From the bakery window, an elderly man glances my way
He rolls out the dough
In that Italian village, all his life he baked bread
And now he hangs as a photo in his granddaughter's bakery
In exile, you want to make your reality visible,
to not feel like a loner without a history
My own grandpa didn't bake bread,
he taught children so they told me, as by the time we met,
he was retired
We'd lie on the sofa or sit at the bus stop
where no bus had stopped for years
"Granddaughter, listen, I'm going to die."
That's how he'd usually start his conversations with me
Talks which led nowhere, shifting the topic of death
from food to food
And I kept thinking that he was just
about to say something so important, something only
he and I would know
Now he lies as a word on pages of my books,
so that I do not feel like a loner without a history.
And this is the example-- sometimes as a poet,
you get the question, how do you write poems?
How do they come to you?
And this is the example of a poem which
took a year to be finished, because I started
and I really saw that poster when I was in Graz in Austria
as a city writer for one year.
And I was impressed.
I don't know why for some reason,
but I couldn't finish the poem.
And I knew that it had to be also with my grandfather
or something.
And then my scholarship ended and I had to go to the exile
to Germany, and then I could finish this poem.
So it's also interesting that time works differently
in poetry.
So now I read it and maybe it feels like the whole,
like as if you wrote it in one set.
But actually, no.
But when I read it for me also, time is--
our perception of time in poetry is really different
than this is very wonderful.