Feature photo: Ulm in summer
There I was again in the hospital for aftercare, and the queue once again got longer rather than shorter.
Since a soldier is known to wait half his life in vain, each of us has probably developed our own method of how best to spend this time.
It was mine to practice poetry and to record the results in a small booklet, but to keep it all to myself and hidden.
For some reason I had to stay the night after all, and so it happened that a ward doctor found out about this booklet and looked at my last poem.
His only question after that was how I got into poetry in the first place, and I explained to him that this was my way of bridging long waiting times.
This doctor must have been an art lover, but at least he liked poetry, because from that day on I never had to wait so long in the hospital to just pull out a pencil.
And so it happened that this also became my last poem, which I therefore kept in special memory.
Who am i
A cloud in the sky
A beam of the sun
A thought on the run
Whatever I am
A shadow of a man
A part of a piece
A memory in grief
Whenever I can
Be all of a man
Be there if needed
Be till time is defeated
"The only way to survive such an insane system is to be insane oneself."
Joseph Heller, Catch-22 (1961)
