My beautiful old ones are disappearing
slowly. They simply leave,
without rules, without a farewell.
They stoop down to reach a clothes-peg
and turn into earth.
Just for a day, their names
invade a modest space in the morning paper
and then withdraw before news of the war.
They leave behind their diaries, their letters, and new suits
readied for their funerals long ago. They pass
like a breeze through the curtains of an abandoned apartment.
And we forget their names.
Like that of the retired captain from the ground floor
we spent half the day burying because the graveyard
was shelled so heavily we had to hide in his grave.
For three years, he wrote letters to an imaginary son
and piled them in a shoebox.
Like that of a former employee of a former bank
whose diaries I bought from some refugee children just before
they started to make paper airplanes.
They were written in invisible ink.
Like that of my neighbour whose whole family had been
massacred in his village,
who had given me the battery radio
he always had with him
before we carried him out of the basement.
He had never bought batteries or tried to switch it on.
It is snowing outside. Just like last year.
Surrounded by keepsakes whose meanings left with the old people,
I try to decipher sorrow’s secret handwriting, that message which
allows a
snowman to watch
a sunrise with indifference.
Or have I already deciphered the message?
Why else would I have forgotten
to switch on the radio at a time when the news from the front
threatened to overpower my need
for letters to nobody, and diaries in which nothing is written?
While it is snowing outside. Just like last year.
