4

‘ … dichte und schöne Fenster.’

‘Well-sealed and nice windows’ are what Frau Merkel

the German Chancellor

thinks epitomise what’s best

about her country

its core value

the key performance indicator

establishing its point of difference

from draughtier places

or places where the cold gets in

as perhaps it did up north along the Baltic shoreline

when Heinrich and Maria were young

bashing the pump to get ice out of its spout

(I imagine)

while a warm breeze from the Pacific

pressed its dream to their chilblained cheeks

with an aroma of tropical coconuts

whenever the bread oven was opened.
It’s four in the afternoon

and already a three-quarter moon

floats white-faced like a seasick sailor

in the darkening sky

above the apartments across the street

where well-sealed windows

are lit from within like little dioramas

whose fragments of life

flit across the provisional warmth of the present.
5

Min Modersprak, wa klingst du schön!

‘My mothertongue how sweet you sound’

wrote Klaus Groth

(1819-99)

the founder of Plattdüütsch dialect literature

so I’m told

by the lowlands-1.net website

where my distant relative appears in a portrait

with wavy silver hair

which I imagine will be repeated

by the statue of him I’ve heard about

somewhere in Kiel

up there on the freezing Baltic coast

where his head’s been crowned with snow

in the home-town of his cousin

my great-grandmother

Maria Josephine Catharina

which I hope to visit when the weather warms up

and the distinguished locks of Klaus Groth

will have thawed to the auburn tint of bronze

as if henna’ed in defiance of time.
I arrived with little enough German in my kit

let alone the sort Klaus loved

as if language was a mother

at whose breast he’d drunk speech

which his friend Brahms made into songs

sung by Maria’s sister Sophie

who ‘cut some ice’ as a soprano

in the operatic world up there.
How much English

did Maria come ashore with

in 1876

and was it the Brahms settings of Groth’s Modersprak

that she sang while taking loaves from the oven

in the draughty kitchen

in Bute Street Wellington

while an icy southerly rattled the windows

weder dicht noch schön?
11

Regentropfen aus den Bäumen

‘Raindrops from the trees’

was inscribed by Klaus Groth on the 2nd of May 1856

in a copy of the third edition of his book of poems Quickborn

to which had been added the High German

Hundert Blätter: Paralipomena zum Quickborn

(‘One Hundred Leaves: Supplement to Quickborn’)

for his new friend Johannes Brahms

to whom he was connected

through the family of his wife Doris

who was modest about her musical accomplishments

but unstinting in admiration

for her husband’s poetry.
Brahms set ‘Regentropfen’ to music in 1871(Op.59, 4)

but didn’t publish it in his lifetime.
Groth’s ‘hundred leaves’ grew not from the Modersprak

for which he became famous

after the publication of Quickborn in 1852

but from the High German of Hundert Blätter

for which he was mocked

and soon forgotten.
The Plattdüütsch dialect of the composer’s childhood in Hamburg

‘is something different from language’

Brahms demurred.
‘I’ve tried it

it doesn’t work.’
But perhaps he anticipated the titters

of his sophisticated Viennese audience

rather than the grateful fervour of his home-town.
Even his one attempt

‘Da geit en Bek de Wisch entlang’

was first set to music in 1862

by the 18 year-old upstart Friedrich Nietsche.
The Brahms setting descended into obscurity

first published in 1889 or 99

and performed for Groth’s 80th birthday in 1899

and then

‘lost’.
Brahms already dead two years earlier

having earlier still

wounded the poet by declaring

‘You know nothing about music.’
The forgiving

and helpful letters of Klaus Groth

as well as the helpful

and affectionate letters of his wife Doris

which Brahms seldom answered.
In September 1878

at a rehearsal of works by Brahms in Hamburg

the Danish composer Niels Gade saw Groth

‘a ridiculous figure

a long thin person who was sitting silently by himself

and was in peculiar-looking clothes.’
‘…a sincere quiet man.’
Perhaps unable to know himself

among his own people

but I want to add

as a young schoolteacher in Heide

rumoured to have tossed poems

through the open bedroom window

of ‘dark-haired, brown-eyed’

Mathilde Ottens.  
13

ende/anfang

ende/anfang

ende/anfang

On the programme board

of the anti-capitalist agitprop

Theaterkapelle at 99 Boxhagenerstrasse

next to the old graveyard

where young women wheel prams

so their babies can hear the birds

making an impatient racket in the bare trees

an abrupt announcement appeared

in mid-winter

a single word

lower case

repeated three times

in a column

ende

ende

ende

(it’s over)

but beside each word

a neighbourhood tagger had written

anfang

anfang

anfang

(start again).
The embourgeoisement of the neighbourhood

proceeds apace

and the Theaterkapelle is one of its casualties

as predicted in its last production

Die Kunden werden unruhig

The audience is getting restless

to which the Freitag salon blogger Peter Nowak had added

‘und vielleicht auch wütend’

and perhaps angry as well.
As the rents go up

and façades are scrubbed

dichte und schöne Fenster installed

GDR-vintage furniture

overpriced in the Sunday fleamarket

I find myself wondering

what kind of fresh start

I have the right to hope for

having come only this far

having barely tested my restlessness

let alone my anger.
And what kind of restlessness

let alone anger

drove my great-grandmother

Maria Josephine Catharina Reepen

to declare Anfang

beside a disreputable runaway sailor’s name

Heinrich August Wedde

at the end of the earth?