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?
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.