My house was shot in the war
and I don't know where even its grave lies.
But today I wonder if it really was
my house, in the house of my father,
my mother beside him, and my
brothers and sisters long ago
extinct. Was it me
in the house whose urn I bear
beneath my tongue? In the house where I would meet
cousins who long ago fled
their birthplace and today in distant
waters are already becoming fish with
golden gills? That is why, ever more often in
fish restaurants from Cologne to Kuala Lumpur,
I take from my plate the melancholy eyes of my childhood
friends. Their warm fish hearts
slide down my throat. I wonder if it was me
in the land whose bloodied head I bear
beneath another’s arm.
Nothing is mine any longer, nor
has ever been mine. I endure even memory like
a lost river that divides me into two,
that tears me apart into a thousand
and one deltas to the four corners of the
earth, so that I may never more
give a thought to the threshold over which,
at the last moment, I escaped into the world.