Monday, April 26, 2004
you unlock the house in which
drifts the snow of that left unspoken.
Always what key you choose
depends on the blood that spurts
from your eye or your mouth or your ear.
You vary the key, you vary the word
that is free to drift with the flakes.
What snowball will form round the word
depends on the wind that rebuffs you."
Paul Celan
With a variable Key - Holocaust Poetry
Translated from the German
(Yes German, the language of his mother and of his mother's murderers)
