Am Pragfriedhof

Pragfriedhof is a large, old cemetery in Stuttgart, Germany.


So many souls, to tiny homesteads bound,
Some born two hundred years and more ago
In days of princely Baden-Württemberg.
Far more did flourish in those happy days,
After Bonapartist blood had ebbed
Before young Princip blew apart the world.
Their houses reach down to the present day,
The earth fresh-turned, the stone fresh carved-upon,
The surnames all (or most) the same through years.
So many titles show: here's "Freiherr von"
And "Freiin", "Doktor", "Brigade-general".
Professions: "Optiker", "Mechaniker".
How can there be so many generations?
Did no-one in this city ever leave?
That cannot be -- but after all the stones
List even those who fell in foreign lands.
And all the while the litany repeats
"Geboren" and "gestorben" on and on.
So many memories that families hold
To root themselves in this, a century
Beset by earthquakes on a scale unmatched
Perhaps in all the history of the world.
These little plots aspire to permanence,
To spite the churning changes of our day.

Thus long ago did godly Plato write,
That man desires immortality.
And so we see here -- here, amid the dead --
The graven stones live on, a testament
To so much longing for eternity.

So what is wrong with me? For here I stand,
With fifty years now, give or take a bit --
A solid age, not in my headstrong youth,
An age when men like me should start to think
About the legacy they'll leave behind,
About their sons, their wives, their kith and kin,
And all the rootedness that makes a house,
That graves on stone to save the memory
Of this our time against the tide of years.

But all my thought is bent on breaking free: --
On pushing o'er the stones,
And pulling up the roots,
And tearing down the house,
And striking out from here,
Straight on unto the ending of the world.

Why sure! I'll park my sons in boarding schools,
Divorce my wife and liquidate the house --
Or else abandon it and let them come
And find me if it puts them in a snit!
I'll take my leave from here and go to work
In foreign lands where men speak foreign tongues,
Eat meals spiked with strange spices, drink strange wines,
And talk to everyone that I shall meet;
To be a man of many turnings-round,
Who many cities sees -- men meets -- and knows their minds,
And who gives not a fig for coming home!

Or maybe not. Remember who I am,
A staid and quiet, timid, fearful man,
too shy for such Odysseosity.
And can I care so little for my boys?
To leave them nothing: fatherless, no home,
No name, no house, abandoned, all alone --
Those boys I claim to love most in the world?

And will I not regret it, after all,
If all men strive for immortality,
And I with my own hands uproot and shred
The marriage - family - home that shelter me
From all the anonymity of death
And the grinding, crushing weight of years on years?
When it's too late for turning back, what then?
Will I not miss the very things I fled?
Look at the honest burghers dead and gone
And buried in the Friedhof, how they strove
To document for all ensuing years
How deeply rooted in their soil they were --
They and their kin, unto the last degree.

So why not me?

I cannot say. Perhaps it's a mistake,
A tragic flaw to bring me bitter tears,
Through bitter years of unrelieved regret.

It may be so.
All that I know
Is I must go.

And may the gods have mercy when I die,
Unknown, unmourned, unburied, homeless ... free.