Poems by Horst EM Schueppel (from "FROZEN STORIES")

Potsdam, Lindenstrasse 1949

During the detention they try to finish me off.
They want me to give away the names of all
those I collaborated with.

Now...
I had allied myself
to the rainbows and the storms,
to the gnarled trees on the cliffs
and to the poets of Romanticism.

Possibly I also cooperated with fairytales.
But I won't tell their names.

I was allied with the sound,
I believed in it
and in what I call being free,
above all in those nights I spent with my stars.

Yet, I will not betray their names,
even if they put me in chains
or reduce me to dust
at the placve of execution,
on the grounds of their power.

Workuta, UDSSR 1950

It's been night on the Workuta
ever since I drank this water.
No sunshine but just a distant glimmer
that soon would go out in the South.

No waves were flowing down this river,
snow and ice lay stiff and cold.
Now and then a wolf-hounds barking,
there is not much to be told.

Well, you're asking about the people?
They werde mute an grey was their face
I may not say more. – Alas!
Shadows werde haunting the place!br>

Those shadows were dark as pitch
darker than the arctic night...
And the blackness of forty coal-pits
swallowed them up.

What the Workuta once witnessed
the waves will whisper some day,
when the icestorm's ferocious blasts
no longer whip the barren vale.