THE GOLD RING (REVOLUTION)

By: Hans Lucht

1.

The summer’s violent recoil is still stinging your

hand, the blind dices thrown to no avail

The days fearfully push each other forward, you first, you first

Death is a ventriloquist who makes everything

mumble, and when destiny finally taps you on the shoulder

nobody’s there, but a gold ring that rolls

all along the street and disappears down a sewer grid

2.

A belt made of horse hairs, seven hateful 

pearls, a suitcase full of money, no, the downcast children 

don’t want to inherit anything, a beautiful man 

with slicked back hair shushes you angrily in the darkened 

theater, face it, you have zero chance against 

the mannequins’ visionary plans, lightening is stopped dead 

in the sky by a child with a cell phone, the street 

party is your revolution, you’re a pear raised in a bottle

3.

In the dead of night, the day’s disasters are laid out

like Astroturf on a roll, naked in the stadium light, the silence

and the gaze from the empty spectator seats

We were always lonely together but pretty good dancers

The way you slam the car door behind you, checking 

messages on your Huawei, smoothing your skirt over the hips

Are you sure we didn’t know each other once?

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Hans Lucht is a writer and anthropologist working in Danish and English. His ethnography, Darkness before Daybreak was awarded the 2012 Elliott P. Skinner Book Award from the Association for Africanist Anthropology. Lucht has published two novels and has received grants from the Danish Arts Council and the Danish Arts Foundation. The poems belong to a larger work titled Shining Train.