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.
In the cool of the evening, silver-lit, when the tide of noise has receded at last, God walks along the coal-black beach to listen out for the whispering waves, to listen out for prayers and sighs, to look for golden gems in the sand, to look for purity in the hearts.
These lines were inspired by the pristinedeep-black beaches ofLanzarote,where you can find lava and, in some rare places, tiny shards of olivine.
The strange idea that God walks on earth in the evening to observe humans stems from the story of Adam and Eve, when they are still in paradise but have lost their purity of heart (Genesis 3,8).
Is this moon new or young, a sliver or a crescent, silver or golden in the deep blue, the newly deep sky, is it striking or dazzling or mesmerising?
Is this a late spring, belated and all the more welcome, bursting with life, with green, bright green, saturated with rain and sunshine, saturated with colour and heat, heat unfamiliar and all the more welcome, or is it sudden summer?
Is this life at last, is this joy, is this joy of life, is it zest, is it just new life-force or is it happiness or elation or bliss?
Reality, as it laps up against the shores of your eyes and your ears and your nose, reality as it washes over the leas of your skin and seeps beneath, cannot be captured in words, not even in verse: reality, so dense it feels like a dream, is not a dream cloud nor a word cloud.
Although this poem would make a good one, with the message of sudden summer sounding out like birdcall, flooded with light and colour, steeped in joy, as if words were written from life and for life, as if words were part of life, of the wide earth and the deep sky and the reality beyond, of the ever-flowing life-force.
Word cloud of the poem Sudden Summer (colours edited but randomly allocated).
Happiness Beyond (Word Cloud)
Your life is a green reality, it reads in large green letters, and newly young; the sky is golden at last, it states in fine golden letters, and saturated with joy; eyes and ears are bursting with wide bright light, it adds in silvery white; and at the edge there is happiness beyond colour on deep-blue ground.
These are welcome words, sudden and possibly deep, a mesmerising message from slivers of verse in your ears, from the new dream poem, from the word cloud of Sudden summer: Your life is a green reality saturated with joy under the newly young moon.
Im Dämmer schwebt der neugeborne Mond, ein unhörbares Gutenachtgeläute. Die Amsel, die auf der Antenne thront, ruft sternenklar… Mein Herz zerspringt vor Freude.
II.
Pflücken
Und immer wieder Amsel, Mond und Rose, und immer wieder Wehmut und Entzücken… Und unterm Abendstern das grenzenlose Verlangen, diesen Augenblick zu pflücken.
III.
Xylophon
Ich brauche nichts als diese Vorstadtstraße, den Blattgoldhimmel und den Vogelruf,– und dann das klare Xylophon der Sprache, die Hunderte verklärter Verse schuf.
Auf der weiten Erdenscheibe kauert meine kleine Bleibe still in pfauenblauer Nacht; und aus ungeheurer Ferne steigen unzählbare Sterne wie von Zauberhand entfacht.
Auf den unsichtbaren Gleisen durch den Weltraum aber kreisen zwei Gestirne um mein Dach: Glück muß mir das güldne schreiben, doch das grüne bringt mir Leiden,– zwei verflochten tausendfach.
On the vast orb of the earth clings my cottage to the turf, hushed in night of peacock-blue; from unfathomably far still emerges star on star, magically lit anew.
See, on secret tracks in space two celestial bodies trace orbits round my own abode: golden star and green must bring happiness and suffering – interwoven thousandfold.
For more musings on destiny, see the previous post, Zugefallen. There are sparkling stars in Zugefallen and flickering candles in the poem Zugewogen. Destiny is written in the stars, or rather, in the Heavens.
Nebra sky disk (Himmelsscheibe von Nebra), ca. 4000 years old. Photograph: JoKaliauer via Wikimedia Commons. Copyright: CC BY-SA 3.0.
Callisto, moon of Jupiter. Photograph taken by NASA’s Galileo spacecraft in 2001. NASA/JPL/DLR(German Aerospace Center), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
Christina Egan 
