|
|
|
|
Best Poems From
ERHARD HANS JOSEF LANG
(January 8,1957)
|
|
| |
|
|
29.
|
No Bars To Blooming Spirits In A Big World
'Why not swing me over one fast pilsner under the counter,
After all, both you and me, we live in the same village! '
Carried on along the happy mood of
the date & dance house night's boiling over
the Ladies and gentlemen to each other,
the waitresses and waiters,
and the boss respectively to the booming club,
the combo's nippy-nappy musicians to
their dance tune's swaying feet of lovers,
I, the bartender, feeling myself then perfectcy unwatched,
getting attracted to the one guest from
my place with a request as a friend,
my villager man got his bonus drink sideways
cunningly without the charges.
Anyhow, I took the freedom of pouring for myself,
in between the thirsty rush of all the socializing business,
all the while, one at a time,
testing all various expensive customer drinks
behind the counter always for free, as well,
something that my companions waiting on the revellers themselves
gave me envious looks for.
But sometimes it seems alright to
push on things a little with a dab
for a friendly mate to get to his lucky coin,
when a deserved sphinx gift.
Did it matter then, that I never before had
talked to the man even once?
I remembered having seen a few times his face
around our place home
from beyond a dozen of its hills
it took to get to our fair secret love-fanners' lair.
And it was on that night, I came to take note of
another outstanding male.
And from then on I had seen this slim
good-looking ladykiller and fine elegant dancer
with the imposingly erect posture
almost every other week
come over to
our club and softly carry away
the most beautiful of our regular lady visitors.
Wednesdays, and on weekends, our
happy dance-club diner Rotisserie in the cosy
south of Germany, in those fat years yet,
a five-hundred seater restaurant,
was getting so busy, that a bartender,
whose job it is to dash out all the drinks & refreshments
ordered, hardly finds a time niche to
smoke a fast faggot in between the waiters' calls.
In this job there is no time to talk
in private much to any customer.
But there is time to watch and see.
With the swinging dance rhythms always in the ears.
One comes to recollect the most striking figures among the guests
one used to have hanging around.
To me, definitely it was that one very good dancer,
with that upright posture,
a man seemingly very popular with the ladies then.
After nine months of doing that job,
all the way through the hottest carnival season,
Burnt out enough I was to quit it and lay it down.
Times of changes naturally bring people
that once used to know each other asunder.
And also I lost sight of all of them there in that club,
and the memory of my admiration for
that one imposing dancer also slowly faded away.
'Haven't I seen that face already somewhere, '
Some fifteen years later on in time,
I said to myself, when one sunny afternoon
I was on the highway on my walk home,
looking suddenly into the eyes of a stranger,
standing there, all out of the blue,
on the other side of the road,
there in the place of my long-time new chosen home
in an island country in the Far East.
And I talked to him, this time, yes, I did.
I was not an overbusied bartender anymore.
And well, it was him, that one dancer
admired once in my memories,
And he said he had thought the same as I, at once, too,
that my face somehow was familiar to him.
Belatedly, thus, I came to know of his story
when he danced yet there in the Rotisserie of the old days
(the once famous club no longer existed anymore) :
His wife had then awakened her erstwhile
slumbering lesbian nature, and shacked up with
another of the same feathers
she fell in love with,
so the poor man simply agreed to
their souls' separation on friendly terms,
and took his consolation out at
dancing it away right there
where, at the time, I was in charge of
filling their glasses.
He told me all that,
and that now he wouldn't need to
go to such clubs anymore,
since he was in a happy love liaison now
with a native girl in the Far East
where we then met.
Once I had been his unknown bartender
who came to admire him.
He then, of all
the billions of possible places in the far, wide world,
had come to be my street neighbour, for a time,
all by God's will, -
'There is no coincidences in the world' -
as my new old friend,
not only a good dancer and lover,
but even an insightful and extreme thinker,
had put it himself.
For long again he has been lost and out of sight.
Erhard Hans Josef Lang
|
| |
|
|
| |
|
| |
|
|
30.
|
No Eye-Washing No More - The High Rumoured Playboy
Once in a blue moon, he, the aging cowboy of the county,
In his second singlehood,
Took home the extravagant lady on offer,
Like on one occasion,
Probably the best singer in the streets of town,
On that early morning that they walked into each other
And went on together for a spree,
On immediate eye consent like of two souls that
Understand each other beyond any need for words.
With no promises attached,
But with the promise of an eventual new chance for a lover's heart
To find one fine maiden worthy of its great love,
He led her on, sat with her in the city park,
And watched her as she unfolded her talents to him,
Singing and twisting it away with heart and soul,
Out in the open, while walking, while sitting on a rock,
Spreading happiness, dashing out of glee her sandalettes high up in the air.
'Interesting girl, ' he thinks,
'Something wrong with her,
Or is this just her way to expose herself? '
After some rather disenchanting experiences
With beauties as 'soulmates' seen through,
Rarely only in those days the boy
Took from the streets late at night a girl with him to his house,
Eventually yes, he did, when convinced by portents and signs of a
Guileless character on behalf of the girl:
'How many hundreds and hundreds of girls
You had had in all the many years
That you have stayed with us here
On our spritely island platform
Far East from your foreign shores? '
Asked from the boy once one bull of a man
After wide-spread rumours on him as
An all-out admired German lover boy,
Who walks the country like an American,
A bull with 38' & 45' calibre Smith&Wesson pistols
Holstered left and right,
Chief of the local narcotic cops command,
In charge of having put the poor boy on hold one fine day
When his itchy tribal girl-friend then,
Secretly walking under-cover for the crocodile mouths
Atop the law's arm
Had spied out the right moment
When there were money enough coming in and
When it were time to strike
And push through a bust-up operation
Against a set term of voluntarily high contribution,
A miraculously quick redemption bill for
The trapped one's restored physical freedom,
The good citizen's acknowledgement fee
For the legal Mafia-rights holders
The hands of those who wield the law,
Money is so badly needed in a corrupt world of capitalists, like ours!
Yes, it is needed yet,
As it, yet, hasn't changed anywhere in the world, from there. -
In a world without money
The Governmental Drugs Departments were to be the ones
To issue to wanting individuals user licences
For certain classified medical stuff
Listed as hazardous psychotropic recipes,
If applied invariably by all kinds of mindless drunkards, or
Discontented hooligans bent on
Shaping their lives as wry as can be, only
To be able to express the unbearable no-sense in their failed lives that
They perceive as flatly nonsensical -
And goverment institutions were to be the ones, likewise, organizing
The distribution and supervision of the use of the listed recipes -
In stead of hunting down and killing hiding
Mafia-indebted hopeless revellers of poor human souls,
While propped up by and against the very illegal sources
That boost injustice and crime,
And that they boast to successfully fight.
Mafia money, in the end, may serve to
Soften up the hurting impact of the constant whips
On our consumers backs
In the latters' rat race after their daily bread and game,
And also to snatch away before ending up in waste drainage channels,
right before the syndicating Mafiosi's palaces, and
Thereby to make ready for legal seizure, and to white-wash
All the naughty brazen's surplus means from out of their pockets
That will get ever cropped, anyhow, quite fast
Through the pressure of the chemicists department's onslaught on
Their hooked and crazed spendthrift elements in society.
Which in turn is done again to serve the practical end of
Breeding new well-fed, well-informed generations of true
Masters-to-be in the field of
Practicalizing the implementation of the law -
In shrewd concord with the prevailing,
Exorbitant needs of the high-rise powers lying in state,
That dictate the terms.
Voracious reptiles at work, hired for the government,
Many of them only lately
Trained to be good law-abiders,
So as for them to fit into the public window of the job,
As they are known to be good at handling 'the criminals' own way'
- Eye to Eye, Tooth to Tooth -
Nasty public extreme situations and aggression
That often trouble life in the countryside
And the peace & order in town -
- Worth, to some, even a complete film theme
As with the 2008 Berlin film festival's Golden Bear
On the spooky law-implemented geeks'
Brazil variation as most dreaded
Tropa de Elite -,
In charge of plying the cities' streets of red-hot leisure
For harvesting, in form of bribal fees & other extra legal seizures,
The high tops from the cream layer
On top of the towering
Ever high rising sweet-dreams cake made
From their undergrounded general drugists' ingredients and recipes,
Diced as spiced by-product in any expedient legal hunt
On outlaws hand-picked and manhandled,
Which must needs be done with expertise,
So Common Sense seems to be speaking,
Since too much tasting from the forbidden cake,
Played out and around in all quarters & strata -
Almost like in a game of inducing a great tempest
That one later on masters to control
And to employ for one's own purposes,
Regardless of minors' or elders' major sacrifice,
With the innocent masses ever holds
The danger that suddenly too many fools might wizen up
And the wise start to take on the fools' part.
'To ask me such a question! ' thought the boy then,
'An insult heavier than one could be willing to bear!
When they knew exactly that they had turned around my girl
And set her against me, the girl
Whom I had madly fallen in love with,
And whom to win over in the end,
After eventually I would have been able to tame the wild horse in her
I had made it a goal & challenge to
Prove the magic power of my heart's desires!
For the love of one amphetaminized girl, very hard to handle,
That ended behind a wild Faraday's cage of bars!
How many hundreds of girls I would have had,
When this one I now, from my foolish heart, had loved
Seems to have been the one that was too much already,
- Better a loner's life than to be hooked in such a mess -
Now that she had been seen
Obviously ever happily doing it with the cops - and
Doing it for my money!
Justify this, evil money! ! ! '
Thus thought the boy,
While the local TV news patrol camera team had come to televise
An interview of the staged stranger chap,
Turned crap for evil money
By those law enforcers and their turbo-armed master.
And it was only on rare occasions like this
That later on in his life the boy came to remember
That one-time bad experience with a corrupted administrational system,
And that hair-raising, arrogant question by a chief of police,
Who only short time later -
The deed of fate's out-balanced arm from a higher watch than his -
Was revenged through the very mouth of one of his own pistols
While feasting on the thickly thorn-encapsuled
Hard-to-open-shelled King of fruits,
The durian of the Pacific islands,
Accidentally triggering his own gun -
When he, the boy, in the manner of a playboy,
Once brought that girl with a gift for lyrical love rhymes & tunes,
And who had well more in store, down to her blood & flesh,
A girl - looking so much younger than she actually was -
But a girl who sadly had gone mad
Behind a giant bulwark
Raised against a tsunami of tears that might have smashed her off her feet, otherwise.
And so the girl moved on, soon after their small encounter,
And the high rumoured boy knew that he had learnt his lesson well,
To be more prudent
For 'no eye-washing, no more'.
Erhard Hans Josef Lang
|
| |
|
|
| |
|
| |
|
|
31.
|
Offered As Taken (On The Wings Of A Prayer)
Wishing for more shares of yours
In times to come in
Your ever self-fulfilling graces and blisses,
I sing a song of success and victory,
And raise my voice sonorous up to You,
You, truly Mysterious Lady,
Pricking me with your lovingly soft touch
So invisibly subtle
While again and again bearing so heavily, as you do, on Time.
Swarty-golden Damsel there in
Your huge black cosmic hole-out.
Once more you made me feel the notion of your greatness,
By a Divine motion in events of yours, Mother of Time!
And you 'even' angled for a Friday the 13th for things to happen,
Making me learn the lesson of
'Don't argue with drunken drivers on superstitious beliefs'!
It might only serve to make
Ill things come true even to yourself
Mingling with the stubborn of the ignorant.
I can see that
Your look-out as a Goddess is one
That surveys the world
Through eyes fixed
Not on the succeeding images of moments, but
You watch everything crosswise athwart the spaces and times,
But we know that you
Do look out of our very own eyes, too, at times,
As well as out of the eyes of many, many others, too,
Whenever you chose to do so.
And thus, you see all things,
Most beautiful Lady of Time,
well exactly all in their very details, too.
Your interacting, as such, always, over time, making for an
Ultimate sense and meaning in our world.
And sometimes I just wonder:
What does that right eye see now in you, as once
Blown out in your worship on a conch-shell blare?
'It is time to have again a goat slaughtered
And have it fed to the poor? '
May only your well-wishing eyes,
Great Cosmic woman of worlds,
Be always set on us, and inspire us perfectly!
*
Erhard Hans Josef Lang
|
| |
|
|
| |
|
| |
|
|
32.
|
On A Journey With The Winds - Excerpts (translation)
A butterfly dancing around its own self
Without destination
In the lovely warmth of spring
A spider's
Work of two days
Being torn into pieces,
As the old servant swings her broom
In the eyes of the moon:
Are these who are watching the moon tonight,
The same as those from
A thousand years ago?
From amidst a hundred stones
Smaller and bigger ones,
All by herself a tortoise is
Moving about -
What a pitiable sight:
The old tortoise does not see
The little bird's
Effortless flight -
How can a senior tortoise have been
Living for three centuries
Without the knowledge of the sky?
A woman in child bed,
Up and awake
Together with five daughters,
Her husband dreaming -
The pregnant woman is
Weeping without a noise
On the bed of her husband with a dream vision. -
A woman, awake,
Next to a man with a dream,
The heart having let go of the hope for embrace
A watch is coming to
A standstill
On the wrist of a blind man -
The blind man inquiring the time
From a schoolboy
Inside a holy centre
I reflected on a thousand thoughts.
When I came out,
It had snowed.
I shout
Across a deep valley.
Waiting for the echo.
When thinking proper,
I don't understand why the
Snow is so white -,
When thinking proper,
I don't understand why
Death is feared
So much
On nothing I am relying
As much, as on
The closing of the night
And that of the day
A child's crying is
Seconded by a bird tweedling,
Until its mother will arrive on the scene
A small mound with
Reject tires,
A wretched dog there to look after,
Without any returns.
Which leaf will next
Drop down,
Along with the following gust of wind?
Nights
Long
Days
Long
Life
Short
from On a Journey with the Winds by
Abbas Kiarostami
(Iranian film producer and poet)
translated by Erhard Hans Josef Lang
Erhard Hans Josef Lang
|
| |
|
|
|
|
|
|