Friday 4 November 2011

Mercenary - a haibun

Sun up at 7:44 and down again 16:36. Moon down up at 14:22 and down again close to 1 in the morning. Just around when the street lamp outside my bedroom window. On top of that it's the 5th day of mist. This darkness doesn't please me, and whenever November starts to really devour daylight, I think of my great-great and many times great grandfather. He was a Spanish mercenary with Napoleon's army and got stationed in this land of mud and darkness. He remained here after the war and must have met a girl. There's no other way to procreate, that I know of. Not one that extends the blood-line anyway. And I think: “Why on Earth would he choose this country and this climate when he could have stayed in Spain?” I obviously don't get an answer, but pictures of hunger, prisoner of war camps, abandonment and persecution, poverty and the impossibility of getting all the way back to Spain from Denmark some 200 years ago flash by just above the surface of lukewarm coffee. Nothing to do but wonder and make a fresh pot.


half a day moon
these days everything
is about cut-backs

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