Sailor's All Poem by Uwe Kolbe

And again a love song
from the sidelines of catastrophes
(was it terrorist murder?
inundation, famine
or simply
a stock-market slump?)
We had learnt of different things,
been promised other
in one of our former lives
under sail with hope
in the era of industrialisation,
in the Atomic Age,
in this that and the other times.
But what stays
is a love song,
a little insistent song —
almost nothing.

English translation by Mick Standen & Jo Tudor