WHAT ANGELS ARE GOOD FOR Poem by Nachoem M. Wijnberg

To find out what you need to pay attention to before you can see what has happened to you, not others,
or is it also possible without? First see who is locked up
in the past, surrounded by stuff you can no longer find anywhere
because no one kept it.

As if you had to find out
who betrayed the world, not you, in the sense of giving it up without getting much in return
and knowing that beforehand Or would you just as easily have done the same, as if you were being asked
if you were still on the side of the angels
and you said you didn't know,
but sometimes the angels still gathered around you.

If you want to speak to someone
you only have to say the name
and they will do their best to bring that person to you. They don't stare at you if you say your own name,
but search for a few days and then dress an angel
in clothes like the ones you have bought or been given
and send him to you one afternoon.

Are you on the side of the angels
or on the side of the working man? But angels do work too, don't they? Yes, but only when others have laid down tools. But if there's a strike
angels can't take over their work, can they? If everyone is striking, no, but if it's just one person, they can.

But does an angel immediately know what to do
when he takes over someone else's work? As he didn't have anything else to do anyway,
he has spent long enough waiting and watching,
and then there's not many things
he can't do as well as those who have spent half their lives doing them. What can you do about it?

Distract the angel as long as you are still working by giving him something every now and then for someone who will accept it it,
and then it will be a long time before he is back again,
because he has no wife or children
and has to search for a long time to find someone
who is willing to keep it after the angel has said more than once that they can keep it.

If you could say what angels are good for
you must also be able to think of a way of getting by without them, a description of the world
without angels, in which you yourself deliver
what you have just given up.

Won't that mean seeing unemployed angels on the street,
on park benches,
vendors selling what you've had for ages? And if you buy it anyway, they say hopefully: there are plenty more
fish in the sea!

But if you knew a way
to get all of the angels to remember from the beginning what they had carried from whom to whom
you could use that to guess a small part
of what is coming.

Maybe there's an easier way
to do it,
but this would give the angels a little bit
of grace like happiness that is the opposite of the unhappiness that it is too cold to get undressed
while others are already naked.