Author: Henning Ahrens
Translator: Geoffrey S. Koby, Mark Herman, Ronnie Apter
Prologue
Only the poplars
endure the days. Planted
quickly grown and shadows
spraying over the flat land. Here
where the earth stopped folding
I go. Where cold
glacier bellies writhed
and crushed. Where power
lines draw eyes
into the void. Someone
running beneath me
bursts up
out of the earth and laughs.
Possible Childhood
In summer
the poplars were luminous with dust.
It smelled of harvest.
A book in my lap
I dozed against the oak
cradled by the brook on a pearl-yellow day.
Fields lapped silently
at village shores.
The crows came in autumn
when there were smells of loosened earth.
Wires hummed over the sugar beets.
Thin snow fell in winter.
In granaries and haylofts
we dug for the sun’s gold
between bales of straw
and mountains of grain. In the spring
fumitory grew on the railway embankment.
It smelled like sulfur. On the horizon
loomed foundry and steel mill
power plant and mine. The river
had been straightened.
Father Comes Home
Muffled roar of the thresher’s
throttled motor. Gleaming
eye of the headlight. Standing
he drives the machine home
trailing a cloud of chaff. The night
smells of diesel and straw. On the field
wagons are waiting full of grain: daily bread
harvested in the dark. At peace
I go back to sleep.
Beet Harvest
Wheel-crushed beets. Tractor treadmarks
on the roads. Mud. Evenings
a haze over fields villages
timberstands. Over soil
both sand and clay. Over willows
by the brook. Where I stood with a hoe
and grubbed up thistles. Beets bedstraw
flowers. Blood red. The kite above me
with its forked tail: autumn
was the time to fill the gaping emptiness
in chest and skull with leaves.
The time we went to harvest sugar.
Daily Life
Mole and mouse
smashed with a shovel.
Hen-pheasant on her nest
in summer beheaded
with the sickle bar. Chickens
ripped apart by beech martens
and dragged into the meadows.
Bulls were
fattened knives honed
tails twisted
and dungforks hefted.
Then the day
the plums hung
on the tree. Ripe. And apples
shone: fears
wrath and weapon were
well hidden.
_______________
Note: A sickle mower mows using two sets of moving teeth set in a sickle bar, which projects sideways from the tractor.
Tracks
Tracks at dusk
in the snow on the meadows
—a goat-footed angel
perhaps. In its beak
the hungering heavens’
last piece of bread.
The full-fed village sleeps
cleft by the street
on the verge of the railway.
From Lieblied was kommt. Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt,, Stuttgart, 1998