In the Winterberg tunnel
the dead wait. They know
neither cold nor heat,
nor hunger nor thirst;
these trappings of life
they left behind
on the fourth of May
more than a hundred years ago.

Below the footsteps that tread 

on early snow above their tomb 

the dead wait. No one

remembers where they rest.
Only weathered letters 

in distant graveyards recall them 

as beloved sons and brothers
who fell far from home
on the field of honour.

*

The moon retreats

against the advance 

of headlamps and flashlights. Men 

mutter curses and muffle their grunts;

their spades shift the soil;
snow turns to slush,

and the dead wait

for the silence 
that will surely come

as it did in the spring of '17 

during the six-day search

for survivors.

At last

the wounding work

of the shovels ceases.
Darkness again 

envelops the hillside

and then

the single stroke of a bell

pierces dust and bone 

and desiccated flesh

and in the Winterberg tunnel

the dead wake.

...because you have died forever.
~Federico Garcia Lorca, Lament for Ignacio Sanchez Mejias


I once consorted
with the stone-wrought saints
of Old World cathedrals
but now I salt rivers
and from furrowed fields
make wastelands
because you have died forever.

*

I do not know you dead.
In my mind your hands still warm
nine-irons, and you discourse
on square-cut diamonds
and the state of the dominion.
I do not want to know you dead

and so I study Whitman’s lilacs,
Akhmatova’s poplars, imbuing myself
with the rage of Dylan Thomas;

but no one feels me like Federico --

he who has also held
the taste of oranges and almonds
on the tip of his tongue,
and who will meet you
on the other side of the sea country.

The rockets glare, and Old Glory sleeps
against the shadowed sky.

*

Though mobs might spit upon my shadow
or shower me with stones,
I will carry this flag
with a star for every sin and prayer.

*

Like an infidel from the New World
I come bearing blood,
hope, and tears.

*

If I should die among the date palms,
burn my body with the Stars and Stripes;
let there be glory in a folded flag.

I shall not be there. I shall rise and pass.
Bury my heart at Wounded Knee.
~Stephen Vincent Benet

The city seeps into my blood,
but the apple-eating bears of Montezuma
still frolic in my dreams.

*

We linger under the eaves
and gables of the grachthuizen
while Rembrandt’s dark eyes watch us
from his seventeenth-century frame.

*

In this country of coffee and concrete,
I have almost forgotten the paths
where like pilgrims we walked
ankle-deep in stars.

For Roeland, with a pair of socks from Switzerland.

A thousand days have fallen to the guillotine
since I intended this gift for you; I never thought
that so many more birthdays would pass
before I came to tell you stories of the Alpmasters
spinning flax and cotton in the Oberland.

*
*
*

Half a handful of years it’s been
since I set out on Christmas Eve
to feast and fête the birth of Our Lord
in the Hapsburgs’ western Reich.
Silver flowed from my fingertips
for souvenirs of a city
where lovers tangoed in the streets
and fireflowers bloomed
above the wine-dark river.

*

In the embers of the Old Year,
I took the train north again
across the Rhineland to polders,
disembarking at last
in the city of bishops and legionnaires.
Ultrajectum – here the Romans once bemoaned
the windswept fens as a wasteland, here Willibrord
came clutching his faith in his fist. I must admit
that I could never summon his courage
to build a cathedral in the bogs and swamps
of the Low Countries.

*
*
*

An Atlantic away, I still write my stories,
setting down the where and when
of your sapphire smile
and how your hand needed never touch mine
to feed my faith and dreams.

When you look to the west, remember me –
not among the Roman ruins, but among the aspens;
I send you socks for the day that you too return
to walk the wilds of the twenty-first century.

A message might be given to many, but those for whom it is intended, will understand.
~Rwandan proverb


Right worshipful friend,
I commend myself to you.
You alone have known me
as Dead Eyes in my earlier incarnation
and walked among my dreams
of ice floes and oranges.
Today thus I write to you
asking that you keep these words
as ever I have kept yours.

Do not go down to the sea to drown,
or seek out the fire-eyed angels
to whom you would sell
your longshanks for silver
and divine grace for mercy.
Stay warm; stay sane. Wait for me
until the Viking ships
come home from Vinland –
and in the meantime

may the hand of Christ sustain you.

Far from the king’s henchmen
the lion no longer rampant
weeps guetty argent on a field of sable.

*
*
*

Speak bitterness, Lancka.

*
*
*

Roel, I cannot tell you
that I came to love your country.
I would have given up all the earth for you,
but the desert did not relinquish me
and all my dreams still dwell in the dust.

Now I have no more poems to give away;
I know my exile and I go there gladly,
to the thunder-covered land.