Status Updates From Sämtliche Gedichte

A fragment from the poem ‘An jemand ganz Anderen’ translated as ‘To someone entirely different’ is in the first comment as it does not fit.

Enigma

for Hans Werner Henze from the time of the Ariosi

Nothing more will come.

Spring will never return.
Thousand-year calendars predict it for everyone.

But also summer, and everything else that has such fine names as "summery"—
nothing more will come.

"You shouldn't cry,"
says a piece of music.

Otherwise,
no one
says
anything.

Enigma

So early in the evening and so late in the morning,
the room is always dark,
snow, fog replaced the reason,
how many winters already?

In the crack in the wall I saw in a moment of panic a black beetle who was playing dead.
Ta like to speak to him,
to show him a way out of this lovely house, to show him an exit, or stomp on him right away.

I learned something from him, I myself
am also playing dead, having fallen into the crack of Berlin, disappearing from the face of the planet,

(Cont in the first comment)

Spoken
and the light
went out,
written, and
a person crumpled
like an old dress.

On plazas of the city at Christmas
…when the gifts begin to tremble because lovelessness walks through the world, because it snarls at you, barks at you from the snow, and the silver ribbons rip and the tinsel rustles silvery, and the silver and gold, and a golden word comes to you on which you choke because you have been sold and betrayed, and because it does not suffice that for you one is redeemed who once died.

Mouth, which slept in my mouth
Eye that guarded my own,
Hand-

and those eyes that drilled through me!
Mouth which spoke the sentence,
Hand, which executed me!

“And I don’t belong to you. / Both of us mourn now. / But like Orpheus I know / life on the side of death, / and the deepening blue / of your forever closed eye.”

AHHHHHHH

Hinter der Welt wird ein Baum stehen
mit Blättern aus Wolken
und einer Krone aus Blau.

Ich bin satt vor der Zeit
und hungre nach ihr.