The sky surrounds me.
Why have I walked so tall?
I rest my weary head
on this cold mountain,
milky pastures
wrapped around the hills
like scarves.
Snow falls in my hair,
melts into dandruff.
I am combing this mountainside for you
Richard Strauss
of the long locks,
whose private house dreams down below,
beneath the looming avalanche of Alps.
I have flown this far to touch you,
to scrape a hill with a fingernail,
to walk barefoot on Bavaria.
The military bands still bury the dead.
A raucous bell around your neck,
The music is not pretty.
It howls from the Russian front
and splinters the bones of a Garmisch churchyard.
And now, through the eyes of the Zugspitze, I watch
fresh battles conducted on your beloved soil,
GIs skiing patterns of another war.
In this time, I lie naked all night,
all ears to your drifting music
as it whistles across the valley,
telling the grumbling peasants that
you too were really a lonely man
who kissed the snow,
and Adolf’s freezing hand.
Keith Armstrong
(Published in Blue Max Review 2012)
