von Writers Ink.
			
				
				
				Brunswick Harbour (2016)
				
					
				
				Future-eating one-man bunkers. 
Yes, the two of you, standing there, unsmiling, 
At the bottom end of the old
					Brunswick dock, 
Twinning for eternity. Round and streamlined 
Like bombs dropped out of Hell, but 
Square
					eyed, square mouthed, 
Ridiculously hooded and altogether dead, 
Dead except for your insatiability. 
How
					do you do it, with jaws and maws 
Cast in concrete, devour, chew, digest 
All that moves forward, ships, dockers,
					forklifts, 
And, for starters, those innocent rabbits 
That hop and mate and nibble 
Across the weeded ramps
					and lanes. Where 
Are the hands, that more than patent metaphor, 
Of what was once the harbour clock? 
Gone
					down your ghastly throats, annihilated. 
Clever, clever, and in your limited perception, 
Un-eared, dead-eyed, as
					you are, not inefficient, either. 
But there is a harbour outside – or so I hope – 
Your range of greed,
					ringing with the thuds 
Of world-travelling containers lifted onto trains, 
A harbour bustling with commerce and
					internationality, 
With barges, barely inches above the waterline, 
That love to shove up mile-long billows 
Along
					the Mittelland canal, before they rest the night, 
But never turn to set these rusty cranes to work. 
The scrap
					heaps, yes, I’ve seen them 
And do not hesitate to call them goods; 
They’ve taken root along the quay, and having
					long 
Befriended you, our pair of one-man bunkers, 
Feel safe, like funny installations at museums. 
Speaking
					of which, there is a band of artists coming, 
Who know that the more run-down a place, 
The better the
					inspiration, curious people. 
I tell you, when they see you – yes, you, 
The bunkers, and I’m still talking to you
					– 
For the moment they’ll forget about that white façade 
Of more or less the harbour’s only storehouse, 
Containing,
					I am sure, floors and floors of obsoleteness. 
That wall, so proud from all the grey, 
Is meant to serve as
					screen 
For some as yet unknown, elaborate light show. 
(Because, artists these days cannot be bothered 
With
					stark blonde nudes in oil, or sculpturing 
From granite heroic guys, wielding spade or assault rifle.) 
So, as I
					said, seeing you, the kids will stand there 
Wondering, and before long they’ll peep and 
Poke into your bellies,
					and like good artists 
Penetrate the rubble with their minds. 
I hope they’ll find the entrance down, 
Down
					to the horrid intestines of history. 
And, hopefully before you act, 
They’ll race back to their van and get out
					
Armfuls of equipment: projectors, 
Cable drums, computers, parabolic mirrors. 
And before nightfall there’ll
					be: the slide. 
Which inserted, will, my dears, my 
Future-eating one-man bunkers, 
Disappear you, will
					disappear you altogether 
Beneath a field of roses. 
And I will stand 
And watch and see what happens.
					
Ottmar Bauer
				Die deutsche Übersetzung finden Sie hier
				Einmannbunker am Hafen:
			
			
				
				The Granary's Voice
				
					
				
				With nightfall comes reflection.
Once the builders, traders, lever-pushers are gone
and have taken their noises
					with them,
we regain our voices:
				The canal laps up whatever stars, leaves or raindrops he
can catch, then talks about becoming a river,
about
					hopping out of bed, one day;
of boldly flowing, where no bulldozer has gone before.
				Their shift done, the young gantry cranes flex their sinews
and I listen politely, as they whinge and creak,
but
					during the day they shuffled and stacked
containers from Hong Kong like Mahjong pieces.
				Redundant as I am, I no longer have cargo for the barges,
but they share their voices, anyway. Same old, same
					old,
they gargle, diesel-drunk, and how they’d like to laze in the swell,
instead of hauling ore, scrap metal or
					gravel.
				But then they murmur of landscapes and locks,
of destinations and docks, and of kissing quays in distant waters.
And
					I, earthbound, obsolete, no longer a feeder of cattle or people,
I fall silent.                   
				
				I have no regrets. I could have been built a munitions factory, or worse,
could have burned in storms of fire. Built
					in ’33, need I say more?
Even though I am empty now, hollow, forever hungry,
without purpose or hope, I shall not
					complain, but
				I’ll gladly tell you about the golden nuggets of wheat and barley
cascading from floor to floor, as though to measure
					time,
and about the dry whisper of black rapeseed and grey rye in my care,
and my endeavours to keep insects, mice
					and pigeons out.
				I’ll tell you about the tickle of the men, how they milled around
to keep the bread-in-waiting cool and dry,
how
					they filled it into sacks, always busy, part of the great flow.
Until the men left for metal silos. Until the pigeons
					came.
				And I, with too much emptiness inside, turned myself into shelter.
I used to think of them as enemies, as rapacious
					gluttons,
but now their cooing keeps me company;
voices in their own right.
				Stepahnie Lammers
				Die deutsche Übersetzung finden Sie hier
				
			
			
				
				Water's City 
				
					
				
				for Braunschweig Harbour
				We dream in opposites. They inform us.
            We, in the
					flatlands, where the sea
                       
					is mainly a rumour, we have sails
            flapping through
					our yards;
in the fathomless centre of night
           
					they are the white shadows frightened Lovers
                       
					mistake for ghosts, who canny matriarchs
touch, finger to canvas air, and shudder.
				                        What
					mother does not fear the lure of water?
                              Transgressive,
					shapeless, it is the ninety percent
                                       
					of every child that eddies to freedom. That is,
                              disobedience.
					Risk. The unfixable. The unbidden
                        inheritance
					prayer can't erase. Water. It sloshes
                              through
					sons, daughters, rendering them unreliable,
                                        dilute,
					strange. Strains the banks of family.
				Opposites. Opposites. Water for heathland.
            Poverty
					for wealth. We, Braunschweigers,
                       
					gentle, observant, earnest, land at every edge
            of
					our existence,  we dream we also dwell
on the Baltic, in league with its league.
           
					Landlocked Hansa. Yes. We stretch past
                       
					local streams and trade talk with the sea
we believe might be, sleep easy, lush with wealth.
 
                       The
					parent, the priest, we bring water
                             into
					the fold; tame it. Name it our own.
                                      Save
					our young by dunking them in it.
                             Sprinkle
					them on feast days, like it or not.
                      Scrub
					them in it for punishment, pleasure
                            
					and routine. We hear we aren't unique:
                                      Oker,
					Volga. Same. Same.
				Lush. The river is bounty. Rushes to be cut, dried
           
					woven into the thrones we stow in our guild houses,
                       
					our workplaces, at the head of our tables, the thatch
           
					that crowns our homes. There are fish too, caught
by us at the market. Wherever there is Need
           
					there is an exchange. Money for life.
                       
					Life for money.  We traders supply the need
we didn't create. And we are the heart of town.
                      The
					standers-back, the teachers, the philosophers,
                             bless
					us, we listen to the cheap
                                     
					speak of the river; we have learned its letters;
                             we
					know it is getting wily. Up to new tricks.
                     
					How to hide even when the sun pays
                             court
					to the merchants. How
                                      to
					catch fish. The river is silting up.
				 And with a heart and a half, we look the other way.
           
					Blank the kid pinching the plum, the doomsters
                       
					who say the river's running out –
            show ourselves
					wise. Pay no heed to pepper,
nutmeg, the burble of spice that hot tongued tinkers
           
					peddle to fickle bellies. Cut our losses.
                       
					Say the Hansa trade is solid as rocks,
while we pull our boats from the encroaching ooze.
				                     
					The talk of the river was the talk of the town.
                             
					It was the tittle-tattle of rittle-rattle pebbles,
                                  shallow
					tales. It kept gossip afloat. When it foundered
                              there
					was a mud of silence, which some
                      mistook
					for obsequy. No one but the water Readers
                              saw
					the end of freedom rippling in. But. Blame no-one.
                                  Even
					shallow waters cut up choppy.
				It was the encroaching dullness, caught our attention.
           
					What wasn't dimmer was distorted. Our wives
                       
					told us they had told us we were captives in halls
           
					of mirrors, river in sky, sky in river, and every harvest
between them brighter in the reflections. The Hansa
					sank
            and half our autonomy was on their deck. Half
					our pride.
                       
					Our buoyancy gone, our gates flew open.
The Dukes surged in. Banned shanties.            
				
				                     Everything 
					seeps, fills.  A storm in the Harz
                             
					raises the Oker, and the traders' hopes bob. Sun,
                                  dries,
					sinks, and they fall low. But in the pale
                              night,
					another tide rises. We, the philosophers
                     and
					teachers, we the mathematicians and poets,
                              bless
					us, we engage ourselves with small sluices,
                                  the
					channels of thought we did not know we could think.
				 Our buoyancy surged from us, but not our will to float.
           
					Every silk we traded, every bolt of calico
                       
					could, without a ripple of permission, turn
            sail in
					our hands. The millers' grain cascaded
through their stones. Horses' breath became mist
           
					on the water meadows. When the brooks flooded
                       
					we nodded to ourselves, generation after dry
generation. Kept swimming.
				                    
					We have found analogies for our calling
                         and
					the buildings built for it.  A college,
                             we
					may say, becomes a scholarly confluence,
                         or
					the estuary where salt and sweet theories
                    
					meet and become inseparable. Before they diverge.
                             No.
					We may say, in our certain uncertainties
                             a
					college is not a culvert, my learned friends, but a canal.
				Keep these streams: Wabe, Schunter, Time.
            Imagine
					the swirl of a thousand thousand
                       
					unsung contracts, mergers, the sump of grief
            at the
					recurrent shock of death; and between
the bubbles of trade left to us, the rise,
           
					rise, rise of our extemporisation. Wars? Come
                       
					and go. Napoleon had no eye for business.
The Kaiser, neither. We watered the earth.
				                    
					Water, formed, governed. Calculated.
                            If
					twenty men take two minutes to drink
                                     a
					pipe of ale, you sir, at the back, how many
                            mud
					pies can you make from a ditch as Long
                    
					as a theoretician’s list of options, and if the answer
                            is
					more than seven slag heaps how many backs
                                    will
					buckle, how many break, before the canal fills?
				 And. Earth moved, we heard.  Collected in pyramids
           
					on the road north. Bedrock, top soil, what
                       
					isn't  fluid? A ditch to fill with cargo,
            on
					vessels on a man made flow.  At beer we were gods
or engineers, inventing springs, sources, channelling
           
					the Hansa. Time was a sail braced, swinging forward,
                       
					back, the clean clack of calico the tock and tick.
We saw barge ropes in our sinews. Prepared to dock.
				                     Here
					are the beautiful things: the Tools
                             our
					need to calculate created. The curve
                                     of
					the compass, the elegance of the ruler,
                             all
					their variations. The laws of average
                     by
					which a town expands to its new harbour,
                             given
					the chance. Given the lack
                                     of
					the incalculable glamour of war.
				 Halved whales, those barges, when they came. High sea beasts
           
					ripping the canal's silk surface with awful calm;
                       
					and the steel in their bellies, the new grain. We gulped it back
           
					with a dash of propaganda. Told ourselves we walked
on water, in the right uniform. Believed the opposite
           
					of what we thought. Till the city drowned in fire,
                       
					the sky spat sparks, boiling all reflections; and we
suspecting we'd earned this, learned to fear thirst.
				                     Hunger
					eats the guts of deduction. We, the historians,
                             the
					mediators of time, we had soot in our eyes at dawn,
                                  as
					if we'd painted caves with the hunters all night.
                             As
					if the firestorm itself was a hypothesis
                     we
					could reason away.  First light, we stole to the towpath
                             to
					measure the bluing of brown water.  It was banked
                                  by
					cardboard khaki, Marshall planned. Food. Food. Food.
				Opposites, opposites, rabble and silence,
            rubble
					and concrete, rivers and canals.
                       
					We took to building in our sleep,
            constructing new
					visions, brick by white slab.
 Water, wherever it ran, was a private pleasure,
           
					a genetic tick, twitching the blood. The canal
                       
					silent, still, threading through bright as grain,
light as winter. Mistaken for mundane.            
				
				                    
					There is much to be said for seeing a dream,
                              though
					we, the planners and navigators,
                                    we,
					the dredger drivers, and pilots of barges, prefer
                              the
					jargon of projects, maintenance, itineraries.
                Do
					not believe that is our only dialect. This wide, grey, green tide-free
                              organised
					water, is our calling, our habitat.
                                                         We
					sing its plainchant.  
				Hush. The stevedores have gone home; the great
           
					containers shift in the earth's turn, China
                       
					setting into Holland.  Metal waste
            percusses 
					for the swaying frogs.
The harbour is dark, that is lit by two moons, and two stars
           
					and we would not say which reflects which.
                       
					Sniff.  Our town in this air. The scent of new coal,
fresh flour. In the granary, something germinates.
				Rebecca Bilkau 2016
				Die deutsche Übersetzung finden Sie hier