Zeitgistlyrik: One Dream Led to Another (Satis Shroff)

 

ONE DREAM LED TO ANOTHER (Satis Shroff)

I was around twenty years old,

My head full of dreams.

I left the Himalayan foothills

To win a dream:

A dream to go to Europe,

Visit places I’d read about.

The Bastille from Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities,

Where I spent time recalling  the French Revolution.

My friend’s Parisienne sister shook her head and said:

 ‘Satis, there are others ways of spending an  afternoon in Paris.’

An eighteenth century house,

Described by George Eliot.

A British pub akin to the one

In John Burn’s ‘Tam o’ Shanter:’

Even though ‘pleasures are like poppies spread.’

In Blenhelm ‘s little tavern with murals

Of its famous son: Churchill.

I stood in front of Winston Leonhard Spencer Churchill’s grave;

Above his remains lay his mother.

The words of James Shirley came to my mind:

‘Death lays his icy hands on kings,

Sceptre and crown,

Must tumble down,

And in the dust be equal made.

With the poor crooked scythe and spade.’

Listen to the English ‘Country Sound,’

I read in William Cowper’s verses.

The smell of sea food at a French harbour,

Such as the peasants of Normandy built.

La Rochelle and the German bunkers in the Ile d’ Oleron.

Peer at sea fogs from the mighty Atlantic,

Watch the ‘last oozing, hours by hours,

From a cider-press’  in the Vosges,

As John Keats  aptly put it.

Taking a swig of English ale  in picturesque Burford,

A Cotswold  town  in Southern England.

Country scenarios depicted by John Milton

In ‘The Poet’s Pleasure:’

‘And the milkmaid swingeth blithe,

And the mower whets his scythe.’

At the German butcher’s in Oberried with my friend

Who died of aneurisma of the aorta.

The Metzger’s lovely daughter was what we call an ‘Augenweide.’

‘In Denmark’ with Edmund Gosse,

When he wrote about:

‚All the little memories of this last afternoon,

How trifling they are,

How indelible!’

Having read Mary Shelly’s ‘Frankenstein,’

I found myself in the apothecary in Heidelberg castle,

And later in the Anatomy Museum in Basle,

Fascinated by the deformed specimens,

Preserved in formalin;

Dissecting an elderly German’s body,

Under glaring white neon light.

Did he fight the Russians in Stalingrad?

He couldn’t tell me his story.

My dreams lived in my head

With fluid thoughts.

Went to Venice and imagined

The speech of Portia to Shylock

In The Merchant of Venice:

‘...in the course of justice,

None of us should see salvation.’

To walk over the Thames Bridge

Between Waterloo Bridge and Chelsea,

As in Stephen Gwynn’s ‘Decay of Sensibility:’

‘The halflight when the lamps are first lit’ in London.

Where the people are now confronted

With the uncertainties of Brexit,

And promises made by Trump to May.

Peered at the Gurkha and Scottish Guards

Doing their duty near the Buckingham Palace.

One dream led to another;

I found myself in Stratford-upon-Avon,

To be reminded of the Bard’s words:

‘Turning again toward childish treble,

Pipes and whistles in his sound’

From The Seven Ages of Man.

The inner German border wall,

Long lines of inhuman barbed wire

Meant to keep humans in, not out.

Hitler said: ‘The great masses of the people

...will more easily fall victim to a great lie

Than to a small one.’

As if in reply to the 20^th year of the Berlin Wall.

A metal plate with these words  of Konrad Adenauer

Was hung on 13.8.1981 in Bayern-Thüringen:

‚The entire German folk

Behind the iron Curtain call us,

Not to forget them!

We will not stand still,

We will not rest,

Till Germany

Is united again

In peace and freedom.’

We’re fortunate to have lived to see the day.

A dream within a dream,

Of a young man from the Himalaya,

Now grown old with a shuffling gait.

And thereby hangs a tale.