Poet-Today ~ Michal Musialowski ~ The Arts-Muse Fair

       

   

A BALLAD FOR NAREHET

There was a time

Sweet, sweat time

Water turning into wine

Spring aborting life

Tame and shy

There was a time

of a shadow and a cross

hanging across the road

on a bed of nails

And so Sybil said:

"EineWahrheit, ein Land, einGott!"

and we died like dogs

"Beautiful dogs!"

trying to understand

and stand under

the regime of middle-aged Gods

while nervously sucking

rotten milk from Madonna's breasts

When we took the sandy path

the swarm was beyond Caronte

flowing into the heart of darkness

into the inferno

like a muddy river of sperm

mixing with the salty Mediterraneo

Among oil stains and fish

we swam

ON THE OTHER SIDE

OF TRAIN TRACKS

In the beginning was the Word

That ripped the silence with violence;

My beginning is screaming with my end

Echoed among crossroads of alleys

The shades of me

Lie in fragments and await

Like an agonizing patient

Cut by the injustice of a new dawn.

The moments will scar with the unknown

Carried by raindrops of thunder

In my beginning is your Word

That ripped the violence with silence;

The fragile light shivers with the unknown

Waiting patiently for the wonder

The world whispers the lonely notes

And trembles with the will of surrender;

The savage dance of gasping souls

Stutters speechless

In trembling drops

And the rain stops.

On the other side of the train tracks

Let there be a piece of a feeling

In my end is my beginning.

REQUIEM FOR FEARLESS INSANITY

“I have heard the key

Turn in the door once and turn once only

We think of the key, each in his prison

Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison”

T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land

I’m breaking the wall of the walls around me

To reach out and flow

With the cacophony of cathartic casualties;

 The notes of a dawn rub against the tide

- The evening spreads angst -

(rage decomposing on a grassy soil of love)

Remember the dying stars;

So blinding bright

To awake the corpses

And feed the soil with seeds of light

When the spring was yet to come

They sailed

Around narrow scars of a gasping past

And the rooftops were covered with dust.

I’m sewing the scars for the years to come

For everyone I loved

For everyone I love

Still

Does the water flood my river with dreams;

Unreal scenes (a suicide of the night)

Unspoken sins (screams)

I celebrate alone

The handful of life

Dropping from dead trees

And the rooftops were covered with lust.

Shadow-painted lips kiss in a broken choir:

“At the funeral of the day

I will be wearing nothing

But the crown of thorns

Of my fearless desire”

The crosses on the map

Mark the silent crossings

Of our vagrant alleys

The evening spreads us

Like a million tiny seeds dancing in the fire.

*****

Michal Musialowski is a poet, organiser and scholar born in Poland. He lives in Germany where he teaches Migration and Cultural Studies and researches Nigerian Poetry at the Carl von Ossietzky University in Oldenburg. In 2019 he visited Nigeria where he encountered Nigerian literature firsthand, met and engaged with Nigerian writers and academics.