The Buttonmaker’s Tale
(Leseprobe aus: Selected Poems, 1996).

Once I had a shop where I made buttons,
but buttons sank like lead, without a trace.
I lost my money and I lost my buttons
but I was young and didn’t give a fig.

The next time I put money into figs
but figs were almost unobtainable.
I lost my money and I lost my figs.
The whole affair was most embarassing.

After that I couldn’t do much better
than put my money into foreign postcards.
(Saucy postcards! Who’ll buy saucy postcards?)
The moral climate changed within a year.

I can’t help it. I have this sort of hunger
for risk and failure. So I took up hunger,
which wasn’t then a scarce commodity –
people bought it and paid me with their curses.

So last I put my money into damns.
The time was ripe and all the tills were ringing,
my little chicks were coming home to roost.
But my lot was with damns and not with chickens.

I was waiting for the Revolution,
but when it came it caught us unprepared.
We lost our money (some of us lost lives)
and ceased to trade at all, except in jokes,

of which this story is a specimen.
You’ll not deny it has certain length,
generous for the times, and, much like buttons,
serves to hold these tattered clothes together.