Clouds as Guarantors

For Sabka

I am homesick for a land
where I have never been
where I will never go
where all the trees and flowers
know me
and where the clouds
remember me
meticulously
a foreigner who
has no home
in which
to cry her heart out.

I sail
to an island without a harbour.
As soon as we depart
I throw the keys in the sea.
I arrive nowhere.
My sail is like a cobweb in the wind
but it doesn't rip.
And beyond the horizon
where the great birds
at the end of their flight
dry their wings in the sun
lies a continent
where they have to admit me
without passport
with only the clouds as guarantors.

You are here

Your place is
where eyes look at you.
Where eyes meet
you come into being.

Held by one call
always the same voice,
it is as if there is just one cry
used by everyone.

You could fall,
but you don't fall.
Eyes catch you.

You are here
because eyes want you,
to look at you and say to you
that you are here.

Lesson

Everyone who leaves
teaches us a little
about ourselves.

Those most precious lessons
at the beds of the dying.
All mirrors so clear
like a lake after heavy rain,
before the hazy day
blurs the picture
yet again.

They only die for us once,
never again.
What could we ever know
without them?
Without these safe scales
on which we are placed,
when we are left.
Without these scales
nothing has weight.

We, whose words fail us,
we forget it.
And they?
They can't repeat
the lesson.

Your death or mine,
the next lesson:
so bright, so clear,
that soon it will be dark.