German Spoken Here
It’s a perfect language for children’s songs and horror films like Fritz Lang’s M, where Peter Lorre plays a repulsive predator. “Ich muss!” he wails. His round, wide eyes grow wider as he mewls: “Help me! I can do nothing else!” It’s like what Rilke tells the young admirer who wants to know how to become a poet: “Ask yourself whether you must create… If you wouldn’t die without writing poems, don’t write them. Letters to a Young Poet? The young man wasn’t a poet and never became one. Evidently he wasn’t one of those actors, adulterers, acrobats, pastors and pianists who claim they make music or havoc in the world because they can’t do anything else. “I must!” they all say, but it’s scarier if they say it in German.
Mrs. Hughes’s Bees
lacked respect
for genius. They stung
the face and neck
of her husband—brightest,
kindest man in the world!
Later, when he left,
they turned on her.
It happened
at the Devon farm,
once loved and tended,
now bereft.
The kids, in their home-
made snowsuits,
heard the buzz
and murmur
of bees responding
to Mother’s query:
“Is it very stupid
to be happy?”
It is. It is. It is,
Mrs. Hughes.
Sarah White lives, writes and paints in Manhattan. Her most recent book is Alice Ages and Ages (BlazeVox, 2010), a book of variations. She is also the author of Cleopatra Haunts the Hudson (Spuyten Duyvil, 2007), a chapbook, “Mrs. Bliss and the Paper Spouses,” (Pudding House, 2007), a book-length lyric essay, The Poem Has Reasons: a Story of Far Love on line at www.proempress.com.