IT GIVES US NOTHING Poem by Stefan Hertmans

Variations on the requiem
I

No, there is no one who will break rank and hear us
the angels are long since gone.
The hand that reaches out for silence is only given
noise in return, the falling of things,
waking in a night which, just before departure,
hoards the dreams that come with cold sweat.
For anyone who wakes from death shall not suffer
the creaking fate of never-seen birds
on a shore without a river, unless he dreams.

Peace which you can no longer ask of anyone
and which torments us above Jerusalem,
a light that shines from a million screens
and forgives us nothing, the living thing
that comes to us and doesn't hear us out.



II

There is no return for what we want to save
in the great sleeplessness we bring others
by remembering them; for he who
cannot forget gets no repose.
Even though the muezzin whines the cities awake
before cockcrow: he who dreams of redemption,
rattles with chains of hollow metal.
He who says survival has already forgotten;
in this fever there is no deliverance.
Shrill, strident, sneering, that's how the singer sounds
who promises us nothing and withholds all
that ever belonged to us.



III

It isn't work, and so it's never done;
and yet it labours through our breath,
and lies awake without us.
And doesn't listen or complain,
and is simply there but pointlessly;
it absorbs into itself everything we thought
was empty; it is no name but
it crosses itself out; it echoes without sound;
is pure deception, speaks for itself,
is prodigal and strips us greedily to the bone.
It hunts for nothing, because it knows it all.
It is inside us and works there doing nothing
frittering away at wasted time.



IV

It washes over us wave upon wave,
the images are a screen for us,
they break on something that eludes us.
It's about people in the morning train,
a bird that's fallen from its nest,
the craft that's zooming through the clouds;
it's about brimstone and pestilence
about tattered books that are blown away,
about no memories, about lying awake
thinking of one word, about feeding on revenge,
about being homeless at minus four,
infections in the medial heat,
the explosion of a satellite,
and out from under, and suddenly, and on and on,
or how on earth, without which not,
it shows no mercy and it gives us nothing.