To Friends Behind A Frontier

A Poem For Reiner Fuellmich

No Advent Calendar today. Some nights I just don’t sleep—it’s now 5:24 am.

I’m thinking about Reiner.

All the many years I thought about, and studied Tranströmer’s incredible poem “To Friends Behind A Frontier,” (which he wrote for two friends in former GDR,) I never understood it like I do right now.

This poem is for Reiner Fuellmich.

(And for his wife, who is in a prison cell of another kind.)

I think it’s a poem about loyalty and friendship, in times of tyranny.

To Friends Behind A Frontier

1

I wrote so meagerly to you. But what I couldn’t write

swelled and swelled like an old-fashioned airship

and drifted away at last through the night sky.

2

The letter is now at the censor’s. He lights his lamp.

In the glare my words fly up like monkeys on a grille,

rattle it, stop, and bare their teeth.

3

Read between the lines. We’ll meet in 200 years

when the microphones in the hotel walls are forgotten

and can at last sleep, become trilobites.

Tomas Tranströmer,

Paths, 1973

Translated by Rob Fulton