Flowers of Horror
People who love flowers
Cannot be bad
Says the proverb.
But take the insight
With a grain of salt
For malignant hands
Can turn flowers
Into graceless means
Of lies and deception.
During World War II
The National Socialists
Perfected the dark art
Of deceit by exploiting
The beauty of nature
To disguise and shroud
Their fiendish goals
Of ruin and destruction.
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poem by Paul Hartal
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Love Knows Not 'Why?
You can touch a stone, a tree or a flower
But not the human heart, he thought
Isolated from the conversation,
Which went on faintly luminous
Non-stellar formations, elliptical shells,
Amorphous cosmic clouds, lunar crevasses
And the conquest of space by man.
But his mind was wandering far away
Contemplating there is no ‘why? ’ in love
(“Quod quaeris,
‘Quare? ’ non habet ullus amor.”)
Pondering things that happened last night,
How happy they were, delighted and ecstatic
Sweet trembles fading on the winding path.
Yet the magic now is over
Just a blurred memory remains
Less than a forget-me-not,
A windflower or a daisy
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poem by Paul Hartal
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Grandma
Above the bed
Old photos stared down
Solemnly from the wall.
Behind the glass frame
Grandpa wore
His grey uniform
Of the Great War;
Grandma her sombre dress.
She died before I was born
And grandpa shortly after.
The only grandparent
That I knew was
My mother’s step mother.
For some reason
She did not get along well
With my parents
But I basked
In the warmth of her
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poem by Paul Hartal
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The Science of Freedom
For Joseph Beuys,1921-1986
The coordinates of history are the masters of fate:
Where and when we are born determine paths of destiny.
You were fascinated by art but worked as a circus acrobat.
You enrolled to study medicine but Hitler’s war came
And you volunteered to fly in the Luftwaffe.
Diving almost vertically from the skies
You were a rear gunner on a JU 87 Stuka bomber.
Plunging downward with accelerating speed,
The sirens on the wheels screaming terrifyingly in the wind,
Your plane descended on its targets, bringing devastation
And horror to distant lands and nations.
And then,
On a deadly mission in 1943,
Russian fire hit your plane
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poem by Paul Hartal
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Richard Feynman's Woodpecker
Under a cloudy sky
A hammering woodpecker
Drilled and drummed
On a tree branch
With her chisel-like bill tip.
Then a physicist stepped out
Of his house into the haze
Billowing over the street.
He scratched his bald head
And brooded and pondered
Contemplated and thought
Of the opaque secret of light.
Well, he said, nowadays
Of course we already know
That light can be
Both a particle and a wave,
A stream of arcane photons
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poem by Paul Hartal
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The Women of China
Once a crowd of beautiful ladies descended
to the waterfront in Xian and Du Fu saw them.
It was the third day of the third month, the time
of the Lustration Festival. In those days
the ancient capital of China was still called Chang-an,
the city of Perpetual Peace, and Du Fu was a famous poet
during the reign of the Tang Dynasty.
However, he disliked the wasteful luxury of the women
he saw at the waterfront and the depravity
in which they were immersed.
These beauties, he said, were as flamboyant and arrogant
as gentle and elegant. The skin on their marvelous bodies
was delicate and jade pendants framed their temples.
They wore exorbitant gowns made of silk,
embroidered with gold peacocks and silver unicorns.
But the women that I saw in China thirteen centuries later
were very different. I saw them working hard on the fields
and in factories. Simply dressed, they walked
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poem by Paul Hartal
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The Divorce of the Moon
The day arrived
And the engineers came.
They turned on the new lamps.
These cutting- edge outdoor lanterns
Glared with enormously powerful lights,
Flooding the whole blue planet
With shining effulgence.
The lights were very radiant.
They shone
With such brilliant incandescence
That the night completely disappeared
From the Earth.
The Moon became very pale then
And felt she was not needed anymore.
Betrayed and heavy hearted
She decided to abandon the Earth.
And so in the small hours of a Friday
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poem by Paul Hartal
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Medals
An enormous explosion threw the boy out of his bed.
He woke up on the carpeted floor, wiping out with his left hand
the crumbs of an interrupted dream. The room shook up as
another bomb detonated nearby with ear-piercing noise.
Shimmering red patches of light flared up in the dark ink
of the night.
Mother rushed into the room panic-stricken taking him down
in a hurry to the bomb shelter. This was merely a basement
shared with other people during the bomb raids.
When the sirens sounded the all clear sign it was already
morning. In the apartment the latched doors had burst off
their hinges. The window glasses shattered into a variety
of splinters and the striped curtain in the living room
became a colony of ribbons.
Looking out of the windowless room he saw long tongues
of flames shooting up from an incendiary bomb that fell on
the pavement. And then starting with a strange swishing
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poem by Paul Hartal
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Dove of Peace
Peace is more than
the absence of war,
enveloped in the ovum
of a tranquil repose.
Peace is more than
the phoenix rising
from the ruins
of Stalingrad and Berlin.
Peace is more than
the terrible silence
of the ashes of Hiroshima
and Auschwitz.
For, real peace rests
in all nations just,
in accord and friendship,
mutual respect and trust.
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poem by Paul Hartal
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Medical Statistics
A wild snowstorm was raging in the city.
It was dark and the streets were deserted.
A savage wind hooted and shook the trees.
It blew the snow into her eyes.
Bundled up in winter clothes
Penny sped up the pace of her steps,
Hurrying to reach the safety of home.
The long ribbon of her red scarf
Flew and flopped in the roaring gale.
The roads were slippery and treacherous.
At a wrong step she stumbled and fell.
She landed with her outstretched hands
On the concrete sidewalk,
Hitting hard the icy surface.
In the hospital an orthopedic surgeon
Examined the x-rays. He diagnosed
A distal radius and ulna fracture
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poem by Paul Hartal
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