THOMAS DORSETT, THOMAS SCHWARZ

The person I was in my previous life
happens to speak German.
So I learned that tongue.

(At the time I didn't know
I was an Anglo marionette
with Thomas Schwarz pulling the strings.)

I said, "Daddy, I've got to
learn German." And I did.
The carnage was recent

and Daddy resisted, but
not like England resisted--
This war I won.

Lots of coincidences (proofs?)
over the next sixty years
which are too prosy to list here

(these lines are plain enough)
Now (2011) what does Thomas want?
May I use an English word?

(I'm translating) reincarnation--
I didn't believe it either
until that day in 1947 when

I saw your face. Where did I go?
I was eighteen years old
when I perished in Dresden

Why did I become a toddler
in a soulless house? Jersey City
would not have been my first choice;

um ehrlich zu sein, it wouldn't
have even made the first hundred--
I was a poet.

I am a poet.
I played Chopin well
I play Chopin, well,

so what? Dieter's name
on the Internet (I was
half Jewish and passed

--forged papers--until
that last year of hell)
convinced me: your awful legacy

was the reason I lived long
not far from the Jersey shore
as a pearlless clam.

"Es gibt nur zwei Dinge,
die Leere, und das gezeichnete Ich"
Don't be so sure.  We want peace;

though after the fire-bombing
we went through terror together,
it's not too late. We're still intact.

Stirb und werde--Yes! The horror has
finally come to an end. We smile.
Why has it taken us sixty odd years?