I am the shadow for you to hide beneath Poem by Ulrike Almut Sandig

DEAR FRIENDS, PLEASE DON'T MISUNDERSTAND
we don't know each other yet. I don't even know
myself. every morning up I get and don't have a clue:
is it me, Almut? Ulrike? just who was that child under
its mother's skirts? I am the mother, I am the daughter
I am the shadow for you to hide beneath
I am a field full of rapeseed, give cover to deer
and shine like thirteen oil-paintings laid one on top
of the other. I am the landscape, I am the huntress
at home on the open plain, sitting in the raised hide
at the forest's edge counting the deer in the field. my friends
do you see my hair cropped short? I shall let it fly loose
in the wind. I am a text that begins to unravel
just as it reaches an end, just a bit of a soldier
his brows perhaps, his calves or that gallows humour
that he would lose the day he failed to give the order
to shoot to a miserable line of shivering soldiers
because he had seen in the even more miserable line
before him a pregnant girl. I am that girl.
I am the row of thirteen rifles, I am a military
court martial. I'm not a well-behaved child
that only unties her hair in secret and lets it fly loose
in the wind! I am a sprite, the wild-eyed wind, child
of the skies, and turn about a tower with a high balcony
where a woman stands and secretly, silently unties her hair.
but no, I'm not that woman there, and if I am

I never want to be her again. please understand, dear friends