Author: Kurt Drawert
Translator: Steph Morris
Relocation
I understand my friends
in the East
less and less. Here between
the Hamme and Weser rivers
I know no-one.
Sometimes the deaf-mute
farmer from over the way
greets me, or an official
arrives as decreed
to deliver just what
I’d feared
with a casual gesture.
I was settled
nowhere and nowhere
was I at home, I confirm
without sadness. So what
should I seek out
if I stay.
What should stay
where it is?
The smell of wet
mildewed wood,
of rotten floorboards
clings in my memory,
the night-time discussions
were worthless
and have been sold
to the four
winds. Voyeurs
who knew better,
with the safe stasis
of the long winter
for support, with fine lines
broken apart
on a desk
in some sorry office.
Their silence
on that score,
my friends from yesterday,
is deafening, gone today
because yet again
it’s about missing
the wrong word
at the right moment, the kickoff,
the next stop down the hill.
I’ll get to the point now:
You lied to me. I
was someone else
at the heart of those soiled years.
But when, for a second,
I forget my name,
I totally understand
that foxhole of language
and feel regret
and view the rot
of conscience in its entirety
with leniency,
just as the autumn light
melts into the meadows
at dusk
and it all sinks
into the mist like tired
maltreated animals. But
I don’t understand it.
Yet my muscles
have relaxed and
the ostracised farmer
greets me.
Kurt Drawert, 1992
…but
there must be some legacy
with which the history of the body
– which, as silence will win
over remembrance,
I sometimes draw on too,
like an album of snapped sensations –
as well history itself
– given that the country within will crumble
like a ruined fortress
its name lost,
which you enter as a stranger
speaking another language –
can be elucidated.
Kurt Drawert, 1993
Sisyphus
Those were the days,
when there was a thing
you had to shift.
A mission bound
to fail at that gradient,
each time knocked back
and sent plummeting,
a punishment
only in an underworld
run by charlatans
with no feeling for the joys
of repetition
at least while matter
was part of the equation,
with no laws
to concern you unduly.
Since your acquittal
you’ve been drifting around
gazing at the void
in your hands,
repeatedly.
Kurt Drawert, 1996
There
I’d forgotten how we would meet
then, in those towns now full of
orphaned anthems
in search of a fatherland. In the ruins
of the last war a peaceful,
fatherless calm could be found.
I came here as a child, disturbed.
Here we had it good. Here language
stayed out of the body.
Later, at a tricky stage in life,
just as some of our voices
broke, with others it was
the spine, you recall.
I was gifted with
silence, there.
There, the grass is shooting up
already. The dip in the ground,
surely the place I dreamt of love,
is filled with grit, puddled algae
and oil, squashed tin cans,
a scorched patch. Even the earth here seeks
to deny its past. It had long gone dark
but I stood there still. Everything I heard
was alien. What I thought.
And it was day.
On the big wheel
When the axis of the turning wheel
links the rising cars
and the falling cars
along an even plane
there is a neutral instant
in which each are at
eye level.
Then the inevitable happens.
Pride is pride again, and a fall, a fall.
Five lines
I want to be like that again,
in love with a sense of love,
like a ship darting into the ocean,
blindly proud. And hearts are hearts
and stone will be stone, until the sails rip.
From: Poetry of the German Democratic Republic. S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 2009.
Aus: “Ortswechsel,” “… doch,” “Wo es war,” “Im Riesenrad,” “Fünf Zeilen,” “Sisyphos.” Lyrik der DDR. S. Fisher Verlage, Frankfurt am Main, 2009.