Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

Poetry Library Southbank Centre - The Poetry Library housing the Arts Council Collection at Southbank Centre

« Previous item
Contents of this issue
Next item »

Heinz Czechowski

print this page

Sic transit gloria mundi

One day
The account will have to be settled:
Even love
Found its way to the mass graves: ashes
Piled upon ashes
And even the feeble voice of hope
Knows no mercy.
                              Outside the metal bars
Day is breaking
With birds twittering and
Rubbish skips rattling.
The guilty, the innocent –
Meaning us too –
Their eyes turned toward the apse
From the Pont des Arts
Are marked:
                     By fear, for example,
That all has been said, or
The fear that what ought to be said
Never can be said.
                               Thus history too
Gets internalised: Charlemagne
Steps up to the portal of Aachen Cathedral,
Robespierre topples Danton, Napoleon
Flees from the flames of Moscow,
Lenin warns against Stalin, Herr Hitler
Sends his Stukas to Coventry,
And a certain Harry S. Brown from St Paul, Minnesota,
Releases his bombs over Rosenstraße,
Where Querner the painter’s pictures burn up.

And Tristan is still dying
On account of Isolde or Isolde
On account of Tristan,
And the gods come down to Shen Te,
And Herr B. advises us
Not to be good but to make sure
We can leave a good world behind us.
                                                         But how,
When every day a new
Sword of Damocles is hung
Over our heads?
                              Sic transit gloria mundi,
Accompanied by Chopin’s mazurkas,
Machine-gun salvos, mushroom clouds,
The flames of Kaisersaschern,
The Fugue in A Minor or
This poem written against futility.

 

Translated by Dennis Tomlinson

Page(s) 26-27

Back to top