curtain sermon, The

Those who climb on the outside of the confessionals:

half-used-up athletes,

outside, in forehead of the portal

they gasp for air again,

want-

as admitting that were usual-

to receptacle with a sun

or bend the rain.

But sweeter than beer,

dearer than small substanceed women,

more mortal still than tobacco

it is to spend

one's vacation,

these scarcely any godless days

with the curtains

in the garden of tulle

Long-distance runners

rest here,

find in each mystical mesh

comfort and forgiveness;

like yesterday's fly

dried-out, without desire,

that sole keeps still:

a new share of the curtain.

From time to time midges,

close relatives of angels,

a word

that escapes the radio

speaks of water horizontals and weather,

of the approaching hurricane Rosa,

that obtains closer and closer to us,

yet is still far away, far away.

Do not say: O God

--that's not valid here--say:

Holy cheap curtain,

sweet withered curtain,

thou hast invented honey

the palateless pleasure of madmen,

the early unimpaireds mother-of-pearl-

receive me now.

Who wanted redemption,

called for the doctor or milk?

Now they come: priests and ambulances,

nurse and nuns

With spiritual body s and carbolic,

with organ and ether,

with spectacles and with Latin they review my afterlife,

and burn my curtains.

Gunter Grass, born in Danzig in 1927 is Germany's greatest in quantity celebrated contemporary writer. His greatest in quantity recent work is The Call of the Toad, a novel. These metrical compositions are from Novemberland: Selected piece of poetrys 1956-1993, translated by Michael Hamburger.

Michael Hamburger lives in Suffolk England. He is co-translator, with Christopher Middleton, of a previous Grass volume In the Egg and Other piece of poetrys published by Harcourt Brace in 1978

Copyright World numbers Incorporated Mar 1996

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