Hong Kong 1997

Have you seen the builders of this city,

these analphabetic acrobats

climbing upon bamboo scaffolds into the sky?

Have you bought the cheapest pants in the world

and slept in its greatest in quantity expensive beds?

Have you coughed in the sooty vapor of the temples,

smell the deluges of perfume

rising from the cesspools?

Have you heard the clatter at the gambling caverns

and the howling at the stock exchange?

Have you seen the tourists,

rubbing their organ of sights

exhausted with shopping, pink giant shrimps

behind the tinted glass of their buses?

No, this city, where a hundr flowers are fading,

can't possibly exist. It is a pipe dream,

it's a hallucination, a fraud,

a science fiction opera, a wobbly bewilderment

HANS MAGNUS ENZENSBERGER is single of Germany's most distinguished men of alphabetic characters He has published some thirty volumes of poetry and nonfiction. Lighter Than Air, in which these piece of poetrys appear, will be published in the spring by dint of The Sheep Meadow Press.

REINHOLD GRIMM is Distinguished Professor of German and Comparative Literature at the University of California at Riverside.

Copyright World metrical composition Incorporated Jan/Feb 2001

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