our house, near the letterbox, 6.00am
waiting for a word



I am beginning to forget my native tongue –

to be in touch with the land of his birth
the emigrant needs someone to write to  –

my mother doesn’t write,
she talks on the phone,
how hard it is to get up in the morning

I tried to tell her that BMW had started
to hide some foreign words in their ad campaign
but they are not the ones I knew when I was a child:

niederlassung is not one of them

now the first foreign bird begins to sing,
and I am snatched out of my normal existence
and for a moment I find myself back in that tiny room
that I shared with my two brothers –