Sadness. Hatto Fischer

Sadness

Weary eyes

follow birds fluttering to the ground

like airplanes having lost control

in denial of the law of gravity;

that is why men no longer answer,

for too heavy have become their hearts

or as the butcher's wife would say,

they are filled with stones

due to a crisis having plastered the road

with dismal outlooks into the future.

Who has thought love depends on money,

if not the alcoholic delivered into hospital

when making the remark next recession

more divorces will follow suit

as to what happened before

when marriages broke up

and children stared out the window

to see the father gone forever.

Top down motions are made by brachial force

to leave the men without money in their pockets.

And no one knows better than those writers

who observe that even the strongest of all men

is the weakest, if he has no penny to his name.

Success counts like a well lit neon light

above the entrance door of the casino in Las Vegas

but who has heard about the contortion girls from Mongolia,

if it had not been for CNN to distract from other news

like what happened in Syria on August 21, 2013.

So cruel is that date for exactly that same day in 1968

Russian tanks crushed the Prag spring

as if no flower should endure the hot summer months

and still shine, give scent, when autumn leaves

begin to colour a landscape called 'Niemandsland'.

Once there, nobody is sure where life begins and ends

since caught in-between the living and the dead.

Men have gone silent after they walked through Auschwitz.

Others are still remorseful for having pushed the botton,

if not to drop the bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki,

then over Viet Nam while flying a jet loaded with bombs.

As if the aggression of a humanity turned wild by own disbelief

in what could have been a sanctuary here on earth,

the paper tigers burn easily up if not in the sun,

then in raging forest fires showing the force of winds.

Wings to fly over oceans are needed if to reach

other shores long left behind by immigrants

leaving Europe for North America to pay their prize,

while migrants are smuggled everywhere into Europe,

if only to dip their faces in the sand if they ever make it

to shorelines not welcoming them like women

watching the horizon of the sea to see if the men return

from Troy like Odyssey did after twenty-five years.

9.9.2013