In the cold decayed
heart of these lands
I saw eyes.
Everyone was there with their voice
and their body's pose.
We know someone best while making love,
when we corrode our hearts together.
Growing heavy, our body
wakes us in the night.
Houses with courtyards are like graves.
Childhood is a sleep, long-lasting.
And a yearning to touch,
a yearning drags us towards death.
I tested myself in every body,
I abandoned myself in every city.
I took the skies of countries to my heart
and when I saw the emptiness of my heart,
I said, it's time to go.
Inside the mouldering robes of ceremony
roots sway on the hanger.
Even if we drop fire in the sea
it will burn for ever,
it burns, a gift of desolation to the dark.
Perhaps history is a mistake says the poet
mankind's a mistake says god.
Much later,
in a future corrupt as the heart of these lands,
mankind's a mistake says god,
I'm here to correct it
but too late.
The wave of red lifeless water,
the road followed at night,
the poor earth strewn with travellers,
the white swaying shrouds,
ceremonial robes.
The only thing needed for a race
is the horse's mane.
This is the truth,
now we are here
rotted away in a rut.
God must not see the letters of my script.
Mankind's a mistake, he keeps saying.
And to correct his mistake
he gives sorrow,
only sorrow.
February 1997 Berlin
© translated by Ruth Christie
...
In its loneliness the nightsky
thought,
Why these stars?
...
All the red stones on earth are smeared
with blood of the god.
And that's why red stones
teach our childhood.
When we are children, the god
walks beside us.
He touches our ear-rings
and necklace.
He enters and hides in our shiny shoes
and the folds of our childish ribbon.
I must buy a flame-red dress and bed,
a red ring
and lamp.
There must come a time
when the mother's time begins and ends.
The blood that knows how to wait,
also knows how to be a stone.
To be in the world is pain -
this I have learned.
Red darkness
blue darkness
and the beginning,
the meaning of these must be
that they never abandon us,
our mother and our god.
© translated by Ruth Christie
...
reets etched on the earth with a sharp sword,
narrow, no meeting points.
Traces of blood, life leaking away.
...
So we died.
We slipped away out of darkness.
Beech trees saw us
...
For thousands of years I lay dead, turned to ice in that lake.
You woke me.
I woke and found my sleep in the mist of a forest blighted with fire.
...
Listen and look, mountains rise into being.
Underground rivers shrink
to sluggish inner blood.
...
When I came to you
I was going to open my wings
over that deserted city
...
Cover me up.
Let me change my shell,
like day, like birds of the morning.
While a black rain falls.
© translated by Ruth Christie
...
I
You chose your exile among rainswept mountains.
Where you lingered last night
was the home of the patient god
...