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the thing which blew at us from large, inhabited trees
was at home deep
in the time of conversations, tree talk
was tree cake and lay
heavy at home, like a bone at rest that had
as we kids often shouted been on its way
before your time, it had stridden across the fields
and breathed on them, and we had
long and happily known to praise it, we saw
that even our father loved it, called it
a memory prop, his heart’s
signal box and the seed stock
of footsteps barely taken now, of crawler
vehicles, of ores and oils, broken from
his walking quarters, far beyond
the Culmitzsch dams, torn far from
a strange job near Selingstädt
with the Russian ores, their oils. and although
we should have long been asleep
we’d crowd down to mother, when father
went about at night and roared
the bone the white was the bones
with Russian oils and ores
as we said to ourselves, he smells the ore, it’s the bone, yes
he’d climbed the spoilheaps
known the mines, the caterpillar tracks, the water, the schnapps
and so slid homewards, discoverer of the overburden,
we hear it ticking, it’s the clock, it’s
his Geiger counter heart
Lutz Seiler (trans. Stefan Tobler)