Ich war Georg Trakl
‘I was Georg Trakl’ (1887 – 1914):
a theatrical prologue
born 1887, salzburg, austria, where
i lived till 21, quitting the gymnasium*
for something better, those powders
and crystals in glass, working in a pharmacy
where i learnt much of mental colour and
intoxication in what was bottled on the
shelves, the morphine, the cocaine,
nights writing my plays that
swam in melancholy of the age,
and poems,
in 1908 i moved to vienna to
qualify in the pharmaceutic arts
whose products i loved well,
and met that boisterous crowd, the artists
unafraid of what the soul exhaled unbound
in their expression, while round them the
true hell gaped in pomp and trenches that were
being dug in mind and soon mud between the
peoples of europe, these friends helped my poems
into print to see the fading light of those days
and barely certified in the alchemical come chemical arts
i was drafted into uniform serving for a year,
yet released back into the shadows of an ordinary
life and its concerns like a garden grown rank,
i enlisted, assigned to the hospital at Innsbruck,
where evenings in the salons i would greet the
Continue reading “Ich war Georg Trakl”
Ruru ki Te Ruru 