O Babylon! Your God is a sport-utility vehicle, a VCR, and a two-car garage!
You delight in images of killing and artificially-large-breasted women!
Your arteries are clogged with Big Macs and a thousand pieces of Kentucky-Fried Chicken!
Your God is Technology.  Your God is Progress.

Your skyscrapers rise to the heavens!  Your astronauts fly to the moon!
You clone sheep! alter genes! make a mountain into a parking lot!
Your fields flower!  Your grain-bins groan under the weight of the ripe corn!
But the land of your soul is a desolation.

O God of Henry Ford, the Wright Brothers, and Bill Gates,...
All the nations adore Thee!
(Pretty soon they'll be ordering Papa John pizza by cell phone in New Guinea....)
Your God is Mammon.

After the movies, after the Quarter-pounders-with-cheese, super-size fries, and a large Coke,
after the evening news, the Hostess cupcakes, golf, beers, and swimming 20 laps,
the hunger will be the same as the day you first felt it, O Babylon!
the thirst of the soul, O Babylon!

the brush creates
    in careful steps
a painter‘s vision of the face
lets eyes shine bright
    or filled with pain
the lips closed firm and serious
    or hinting at a secret smile
abundant hair, a bit, or none at all
large ears, or medium, or small
pale cheeks, or rosy, with a glow
firm chin, with or without a beard

few limits to the versions of the world
in the attempt to make
the portrait gaze
right into viewers' eyes
    wide with surprise

a morning breeze draws gentle ripples on the sea
    dancing and glittering in the sun
at times more serious wrinkles
on the puckered surface indicate
strong deeper currents down below
moving unseen

shaping the everchanging faces
of our oceans all across the globe
creating scenes of terror and of beauty
    leaving us breathless
wondering about the plenitude
    nature brings forth
    often in frightening abundance
that occupies our lives

the time we spend
on sorting trivialities
one should not always
see as wasted

it can be a reprieve
     or an escape
from life‘s important questions
that tend to overwhelm us
now and then

solving our little problems
helps us establish
the much-needed illusion of order
in our life
encouraging us
to tackle bigger questions

a business person
     of somewhat dubious reputation
ran for president
promising to drain those swamps
we all believe we know exist
    around centers of power

he delivered on this promise
in his very special way

draining the swamps
     of all the alligators
that are now in his government

go figure

involves little brain
just basic arithmetics
lots of gut feeling
and trained physical action

works for surviving
in the Hollywood Wild West

not recommended
for leaders of nations

the  air-conditioned railjet takes me
with strangely whincing wheels
through winding tracks
along the mountains of my youth

clouds are hanging low
    after recent rainfalls
fog shrouds the forest hills
    in mystical silhouettes
rises slowly from the valleys
revealing an old castle here
     a younger hotel there

the next stop announces
     my birthplace
today's wet greenery passing by the window
makes me wonder what it was like
almost seventy years ago
     two years after the end of a war
     that destroyed many places on the globe
     and killed fifty million people
for my mother to give birth to the first
     of two sons
with a husband who
     at the age of 21
had just made his way
      not quite nine months before
escaping from a Soviet POW camp

     took him and a friend one month
     walking by night
          hiding by day
     through all of Poland
     to end up in a British field hospital
     from which they fled
           gratefully
     when they had regained some energy
     jumping trains from northern Germany
          to eastern Austria
     coming home just before Christmas 1946

and as my hometown disappears in fog and rain
I hear the muted noises of the high-tech train
     now on a steady downhill track
musing how easy my own life has been
no wars, dictatorships, catastrophes

how we are born into a world
so different from our parents‘
raised by their words and values
to make our way