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Best Poems From
ERHARD HANS JOSEF LANG
(January 8,1957)
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21.
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Lullaby To The Longing (translation)
Take, O Beloved, your head into your hands and listen up.
I shall sing you a song.
I'll sing for you of woes, of death and of endings.
I'll sing for you of the ending that parted us.
Come with me and close your eyes,
I shall rock you in a cradle now,
We'll both now dream of happiness,
We'll both now dream the goldenmost of lies.
We'll dream ourselves far away, back far away.
And lo, in our dreams, Beloved,
Days full of light do come back again.
Forgotten the hours full of pangs and emptiness,
Of sadness and suffering and renunciation.
Yet then, our awakening, Beloved, will be a sombre one -
Ah, everything will be more empty than ever -
Oh, if only these dreams could re-establish my happiness,
Chase away these wild-hot woes of mine!
* * * * * * * * *
a poem by Jewish Nazi concentration camp victim Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger (1924 -1942)
in its original German:
Schlaflied für die Sehnsucht
O lege, Geliebter, den Kopf in die Hände und höre.
Ich sing' dir ein Lied.
Ich sing' dir von Weh und vom Tod und vom Ende.
Ich sing' dir vom Ende das schied.
Komm. schließe die Augen,
Ich will dich dann wiegen,
Wir träumen dann beide vom Glück.
Wit träumen dann beide die goldensten Lügen,
Wir träumen uns beide weit, weit zurück.
Und sieh nur, Geliebter,
Im Traume da kehren wieder die Tage voll Licht.
Vergessen die Stunden, die wehen und leeren,
Von Trauer und Leid und Verzicht.
Doch dann - das Erwachen, Geliebter, ist Grauen -
Ach, alles ist leerer als je -
Oh, könnten die Träume mein Glück wieder bauen,
Verjagen mein wild-heißes Weh!
Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger
Erhard Hans Josef Lang
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22.
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Man Wasn't Meant To Trudge On For Ever In The Mire
People can never stand to admit that times have changed
And that time had come to do away with the old decrees.
'Wouldn't it mean to admit our fathers
who initiated the decrees were wrong? '
The communists didn't get over their Stalins and Lenins,
until dissatisfied hordes of their people finally
came to slash all of them off their feet.
While it could have been so easy: just to get together and,
coming to the conclusion
something completely new had to be started,
a whole new world of a system,
to decide to make it happen
that from the following day on
it will be orange where
red had been the color of the day -
for a well-founded try.
But no! : 'wouldn't it be equal to a slap in the face of
our elders who had founded the current principles? '
Imagine they'd come and legalize all of a sudden things
that their fathers for some reason had prohibited by law,
and many, many citizens, over time, had gone to jail
for breaking that law,
although they now had all the best reasons
to revoke the old ban,
still they wouldn't do so, against all better insights and
insider advices of their time,
not because they were bad,
not because they didn't care,
but because....
- not only of the dreaded numbers of culprits
possibly to be indemnified -
but because they just can't 'admit that
how their fathers had handled things was plain wrong.'
But what they don't know, all
those who argue like that, is:
their very fathers would have most probably,
supposed they had lived in their own days,
made exactly these changes
required by the altered needs of time,
that they are not ready to make -
in the names of themselves, their fathers.
Their fathers were visionaries, revolutionaries and human adventurers.
They are but cowards, boot lickers, and an unprogressive lot.
The day these obnoxiously stubborn ones of today will meet up in heaven with their fathers,
their fathers will look down on them.
They had not understood the latters' messages at all.
Stalin, in heaven, might want to make friends rather
with the ones who toppled the Berlin Wall,
than still to pose in heaven on and on,
to be praised evermore by those stubborn
blind-folded estranged foolish
heroes from the latter days
who had imprisoned a once great soul to
its corpse on a changing earth without far-sightedness.
Now this is something that applies,
not only to the communists, now gone,
but to many many other factions, sects,
religions, ideologies amidst the miseries of today's world.
If something is practically just
not good to any people on the globe,
then it ought to be eventually discarded
and done away with as something wrong
and to be overcome,
whatever it might be what had been said or
written once by those who lived in another time and age.
On what is the will to change for better to be based?
On God's pledge to fulfill himself by becoming Man.
God's hands seem to have got tired
from all the kneading to shape His man.
Man, why don't you want to meet our God
midways and be of help in His endeavor! ?
Remember, God doesn't need you to make himself better,
but you could need Him, to overcome your cowardice,
to stand up and start something better,
in the face of your smiling forefathers.
Man, learn to discern what is good with your traditions,
and does no harm,
from what had been misunderstood,
and needs to be changed,
and act accordingly -
for the better of our whole human lot.
Erhard Hans Josef Lang
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23.
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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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24.
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Personalized Overflow Of Three Rivers' Mighty Confluence
Threefold is the source of the fluid-liquid element.
The flow of rivers on the Earth
Are but imitations of the flowing principle and
The tides in cosmic spheres, as it is,
On the planetary plane.
The streaming of the fluid elements in all of this station Earth's waterways,
In its unseeable, though most widely spread momentum
Is kept aflowing with its fuel for the rover's mobility ever self-generated
From the deepest gurgling in the underground plants of
The Earth's cisterns and caverns
Through Nature's raingod-supervised complex recycling machinery,
Working in between the laden skies,
The catalyzing agents of the air we all breathe, and
The solid soiled grounds below our feet,
Way up and way over, for all of them, in the end,
In most tremendous onslaughts of power in Nature at work,
Jointly flowing in unison of biggest nature,
Grandest scene of all times and
Throughout the three worlds of current elements in the universe,
Yet to be gushing
Into these most paleo-ontological and hugest ocean beds of ours
On the surface of this planet earth of oddmost spinnings.
As in some instances the mystic triad of the many-layered cosmic fluidum
Comes to even manifest itself,
In moody display of a weaponry of arms of an ordinance
Higher than the plainly disorganized physical
And organized human plane,
A show by spirited gods with a naughty interest in making certain matters coincide,
As a figure of three-in-one, in the very landscapes
Where divine Nature's human think-tank heads sport about -
'Hey, can't you really, really remember me any more, after all? ' -
While a traveller through Southern India's highlands, and
The only third-party member in a group of
Otherwise British and local Tamil girls and boys,
I was about to break away from so I'd be
Free to take a different route more appealing to my personal interests,
As I was standing on a corner,
The hushed voice of a deep and long, silent stare into my eyes
By a foreign face, which came out of the blue,
Spoke to me
The face of a young traveller, another German, like myself,
Who had come near where I was standing to meet with me.
Only after eventually lending speech to what
His eyes fixed on me could not reveal
It became clear to me that the young tourist was
My one-time chance lodge mate in another South Indian
Highland spot, not all too far from where we then met again,
Some two years prior to our renewed seeing each other.
During our first short time together
I had become used to be looking into the face of a companion
With long shiny hair billowing down onto his shoulders,
With whom I then had gone on one day
On a long walk-about out in nature through forests and mountain villages
Within the range of the hillstation where we both and his then girl-friend were lodged,
Whereas the young man's mane from times before
At that second instant of our meeting one another had been no more.
My unexpected newly met friend from before,
In addition to the travel company in whose hired van
I had come up to that very town there
With me, myself, thus was to make up for a set of three -
Who, each of us, then had happened to be, at the same time,
At a place of confluence of three rivers
In a highland town - called Three Rivers -
'Munnu aaru' in the language of South India,
Named so after three rivulets that
Unite into one stream of current
Right there at Munnaar,
In the borderland between the Indian states of Kerala and Tamil Nadu.
Three of a kind swept onto the same shore
On the brinks of chance with the flow of time,
Is a deep cosmic event that
Hails from spheres higher than our small world's,
As such an engaging source of inspiration that reminds us also to
Get the world moving on by resolute leaps of triple strides.
Causes and reasons, pleadings and reasonings,
Decisions and intentions,
When only the gods are in a mood to be smiling on us,
Will work themselves out at once
In Three Rivers, flowing together.
Erhard Hans Josef Lang
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