it seems difficult to deal with people who enjoy poetry

Traffic accident dead. War dead. 

Casualty coincidence crime. 

(It could just as easily 

have taken you or me): 

When I read the newspaper, 

those lovers of roses look suspicious. 

I’m a gardener with a guilty conscience. 

 

It seems difficult to deal with people who 

enjoy poetry, 

climb mountains, 

attend concerts, 

water radishes, 

who talk about rights, guilt and justice. 

 

I lose 

all sense of orientation. 

In place of words I see fists, 

gestures, faces, isolated faces. 

I see everyone alone with himself: 

an almost harmless person, 

just because he’s sad or he’s happy. 

 

I fear the man whom nobody misses. 

At a single blow he forces us 

to picture him. 

There’s nothing yet 

about this man in the newspaper. 

One knows him on sight. 

It’s now too late to love him. 

                ....... 

Every day 

the Bridge of San Luis Rey collapses. 

We’re badly informed 

because it tires us quickly— 

in a burst to precisely follow 

the flight of a single flake. 

 

“Their manes flowed like a snowstorm,” 

Black Elk said of the sacred horses. 

Who killed 

Who killed the sacred horses? 

The red? the black? the white men? 

It has been said the grass grew over them. 

—We 

kill them now. 

 

Invocation revocation obituary. 

Men shrivel to names. 

Names are words. Words flake. 

Black flurry. Alphabet snow. 

 

Holding on to the empty margins, 

I hear 

the growing 

of grasses. 

 

[Erika Burkart {1922-2010} 'Orientierung' ('Orientation'), from Die Transparenz der Scherben (The Transparency of Shards)]