Wide View
On the Rothorn
The Mira star
Hardly visible now
Doubly concealed
This portion of sky
Descending to earth
Lifting the light of day
The sun touching the rocks
Here I stood in disbelief
Not to be alone
By the light of the Laterna Magica
My hearing
Exposed to the echo
Of silence
That breaks itself
To reach into the wide
Descending
Attempting to make sense
Of what one hears from the eagle
When he tries to learn from ravens
And wasting most of his time
Listening to the talk
Of domino players what
Are the wolves doing in the tree
The sunny side being empty
In the Valley
A few pebbles
Rolling over the lakeshore
Grains of sand tossed into the air
Beginning on the deepest ground
To become weightless
Light
Dream and Truth
On the skin of fishes against the scales
The blueness of blue
For the modern nomad
White paper and quarterly report
Anything crossing his path he names
Unquivering in his squareness
Mysterious radio signals
From the centre of the Milky Way
Surfing electrons
Riding plasma waves
Bending aluminium foil
Accelerating protons
With particle cannons
He builds a stairway to outer space
For children and old people
Dream and truth are one
And who will protect
Those who love?
He who speaks with a forked tongue?
Are you William Blake?
Yes, that’s who I am. I will bring you to the bridge
Made of water and air
In the end this world
Will concern you no longer
Take this heavy load onto the journey
Hard times for sparrows & Co.
Hanging weighed down in the ether
Bumble bees and artists of the air
For it’s autumn now
In the sky
Postcard-sized the loose feather grass
Goliath’s Lament
The earth has its history the sun
Its life the moon its laws
and he, he would use pitch
To seal his boats
Devour a slice of heaven
Without joy turn his stomach
When sulphur fumes rumble
Hurl rocks across magma flows
Full of furore scatter black glass
Over the landscape on pock-marked stone
Guard the rocks‘ oil with power
And heat beneath the ice of the sea
That belongs to no-one and all
Even the wilted bugloss
The alyssum that claws its way
Up vertical slag slopes
He who would prop up the mountain
Where master and dog lie buried
Together beneath the thistles where
Blue-throated lizards multiply
In cave passages and
Geckos bring good luck to the day
And he, what by all means should he do
To sing his own song freely
As the warbler sings the song of his kind
Because that is what he does
Let’s not Forget to Contemplate the Wind
Wandering the ancient sea bed
On the relief of basalt blocks
Easy to see on clear days
Our second sight
Tied recollection and flashbacks
We crawl on breast and bone
Our hands warm enough
To open up the Now
By the oldest realm in the water’s flow
While searching for landmarks
For the five-armed starfish
Once brighter but unseen
Missed beforehand by water and earth
How Much
Moss animals on the rock slope
Crabs and sponges
Opulent mattings
Drawn down weightlessly
Raised up
By their own weight
Falling back into themselves
Endlessly pliant driven out
Into the open
Among mussels bone eaters
With sabre fangs
Excess in petrification
The boundaries
Of their equations unequally
Shifted
As far as it’s possible
As far as it can be possible
That nothing entirely fades
© Rosemarie Zens, Hidden Patterns, Berlin 2010