Celebrating ten years of this blog with two new versions of one of the first poems published here: “My City Calls” typed up as a cityscape around a Gothic Cathedral and as a church bell.
The additional letters at the end might be the notes of the bells – but they are also a clue to the identity of the city!
You can click on the visual poems to read the text more clearly and go to the plain text via the link above.
We are the bricklayers: we lay the next layer of bricks in colours of coal and cream and mustard and rust, and the next and the next, where it fits, where it clicks, bricks upon bricks upon bricks.
We are the people who have made the big city.
We have walked here over the hills, we have sailed here and settled, we have woven the brittle wattle and cast the wayward clay into bricks and levelled the luminous limestone for thousands of years. Our stories still run underneath the pavement, in the veins of the hidden rivers.
II.
We are the bricks: We come in in all sizes, in all shades of beige and brown and black, the walls next to each other and often the bricks, mixed, a mosaic, haphazard and rough, like the bark of a London plane-tree.
We are the people who make up the big city.
We have moulded and sawed, we have woven and sown, we have carried and ferried and bartered on the market. We have brought up and taught, we have cared for and cured, invented, imagined, and immortalised.
I am writing on the wall in lurid colours painting mouthless faces naming faceless fears the hydra of the mutating germ the wheel of the rotating power filling the space by the street with the sunflower yellow of hope one day it will be overwritten by times to come and poets to come
The poem speaking through a mask was inspired by photographs in the Tottenham Community Press and published by the same newspaper in TCP Issue 43, February 2021. It continues as the Haringey Community Press.
Tottenham is full of art in in very bright colours: graffiti on walls, mosaics on houses, paintings on roll-shutters of shops…
The fear expressed in these lines is of the malicious pandemic as well as of total surveillance. The masks gave us a chance to protect us from both to an extent.
I had great hopes that the pandemic would change our society to become more local, sustainable, authentic, co-operative, considerate… more healthy in every respect.
Sadly, only some positive outcomes have persisted against the pressure of ever more exploitation, exhaustion, pollution, production, consumption, and waste.
Image: Red camera eye of HAL 9000 (from ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’). Julian Mendez, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
For the English visual version and for a related word cloud, see the previous post, Webs of Steel (Visual Poetry).
Von stählernen Waben
Von stählernen Waben und gläsernen Wänden beschränkt auf ein spärliches gräsernes Eck, steh’ stille und spüre dein Blut in den Händen: Du hast ein Gesicht; und du hast ein Geschick.
Will keiner dich kennen, verstehen und lieben, gibt keiner verborgene Neigungen her, hol’ Atem – hol’ Atem – und freu’ dich am Leben: Ich weiß es ja, bin ja bei dir übers Meer!
When webs of steel and walls of glass confine you to a square of grass – stand still and feel your sap pulsate: You have a face. You have a fate.
When no one listens, no one knows you, when no one loves you or else shows you, take a deep breath – take two – take cheer: I know, across the seas. I’m here.
Some of us are pushing the swings in the park, a powerful pendulum, some are hurrying for their daily bread, counting the pennies in their pockets, and all are treading on rustling leaves, fallen too soon, too soon this year, for the world is brittle with heat and creaking and breaking apart.
The rain has come and gone but the clouds have stayed: No rainbow today over the weathered church. The blue emerges, the brightness of grass, of the thousand things, and the old oak stands smiling. Higher the swings go and higher –
Then the sky bursts with the lion’s roar of the helicopter, closer, close, here, the colour of blood. And we look at each other and fear the worst and know it has happened again.
A street between brick walls, a random courtyard or a random corner has been stained, and from the earth cries someone’s blood, someone’s brother’s blood, our brother’s blood.
I have seen the red helicopter of the emergency services land in parks in Tottenham (Lordship Recreation Ground and Bruce Castle Park). In both cases it was the middle of the day, and in both cases, a teenager had been stabbed, once fatally and once nearly so. Another young man was shot and left to die in Tottenham Cemetery. All these green spaces are vast and idyllic.
The first poem of the year takes place in Roman streets again, in the midst of Cologne, in Sankt Andreas, the mighty mediaeval church right opposite the Cathedral. When you descend into the crypt, you are pretty close to antiquity. All around, Roman walls are displayed, or simply still standing.
For an English poem about Cologne with a similar content and in a similar style, see My City Calls (Grey Roofs Grey Walls). There, it is the city itself which provides comfort and hope, as religious faith does here. I noticed the striking parallel only yesterday on relaunching my poetry blog!
A lonely star surveys the streets. The dark is brownish, blurred by lamps. The cold is damp and slowly creeps through draughty windows, long-locked doors. Bats flit about like ghostly hands. A blinking helicopter roars; the city stirs and sighs and sleeps. The star looks down and frowns and stands.
„con… il sole che splendeva, e con una città che scintillava, letteralmente scintillava sotto la sua finestra, e un azzurro, un azzurro mai visto, sostiene Pereira, di un nitore che quasi feriva gli occhi…”
Antonio Tabucchi, Sostiene Pereira
Antonio Tabucchi (1943-2012) loved Lisbon and lived there. I wrote this poem for him when he died: his last voyage would be the one to another, even more beautiful world. The last line can, however, be interpreted in many other ways.
Illustration: “Elba — Land der Esel” by Ottilie Ehlers-Kollwitz (1955). With kind permission ofGalerie Klaus Spermann.
Christina Egan 
