Spilled milk.
The further we go, the whiter the landscape becomes.
Snow, salt, snow, salt, and the fog of forgetting,
where you are with yourself.
Mnemosyne is looking for a photo.
A few boxes contain decades.
Pictures lie face down like soldiers on the field.
Witnesses to those who know this language.
What does this language do to you?
Evacuee, front, bombs.
With the war come, new words.
And the new law, too, only one egg per child while officers
fight over delicacies from France.
Memory gives us a push.
Go on then.
Run.
Keep up.
But I just stare and can't remember
why I'm wearing this dress.
What am I doing here?
These people?
And whose shadow is that?
The pears in your school bag.
The turkey's feathers beneath your palm.
A snowball attack and dreams of Africa.
Summer and winter slowly erase their borders.
They become one big season.
The season of childhood, where you are with yourself,
of yourself, in yourself.
Like never again afterwards.
Blind spots are sometimes false memories
where the cloth wears thin.
It will tear, someone will certainly say.
And we darn these holes.
Change our memory like an old coat,
so that you can still put it on, so that it can still be worn
by the girl who comes after us.
The further we go, the whiter the landscape becomes.
She tilts her head over the glass of spilt milk.
Mnemosyne.
And this poem also was written as an homage
to a Barbara Frischmuth.
She was an Austrian prose writer.
And she died last year.
And once I had to introduce her at the festival as a city
writer of Graz.
And I decided to introduce her through a poem.
The poem was based on her book about her childhood in the early
or war, post-war, second world war years
in small town in Austria, where her family had a hotel.
But I think today, it reads like as if
about the war we are having today.