It was on March 21, 2003, World Poetry Day, when the late National Book Center was released by short poems, including the poem of the East German poet Sarah Kirs. Five wisdom lyrics all, a woman who is constantly escaping from the suffocating center that others had defined, such as the centrifugal souls of Thelma and Louise in the famous film by Ridley Scott.

Air

Nothing that can

To keep me any land

That had caught me for a long time. Everything

I was overwhelming the last

Line boat in September.

Sarah Kirs (1935-2013) was born in the then Prussian part of Thuringia, the grandfather was a pastor, the father engineer, the mother-in-law who read frantically literature. He wanted to become a forestry, eventually studied biology. In her very first poetic collection in 1965 it was clear that she was expressing a new subjectivity, not at all widespread in eastern Germany. It was nevertheless recognized in her home country in 1977 from settling in West Germany. The poetry of Kirs is usually played in a fantastic rural environment, which is traveled by the melancholic lonely ego, away from the industrialized areas and the big cities. The atmosphere of her poems owes a lot to constant silence, minimum punctuation and successive stride. With her subtle lyrics it is like trying to capture dead nature movements and hooks of the soul that would otherwise be permanently lost. A few days ago we had World Poetry Day again, let’s remember another poem about the illusion of temporary, private happiness.

Tobacco

And occasionally happens

To be very happy for

A thing of a news

The new lover the child

And to wander around yet

And with the most comprehensive things we suddenly cook

Wonderful foods we clean windows

And we sing by throwing a kiss

In the bud that just burst

On the bush in front of the door we talk

To strangers on the road

And we don’t care for the sun

The slim snow dancing lightly

Everything is familiar and familiar

So it will be forever believe

Even the awesome pictures

On television they are boosting

Here at least nothing will change we stack

Carefully the newspapers that let us sleep

Quiet until they come and gather them

We feel a vibrancy we dance and jump

Inside the furnished apartments of death.