II. MOBILIZATION FOR LIFE Poem by Taja Kramberger

From a longer poem, ‘Mobilizations', in three parts


An eccentric, deserter and atheist,
seeking refuge in agronomy,
Goethe and the discipline of children. Whose life
tosses him to and fro on a mine field
like an unsaddled chess knight. Who depicts
the letter L: Lehrling, but makes no use
of the basic gears and never brakes.
Who reads Pigs Fodder, his feet in a cold bath - to
improve concentration -
and who hopes to discover a shelter in botanical books,
the ground beneath his feet,
but cannot find a coltsfoot leaf
big enough to cover his own shadow.

Who brought my mother on their first date a bouquet
of two ladles and then removed himself
to a distance of 800 km. Once on the field, he
changed the course of the bishop again,
directing him back towards the regal chess piece;
the one that can move painlessly
in all directions, at times simply with a glance
without a move, towards her
hiding within herself
the moves of all moves, watching over them.

And I: the outcome of a family vote
in February 1970; nobody imposed a veto and the embryo
freely grew into me,
so that today I can calmly look upon my path,
a trail, already longer than life, so I
can see your life
ahead of me, much longer than the path.

And so my father invested his
unfinished herbarium in me,
and my thoughts crammed between
the piles of books like flattened flowers
until, in my first collection,
all this vegetative erudition exploded
and all the blades, precisely ordered,
could once again occupy
their former volume.
And now I am faced with an endless
wasteland of flowers, words, willing and fresh,
contracting and expanding at my order
like the universe. What am I
to do with it, here,
in this twisted place,
cold-blooded.

And now in front of my eyes: an endless
featurless pampa
of common danglers, Vulpia myuros,
covered with an envious spawn of
amphibia.

Your diphase, alternating current
and the 1200 pages of frenzied notes,
gushing forth with the magnitude
of a hurricane spout. A siphonic
burden you have laid on
your children's shoulders, the way
a war selfishly lays its bodies
and its bloodied memory into
an impenetrable mythical ring and
buries it for the future generations
amid the pages of an earthly book, a large
unpublished hardback
with no corrections and
no editor.

Was God hidden amid chick-peas,
sunflower seeds and carrots,
in the mouths of dystrophic prisoners
on their way home?

Was God hidden in the deaf eardrums of rifles
the Gestapo prodded you with in Vienna,
when you lads were shovelling
sand inside the axes of the railroad composition?

Was God hidden in Jaroslav, an internment camp
from World War I, between the teeth of rats,
that, skipping across prisoners, surprisingly did not bite?

Mother's God or your non-God?
Both announced
in capital letters,
both, in an hour of need, puffed into darkness
without an answer,
both numb and frail
as if crouching in an enclosed barrel
of Mohojeva bolota.

It was neither the Russian front nor hunger, nor wine,
nor was it your studies, no -

nothing matters but the quality
of the affection -
in the end - that has carved the trace in mind
dove sta memoria -

it was my mother who mobilized
my father for life,
the gentle and unfaltering love
named Zorka.