—in memory of Rose Ausländer, 1901–1988
I couldn't find the Nelly Sachs Home
for the Jewish elderly in Düsseldorf
where I wanted to bring flowers
to the roseland of her final room,
and so I wandered into an empty garden
with a basket of wild strawberries
and a loaf of coarse country bread, as if
I were living in a Goethe poem,
and sat under the catalpas and lindens
that drive you mad with their sweetness
so that you want to forget everything,
and listened to the little European nightingale
singing amidst our homelessness
as if the twentieth century had never happened.