Robert Gray 

Übersetzer:in

The crematorium for the city of Nice
is fenced in, ten kilometres up the Var,
between small industries and mangold fields:
an amphitheatre built in a quarry,
like a modern temple for Queen Hatschepsut.
Arabesques ornament lightweight concrete
with white bombast: set pieces of the canna bloom
and of poppy stalks. Ragged
and plagued, sunken and treeless,
a place of sixty thousand urns.
The wind organs over the car park, as if ash still groans.
Two guards, north African,
faces that wait for a beating,
hoist bottles of butane
onto a trolley, and these are pushed toward the interior
in a gleam of flashlights.