Download PDF Here 13th Anniversary
Live Encounters Poetry & Writing Volume Two December 2022.
Elsetime, poems by Sven Kretzschmar.
Elsetime
This downpour falling is more
than sound on our cagoules,
despite a canopy of black alder leaves
still dense in September. Gales
tear cracks to bombard moist ground,
squirrels, and surprised saunterers taking
to their heels, wet heads on home.
Evening town, open roof deck door,
it is rusty jaded robots banging,
no gentle steady rain. Sewers are alive,
something pains its way into my gut,
cruel the fading of your warmth
against me.
When the empty are gone
Soft barbarians dangling on twigs in red
and orange, some still green, some others
already on toward a raid of moist earth,
undergrowth, gravel paths, mingling
with hoof prints and hollow cupules.
This early October undecided as of yet,
its good-days sky a remorseless blue
with honey-coloured hedges hiding
the sinking sun. At times, their shadows
seem more real than you. And I uphill,
past fields that, after rain-batter, appear
fen-like and bare. When all backs have been
turned, where does emptiness linger
when the empty are gone?
At home
after patrick kavanagh
She passed me on rustling forest floor, a maroon-soft lady
leashing two brisk dogs on a path attended
by the ditches of our own Rosselwood. Between her lips passed
the decline of a surprise dram I proposed. They wandered on,
the tree of them a ten-legged bundle. Her soil-sensuous smile
left me standing, pondering had I gone ahead more crisp
then comical? Days later, late winter,
a primary-school boy is catching the virus, the weather grey, cold –
appropriate for quarantining, for board games with
a maroon-soft mother and two brisk dogs, for the taking
of a pause. A taste for thought is not a waste
in the void of a silent tv, dark phone screen, and only snuffles
or the sniff of a snout reminders of a turning world,
of forests growing thick again in time with green
prickly husks in the crips air of ever-becoming,
parted, like eyelids, by occasional smiles of soil-sensuous irises.
@ Sven Kretzschmar
Sven Kretzschmar hails from Germany. His work has been published internationally, e.g., in Writing Home. The ‘New Irish’ Poets (Dedalus Press, 2019), Turangalîla-Palestine (Dairbhre, 2019), Hold Open the Door (UCD Press, 2020), 100 Words of Solitude (Rare Swan Press, 2021), Das Gedicht, Loch Raven Review, The Irish Times and more.