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From the bakery window, an
elderly man glances my way

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He rolls out the dough

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In that Italian village,
all his life he baked bread

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And now he hangs as a photo
in his granddaughter's bakery

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In exile, you want to
make your reality visible,

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to not feel like a
loner without a history

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My own grandpa
didn't bake bread,

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he taught children so they
told me, as by the time we met,

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he was retired

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We'd lie on the sofa
or sit at the bus stop

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where no bus had
stopped for years

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"Granddaughter, listen,
I'm going to die."

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That's how he'd usually start
his conversations with me

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Talks which led nowhere,
shifting the topic of death

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from food to food

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And I kept thinking
that he was just

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about to say something so
important, something only

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he and I would know

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Now he lies as a word
on pages of my books,

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so that I do not feel like
a loner without a history.

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And this is the example--
sometimes as a poet,

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you get the question,
how do you write poems?

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How do they come to you?

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And this is the
example of a poem which

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took a year to be
finished, because I started

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and I really saw that poster
when I was in Graz in Austria

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as a city writer for one year.

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And I was impressed.

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I don't know why
for some reason,

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but I couldn't finish the poem.

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And I knew that it had to
be also with my grandfather

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or something.

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And then my scholarship ended
and I had to go to the exile

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to Germany, and then I
could finish this poem.

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So it's also interesting
that time works differently

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in poetry.

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So now I read it and maybe
it feels like the whole,

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like as if you
wrote it in one set.

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But actually, no.

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But when I read it
for me also, time is--

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our perception of time in
poetry is really different

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than this is very wonderful.