Volker Sielaff
Street, Inside and Outside
It’s the middle of winter, please
don’t forget that. In the morning poems, coffee, in that
order. The façades aren’t right any more, you say, the houses
grey at the temples, not to mention the sky.
Behind a cream-coloured curtain
I'll become the chronicler, who only records
what he sees:
The junkies are begging for a gulden.
A woman screams and runs into the pizzeria’s
glass door, the pizzeria I’m sitting (and writing) in.
A fuck costs fifty gulden.
Just the street only the
yellow, blind and faded street keeps me awake.
It is what it is.
You can walk a long time without arriving, that is,
without the illusion, that you have arrived. Nietzsche,
while he was contemplating the re-evaluation of all values
is said to have walked far in his room, and Modigliani went for walks
because he enjoyed it, his umbrella in one hand,
through nocturnal Paris.
That room over there is empty; on the stool
there’s a big, wrapped bunch of roses.
Volker Sielaff, born in 1966 in the Lausitz hinterland of East Germany, has been presented, and highly praised, in leading poetry magazines in Germany and Austria. He lives in Dresden and works as a critic and stage manager. Stephan Tobler is a translator from German and Portuguese. He is presently in Dresden as a full-time Papa to his two year old son.
Translated by Stephan Tobler
Page(s) 34
magazine list
- Features
- zines
- 10th Muse
- 14
- Acumen
- Agenda
- Ambit
- Angel Exhaust
- ARTEMISpoetry
- Atlas
- Blithe Spirit
- Borderlines
- Brando's hat
- Brittle Star
- Candelabrum
- Cannon's Mouth, The
- Chroma
- Coffee House, The
- Dream Catcher
- Equinox
- Erbacce
- Fabric
- Fire
- Floating Bear, The
- French Literary Review, The
- Frogmore Papers, The
- Global Tapestry
- Grosseteste Review
- Homeless Diamonds
- Interpreter's House, The
- Iota
- Journal, The
- Lamport Court
- London Magazine, The
- Magma
- Matchbox
- Matter
- Modern Poetry in Translation
- Monkey Kettle
- Moodswing
- Neon Highway
- New Welsh Review
- North, The
- Oasis
- Obsessed with pipework
- Orbis
- Oxford Poetry
- Painted, spoken
- Paper, The
- Pen Pusher Magazine
- Poetry Cornwall
- Poetry London
- Poetry London (1951)
- Poetry Nation
- Poetry Review, The
- Poetry Salzburg Review
- Poetry Scotland
- Poetry Wales
- Private Tutor
- Purple Patch
- Quarto
- Rain Dog
- Reach Poetry
- Review, The
- Rialto, The
- Second Aeon
- Seventh Quarry, The
- Shearsman
- Smiths Knoll
- Smoke
- South
- Staple
- Strange Faeces
- Tabla Book of New Verse, The
- Thumbscrew
- Tolling Elves
- Ugly Tree, The
- Weyfarers
- Wolf, The
- Yellow Crane, The