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Best Poems From
ERHARD HANS JOSEF LANG
(January 8,1957)
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37.
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Modern Boy Lost On His Goggles' Radar
Modern tools of communication topple like
Castles of sand in a sham race of techno-evolution.
A modern boy lost
In search for that radar
That until yesterday had served
His micro-macro Hertzian eye of an ever bountiful booty
From today's globe-spanning trade net market of
Free communication & information read
And the boy who became one of its exalted extending wielders,
Is now left to be a reader with a blinded eye.
How can the boy now get the rest of
The whole tale 'of gods and men' - he had
Started to retrieve for his readings
If all of a sudden not anymore
Served down onto his handy fawn of old
As ever before?
- Once hung out on this global station of
Webbed shoals of ether
- Now hung up on blinded goggles
Raised like a farmer's wonder chicken,
And then slaughtered, just like any other poor old hen...?
But oh, dear Boy, you need not lose your head over such triflings!
Why not learn to re-evaluate
The toys that you choose to give splendor
To your games of life - that will make you content
In a fast renewing world?
Take up once a nostalgic seat
For this purpose
Within the playgrounds of your fathers' times
For a moment or two - for a game
More of an inner quest,
And from there then overlook, dear Boy,
The working fields of your modern day -
Once with different eyes -
From the heights of a time-tested past
That the big heralds of the modern money makers age
So vainly want to make believe as completely outrun
And you will find, dear Boy, there is
No need for you to go into the forest.
We all get ourselves raised on sparklings of hope
And sometimes on something new we thought we could hold on to,
From where we but suddenly get dropped.
That's life.
And it's good we know
The choices after the failures are ours!
(written at the end of October in 2006 on the occasion of the sudden
functional curtailing of a once big-time web-wap converter for the use on
mobile phones, as applied by countless people all around the world,
which the server company first had allowed them to become used to over a
number of years ahead of the mentioned cut in their services provided -
an example of the futility of modern innovations in terms of real
life-enhancing quality)
Erhard Hans Josef Lang
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38.
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Money And Words Of Value Under Crucifixion
My Mom used to say:
All that you do, my son, is mere trash,
When you can't turn it into cash,
Whatever the truth you see or speak.
And I heard many others say so, too.
Now I question myself:
Then how does it come,
As that is the good people's standard,
That they themselves, as if with forlorn babies' eyes,
In utmost confident abandon,
Often, almost daily, look up in prayerful moods to One,
Whose saintly words once were well benign and of
The nature of a God-like preacher man,
That but never made Him a single dime or even a cent,
In the end, the preacher Himself only badly slammed and even nailed up,
For all of the treasured words He spread.
How these unpaid-for words of such a priceless soul
Managed, all the same, to
Get themselves affixed for so long over time,
Through milleniums to come
Under the rising and sinking sun,
As THE ever-flowing source of one-&-only true inspiration
And those words keeping themselves yet
Ever renewed through nostalgic sad-sweet sermons on
Physically crossed spiritual truths about the making of man -
Otherwise so highly acclaimed a question of money?
Once benign and saintly words of an unpaid preacher man, whose
life-story
Through millenniums to pass
Has been taken by ever-growing masses of people on the globe as
THE Wholesome Pepper Pill to cure the tongues of all unholy babblers? ?
Or were they paying Him for raising the spirits of the uneasy crowds
Surging to the mountains,
Paying Him for washing greedy wine-bibbers' eyes in their vain
mansions,
Paying Him for making the death-stricken suddenly forget about
The living not worthy of being remembered,
And the ones fallen lame forget about the walks of life of those
guilty?
Nay, they made Him even pay for it - as we all know -
For the good he has sown and strewn
Pay with His own blood so unforgivingly
As that they're seen curdling that wronged blood
Until to-day - two-thousand years into time.
Therefore nowadays, feeling kind of obliged,
They make sure to be paying even
All their minor preachers of the day,
Those who think they have something to sermon on,
And, to be sure, all the clowns, too,
On top of more serious miracle men, even more so.
And that's why my Mom even used to say to me:
All that you do, my son, is mere trash,
When you can't turn it into cash,
Whatever the truth you see or speak.
But I hope that now, after reading this poem,
There will be a few more of you who
Judge a poor poet or poor philosopher again
By the old Aramaic standards -
And not only by your more fortunate sons' values in
What you yourselves couldn't reach up to in life-
In spite of all your words and your money.
* * *
I recommend readers to take a look at my Votelet page and eventually cast a personal vote at http: //www.network54.com/Votelet/38264 on the issue of abolishing money
Erhard Hans Josef Lang
Erhard Hans Josef Lang
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39.
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Motion For Peace (translation)
With wet traces yet of the embittered quarreling
in our eyes that we have pinched together
we are biting ourselves fast onto each other
angrily anxious to celebrate our reconciliation
creamy drops of maddened cardiac blood
cleansing us, making us pure again
as you are stabbing me,
I am devouring you
we're hooking on to each other with our claws
to expell the anger with our loins
we tear each other's throats out
with our angry teethy kissing,
mangle each other
only to be restoring ourselves again under tears of despondency,
nailing each other to the wall,
to the table, to the bed
for licking up our wounds and bruises mutually
the ground is tainted with our passion for each other
we'll be getting mellow only then
when death with small steps comes rolling over us
enfolding us once more
as we are gasping snuggled into one another
caressing the red-pearled traces of our scratches
the air after that bad weather being clean
reeking of beastly lust
as I passionately love to be dying with you
a thousand times like in an explosion.
by Sappho of Ancient Greece (ca.630 - 570 B.C.)
freely retranslated into English by Erhard Hans Josef Lang after a
translation into German by philologist Sabine Rφmmer
Erhard Hans Josef Lang
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40.
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No Bars To Blooming Spirits In A Big World
'Why not swing me over one fast pilsner under the counter,
After all, both you and me, we live in the same village! '
Carried on along the happy mood of
the date & dance house night's boiling over
the Ladies and gentlemen to each other,
the waitresses and waiters,
and the boss respectively to the booming club,
the combo's nippy-nappy musicians to
their dance tune's swaying feet of lovers,
I, the bartender, feeling myself then perfectcy unwatched,
getting attracted to the one guest from
my place with a request as a friend,
my villager man got his bonus drink sideways
cunningly without the charges.
Anyhow, I took the freedom of pouring for myself,
in between the thirsty rush of all the socializing business,
all the while, one at a time,
testing all various expensive customer drinks
behind the counter always for free, as well,
something that my companions waiting on the revellers themselves
gave me envious looks for.
But sometimes it seems alright to
push on things a little with a dab
for a friendly mate to get to his lucky coin,
when a deserved sphinx gift.
Did it matter then, that I never before had
talked to the man even once?
I remembered having seen a few times his face
around our place home
from beyond a dozen of its hills
it took to get to our fair secret love-fanners' lair.
And it was on that night, I came to take note of
another outstanding male.
And from then on I had seen this slim
good-looking ladykiller and fine elegant dancer
with the imposingly erect posture
almost every other week
come over to
our club and softly carry away
the most beautiful of our regular lady visitors.
Wednesdays, and on weekends, our
happy dance-club diner Rotisserie in the cosy
south of Germany, in those fat years yet,
a five-hundred seater restaurant,
was getting so busy, that a bartender,
whose job it is to dash out all the drinks & refreshments
ordered, hardly finds a time niche to
smoke a fast faggot in between the waiters' calls.
In this job there is no time to talk
in private much to any customer.
But there is time to watch and see.
With the swinging dance rhythms always in the ears.
One comes to recollect the most striking figures among the guests
one used to have hanging around.
To me, definitely it was that one very good dancer,
with that upright posture,
a man seemingly very popular with the ladies then.
After nine months of doing that job,
all the way through the hottest carnival season,
Burnt out enough I was to quit it and lay it down.
Times of changes naturally bring people
that once used to know each other asunder.
And also I lost sight of all of them there in that club,
and the memory of my admiration for
that one imposing dancer also slowly faded away.
'Haven't I seen that face already somewhere, '
Some fifteen years later on in time,
I said to myself, when one sunny afternoon
I was on the highway on my walk home,
looking suddenly into the eyes of a stranger,
standing there, all out of the blue,
on the other side of the road,
there in the place of my long-time new chosen home
in an island country in the Far East.
And I talked to him, this time, yes, I did.
I was not an overbusied bartender anymore.
And well, it was him, that one dancer
admired once in my memories,
And he said he had thought the same as I, at once, too,
that my face somehow was familiar to him.
Belatedly, thus, I came to know of his story
when he danced yet there in the Rotisserie of the old days
(the once famous club no longer existed anymore) :
His wife had then awakened her erstwhile
slumbering lesbian nature, and shacked up with
another of the same feathers
she fell in love with,
so the poor man simply agreed to
their souls' separation on friendly terms,
and took his consolation out at
dancing it away right there
where, at the time, I was in charge of
filling their glasses.
He told me all that,
and that now he wouldn't need to
go to such clubs anymore,
since he was in a happy love liaison now
with a native girl in the Far East
where we then met.
Once I had been his unknown bartender
who came to admire him.
He then, of all
the billions of possible places in the far, wide world,
had come to be my street neighbour, for a time,
all by God's will, -
'There is no coincidences in the world' -
as my new old friend,
not only a good dancer and lover,
but even an insightful and extreme thinker,
had put it himself.
For long again he has been lost and out of sight.
Erhard Hans Josef Lang
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