Rumour Poem by Ulrike Almut Sandig

when the performance is over, the applause has died
down, when the very last image of the woman with
the child in her arms can no longer be seen in the
darkened hall, when the audience has gone back
home and has had its own children, has brought them
up and is grown imperceptibly small, smaller, and at
last disappears, when even the hall has not stood there
for years and there exist only the blueprints and a
handful of yellowing pictures to prove how uniquely
beautiful it all was, and that inside it looked like the
belly of a massive fish and that's how it sounded too
- then after all that has gone, there's still this old
rumour, that once there was something that looked
like a great and impossibly beautiful, a singing house
with two different-sized horns instead of a roof and
hundreds of wafer-thin walls spanning from gable to
gable, like otherwise only circus
tents