Whoever yearned for wholeness

was never satisfied

To be alive this morning: to be waiting for a story

yet to grip mere sentences by the hair

Things are bigger than our vague happiness

more constant than the illusion of eternal presence

stronger than the links between this consciousness and the next

Unlike a hazel bush

you cannot climb a plane tree:

bark flakes off and you fall

down on the cracked asphalt in front of the Ministry

A parade of tanks in fact

does not change space in any way

still less time

In the barrel of the gun lies the future

and the manifold past of the flesh –

under the steel there lurks

a return to the beginning

and the end

History is divided by the passage of brigades

Because of their march we

cannot get across