Light
Viewers, listeners and readers,
you are present on the day of wisdom,
before you Plato is seated on the throne
of the State,
Shakespeare rhymes with Hamlet on the wall,
Goethe christens his devil Mephistopheles,
Sophocles weeps at Antigone’s birth,
Pushkin challenges the Captain’s second daughter
to a duel,
Mozart using a lexicon studies the word note,
Camus encounters the Outsider in himself...
Viewers, listeners and readers,
around all these acquaintances of ours,
immortal mortals and mortal immortals
who live and die by their own and others’ wills
please resurrect the applause
of the public in front of all the microphones
and fraudulent charts...
Viewers, listeners and readers,
literate and illiterate alike,
teachers, professors, deans,
secret agents, spies and generals
you are the living participants
in the greatest sensation,
you can see for yourselves
that everywhere the halls are packed -
in cities, on mountains, on oceans,
and the cosmos has hired out its auditoriums -
the halls of speech, of laughter and of ridicule,
all the halls on the sun are packed,
and all the halls in every constellation too,
every star has sent its representatives,
chroniclers, reporters, correspondents,
every black hole has sent its representatives
only the meteors will be in the role of observers.
We are all waiting, they are all waiting
while the temperature rises,
cyclones, hurricanes, typhoons,
we all want, we all desire
wisdom’s representatives to say
something ...
Plato has split into three parts,
Shakespeare has become a brick in Hamlet’s wall,
Mephistopheles devilishly exiles Goethe to hell,
Pushkin is mortally wounded in order to win
the heart of the captain’s third daughter,
Antigone is transformed into the board of a stage
at Sophocles’ tomb,
Mozart’s dead body has been thrown
like musical dust into an unknown grave,
Camus did not know whether it was worse
to be a Plague or an Outsider...
But the representatives of all the planets,
stars, meteors and comets,
black holes and atoms
were impatiently awaiting the word of wisdom:
they were born, they lived and multiplied
without knowing what death is,
so much did they want wisdom to speak out,
but wisdom lived out its own life
easily, joyfully and thoughtfully,
it was a light
that was travelling timelessly into eternity.
The Bull
August burned bright in the yellow of the sand
while the music gathered the hearts of all eyes.
Trumpeters, trumpeters, the arena entreats you for quiet and for peace;
The bull makes ready to dash out to his death
and kiss the toreador who looks towards you,
now before the fight begins, before the blade of silver flashes,
look at the dusty whirlwinds that blaze in the eyes of the bull,
How utterly beautiful he is, how black and how strong.
His might moves in clouds of black shadows
and ripples over the arena like a serpent’s tail.
Here, left of the gateway,
His hooves dig golden holes in the sand,
His heart shatters into shards of ice
at the sound of the trumpets, token of death.
Should he weep or meet death proudly.
In his soul knows he is closed in and alone,
only the dust beneath his feet moves as it chooses.
A powerful light flashes for an instant in his sad eyes,
he forgets the flaming red and his own blood,
feels blinded and drunk on his childhood,
remembers his mother.
Oh fields, oh fields, how green you were, how fair:
butterflies everywhere, mounds of soft earth all round.
Oh fields of warmth and tenderness that charmed me!
He recalls how he ran for the very first time,
and everyone saw how light and fleet he flew.
His mother wept with joy at her son -
how fiery and fine he was.
Ah, grass and butterflies, mounds of soft earth, bubbles of spring!
This ominous music drives death to run at me.
Look how the toreador lures me with his hidden sword,
look at the shadows of death that gaze into your eyes,
music, you’ve wailed long enough in my soul,
you were born to life as I was.
If only I could have said farewell to my mother,
have taken leave of her yesterday.
I know the fields would have wept at our meeting.
It’s the grape-harvest now and the wine’s being pressed.
Music, do you have a mother, or is death your dam?
If that’s the way it is I too will kiss her.
But wait - something grips at my heart,
My mother has something to tell me before she dies,
She dies tomorrow, I today - without her secret.
Rats
This is the platform of the great rats,
everlasting lords born into death,
underneath trains and metallic screech of rails.
This is the platform of sorrow and love,
of the great rats of the evil empire,
of corridors that travel in trains of fog
of the birds that fly one way along the corridors
of fog, scattering the spirit of the wind.
Birds, corridors and passages of fog.
The lens of the eye peers anxiously
here among the rats, the trains, the rails.
The fog announces to us and to you:
No escape. It is lord and master of our entrails.
It is the shadow of our route.
Look, there are the poets who are just
crossing the threshold of the entrance.
They want to be first to bid us welcome,
last to say farewell.
The rails rattle askew at the tread,
the tread of trains arriving
and departing within us.
The new arrives, the old departs.
Here is the ball of love
rebounding off the walls of life
that no one can catch, can touch.
Here everything is secret and concealed,
the platform of the great rats - a great secret.
How many platforms and trains to their souls,
how many platforms and trains to our death -
ask the shadows of the guards of death
born in them, ask the guards
of all the secrets stifled there.
Number
After my death I’ll tell you how many decades I’m behind
in writing telephone numbers in my notebook;
it is grubby, long-suffering and old.
I write and write in it, rubbing nothing out.
My telephone notebook is a city of the living and the dead,
the dead are born again
and the same is true of the living.
It is a city of friends,
loved ones and chance encounters.
Meetings there take place at any time of day.
Everyone starts out there with everyone
and everyone knows everybody else.
New friendships are old, the old are new.
There everyone writes himself in without rubbing anyone out.
Noted like this the numbers are stamped
on the skin of the day
and together they write secrets they don’t even know.
Since sincerity settles
into them all
they merge and crowd together,
stretched out they set inner roads in motion.
So number matches number and is fond of it,
so number hushes number and comforts it,
though when there’s no third number any more
there’s no response
from the number sought.
So the numbers entered will always
be alive in themselves,
and the fates of the secrets will last together
in the travellers through the gentleness in their pure souls,
and it will always remain so as long as the numbers
stay in it,
and as long as they can be told:
Always be good to your souls
and as long as my body moves
I will be a river that flows in you all.
But when it is not so
I too will become one of the numbers there.
Novel
I am the text of an advertisement:
Let’s write a novel together, folks,
the novel of our first encounter,
the novel of our first love,
let’s write together the history
of our souls, our hearts.
Clear spring water will be born of it.
Isn’t it good that everyone writes about everyone,
everyone writes about himself?
From it the Bible will begin
to read the souls of spring’s awakening
and to hear what there is within
the novel that is written in everyone and in all,
in the novel that is written in the joy
of its own letters.
Let’s write a novel together, folks,
the novel of our first encounter,
the novel of our first love.
Everyone should read me,
everyone understand me,
everyone should read everyone
everyone understand everyone.
