Childhood Memory
Unreal May Day
The Linden is in Bloom, and It is Night
After the War
Stele

Author: Reiner Kunze
Translator: Kay McBurney

 

CHILDHOOD MEMORY

When the swallows gathered to fly away,
the bird-barbed wire
strung between the electricity poles
fenced off the village from the sky

And the people were
imprisoned, sentenced
to winter

To telegraph wires
with no birdsong

To the empty nest
within their breast

When the swallows gathered
and their tail- and wingtips
marked the border

 

 

UNREAL MAY DAY

The cherry and pear trees flowered in such abundance
that they metamorphosed
into white clouds

Enblossomed, the village
floated up

With our white hair
we affected belonging
and became weightless

 

 

THE LINDEN IS IN BLOOM, AND IT IS NIGHT

The air … so warm and deathly still
Adalbert Stifter

The linden is in bloom, and it is night
The droning bees are silent now, instead
the air is teeming with stars

Man, that itinerant beekeeper flitting by night to pastures new,
the bolts of his hives slid into place, air flaps open,
wheels rasping,
hungers
for other honey

He has measured the curvature of the firmament
and sets off
to those distant shimmering swarms

Eve’s genes murmuring within him

But no matter how far he extends the radius of his heaven’s sphere
into boundless space, he will only ever fly
along the inside

If we wanted to understand the otherness of the world,
we would have to be
other

We humans under linden trees, in bloom,
at night

 

 

AFTER THE WAR

The farmers hoed over the harvested fields
until the furrow mounds
were trenches

Strangers who dared
venture too close were shown
the horsewhip

Hunkering in the undergrowth,
we waited in the wood
until above the smouldering haulm fires
the moon rose

and to our hungry mind’s eye
an unattainable,
ember-split
potato glowed

 

STELE

What
I
have
seen
no-one
should
see
no-one
should
have
witnessed
this
Though
anyone
who
did
see
it
would
have
been
better
off
dying
soon

[Varlam Shalamov / Kolyma]

 

Reiner Kunze, Lindennacht.  S. Fischer Verlag, 2007.