be wasted

as a jail

for its builder,

who still

cherishes as

the greatest treasure

the key

to the unlocked door.

18.-19.07.2020

AMY LOWELL(1874-1925)

If only you would have been a man,

an obese, rather ugly man,

loving women, 

then it would have been all-right;

your status as a major poet

would not have suffered -

but, alas! You were a

woman, and a middle-aged,

overweight one,

and all the obese,

rather ugly men

could not forgive you

that you were a lesbian

of the kind

their friends wouldn't paint

cavorting nude and pink

beside some

Arcadian stream.

19.07.2020

THE NIGHT WIND

The night wind

awakes memories

of autumns from
long gone years,

but the birds that
chatter in the gloom

only speak of the summer

that has come.

I choose the

memories, let them come

like high tide

over sorrows.

24.05.2013-18.07.2013

#Poem #Poems #Poetry #Verse

HOW EASILY

How easily we harm

people, the loved

people who

are all we are, 

even when trying

to help.

Ignore

their plight,

and they die

through your selfishness;

try to help

and your clumsy,

misguided attempt

dooms them.

Either way,

you send them

away into the sunless

death, in the airless

void, the oblivion

of thought and being.

You, to all you

loved and cared about,

deadly.

17.07.2020

coming to us all

it could end

just now

suddenly

and not

have time

to realize

is as terrifying

as to know

and awake

to weeks

of remembering

that death

is coming

and of course

it is

to us all

17.07.2020

THE WORDS THAT ENDURE

Letters on tablets of clay,

scribbled on shards of pottery

in cuneiform and hieroglyphs,

will endure with their sentiments

past the ephemeral existence

of all our emails and text messages,

and with them, some echo

of their writers will reach

past us to generations in far

future to whom we shall be silent.

17.07.2020

ALCIBIADES

When the house is on fire,

and the way to the Persians

is blocked by the

armed men waiting outside,

listen to the roar of the flames,

draw your dagger and seek

your death in swift shafts.

16.07.2020

A PHILOSOPHER CAN NEVER ADMIT BEING IN WRONG

When the Athenians had sentenced him to death,

the astronomer Anaxagoras escaped to Lampsacus;

the nature of the Sun and the Moon

were not reason enough to die for.

Better to live, teach

and see them sail the great void.

The material things of the cosmos

have reality beyond the human arguments

and need no human sacrifices

to confirm their existence,

unlike what exists solely

in the thoughts of human beings.

When the Athenians turned their condemning

gaze on Socrates a generation later,

he stayed to drink hemlock and die;

preferring martyrdom for debating

on some foreign agora and

allowing the Athenians think they had won.

16.07.2020

TO THE END OF EVERYTHING

At the beginning

is the birth

of the end,

and at the end

is just

the end

of everything

that came

between

the first cry

and the last

breath.

16.07.2020

THE HANDS THAT HOLD THE OIL LAMP

When archaeologists opened

the tomb of an Etruscan princess

in ancient Tarquinia's necropolis,

her skeleton lay among princely goods

and remains of a funeral feast,

but they soon looked past all the glories of the lost

and were amazed by a little oil lamp

that had been hanging on the tomb wall

for two thousand six hundred years...

When the kings of Rome ruled, it hang there,

when Rome fell to the Celts it hang there,

when Rome burned Carthage it hang there,

when Caesar laid in a pool of blood it hang there,

when Nero watched Rome to burn it hang there,

when Constantine won on Milvian Bridge it hang there,

when Alaric sacked Rome it hang there,

all through the dark ages and the renaissance

it hang there as the popes came, schemed,

went to their graves and got their sainthoods,

through the conquests of Napoleon

and Garibaldi it hang there,

the petty Savoy kings

and the pompous fascists

and the corrupt politicians came,

schemed with the Mafia,

molested underage girls,

and got killed, dethroned,

or slapped on the wrist,

and still it hang there

until the tomb door was opened

and a human hand took it,

just like a human hand

had put it there

and all those twenty-six centuries

were like one evening and one morning

whose light now danced

on the little oil lamp

and no one could see a difference

between those two hands...

24.09.2013-15.07.2020

Jii

above the town

and the frozen lake

the bright

fearless young eyes

of my niece

look far with curiosity

28.02.2014

THE PEERS OF THE GODS

The gods have always

been on the side

of the rich and the powerful,

and why not?

How many poor and weak

gods

have you

worshipped?

13.07.2020

BEYOND OZYMANDIAS

Grim irony is weaved through human history,

pulling down the mighty dead

to sinkholes among the living poor:

The hieroglyphs in the memorial chapel of Mentuhotep II

(2008-1957 BCE) in Abydos,

praising the pharaoh

who united the Two Lands

after two centuries of strife,

and brought forth three centuries of prosperity,

being eroded by waste

from a leaking sewage tank

built in 1935.

12.07.2020

SHEPSESKARE

Even the least of those

ruling over the suffering masses

has a name echoing through millennia,

a name without a face or activities

to boast about, just

a name on damaged lists of kings

and

the meagre remains of a pyramid

barely begun; yet

great minds struggle to give

reality to the name -

an usurping uncle

or

an orphaned infant dying

on his mother's breast?

Thus a few months on the throne

indeed grant immortality

as the great masses

with their toil-filled days

are but dust and sand.

08.07.2020

PAIN IS THE ONLY PLACE TO LIVE NOW

In the last moment

we will yearn for the pain

that life is

now, has been through cascading

years of grief and regret.

We dress in sorrow

and hastily leave

for the exit,

only to realize

that life reduced

and weaved through with agony

is still existence

outside the erasing gates

of oblivion. Beyond

the pain lies nothing.

05.07.2020

EVEN WHEN WE WRITE POEMS ABOUT IT

Life is a denial of death

in action, in every breath

taken, in each heartbeat felt,

in each hopeful thought cast

towards future time

we deny the inevitability ´

and the reality of our own end,

as long as possible

postponing mortality

beyond the horizon of thought.

Life is about holding

into existence so tightly

that nothing else

seems possible

than us going on,

going on forever.

Until death.

14.05.2013-04.07.2020

OF BEAUTY

The most beautiful women

never lived -

look in vain for the grave

of Ireland's Mary Hynes,

sung by the blind -

or were wreathed in beauty

by power and charm,

like the last Cleopatra,

bitten by

the snakes of Rome.

04.07.2020

EVEN OUR GRIEF IS MORTAL

That human beings

are mortal

is the lesser sorrow;

a bitter shadow over

our days, and grief

weaved through them -

yet that the memory

of our existence

is as mortal

is the greater sorrow,

but time takes even this

and turns it dust.

30.06.2020-26.02.2020

LAST DAY OF JUNE

Cold rain

and already

this unlived

summer feels

over,

brooks flowing

through

the mind with memories

of autumns

holding you.

30.06.2020

NOW WAIT FOR THE END

Our brief time

now spent

lamenting what was lost;

what remains

is crumbling

away, for those past

days hold more

in memories than these

thinner, lesser days flowing

past, fit only for regret

and sorrow.

30.06.2020

THE FRIEND OF PYRRHUS

There are two bad times

to tell ill news

to the preaning powers

of the earth:

When the worst has

yet to come, and

when the ruin has spread

its carrion wings.

Speak of ill times to come,

or tell how the fall

could have been avoided,

and they grab their spears.

26.06.2020

THE END OF THE ROAD

Here, in the

blazing Sun

we still

live the illusion

that life

is just waiting

to truly 

begin;

that this

is the evening

is a travesty

even to

our weary mind.

Is it always

thus? You

beloved

who left -

was it

like this

to you,

when the

Sun caressed

your days

that then

had no end?

Where we

see the end,

did you see

years blooming?

26.06.2020

A SUMMER DAY

It's a hot day out there

in the blazing June,

but, bless me for my sins,

it's hotter in here

in the brown matter

inside my skull,

waiting to become

earth and dust and reborn stars.

It's a hot day out there,

in the green and blue

flowing away in time,

but it's hotter in here

in the brown matter

inside my skull,

fearing to become

earth and dust and dead stars.

16.06.2020

WHILE LISTENING AN ONLINE LECTURE ABOUT THE ENTRADA OF 378 CE IN TIKAL

I'm translating poems by an author

who I hate because

he's a successful elitist

from a successful elite family

whose all family members

were/are successful elitists,

either actors, journalists or authors,

and I would really

like to throw

his frail, aged frame

under some bulldozer

or something.

14.06.2020

BEYOND THESE WALLS

Behind the curtains

the summer flows past

me, a crumbling

rock, in a slow flowing

river near its delta,

hearing the sound

of the tide rising,

falling, unseen.

14.06.2020

THE RIVER REMAINS THE SAME

The river, Heraclitus,

doesn't change.

All the change

is on the riverbanks.

The cries of newborns

turning into laments

for their death

in old age.

The spires raised

wrecked come

to embrace

the soil.

The river

is always the same.

The people

and their monuments

come and

crumble to dust.

This, Heraclitus,

is history:

The landscape,

flowing in geological

is frozen

in historical time.

14.06.2020

UNTIL THE FINAL DAY

Until the final day

comes cold and gray

I shall remember

and regret,

and find no peace.

Until the final day

comes to close my eyes

and I shall think

no more thoughts

I shall remember

and regret.

Until the final day

comes in blistering heat

I shall remember

and regret,

and find no peace.

Until the final day

comes and all this

what remains of life

shall end in the void

I shall remember

and regret,

and find no peace.

Until the final day

I shall remember

and regret,

but after the final day

has come

I shall not remember

and I shall not

regret no more.

Until the final day

comes as diamonds

sparkle in the snow

I shall remember

and regret,

and find no peace.

Until the final day

I shall remember

and regret,

but on the final day

all I remember

and all I regret

will pass from the world.

14.06.2020

ALL THE LOVELY PEOPLE IN OUR MEMORIES

The past is dead, and all

the lovely people in our memories

who still come and talk to us

in our dreams

are but fragments in our mind,

which in sleep and woken thought

we resurrect to ease the pain,

the pain of loss

that shall pass when we too

will be but lingering shards

from long gone days

in the swirling thoughts

of doomed men and women.

14.06.2020