In the Attic

In this attic a draught licks the walls,
the former God sleeps in a warm blanket.
The forgotten halo has rotted in the cobwebs,
where damp time rustles with rust.
He shrank, squeezed into a powerless “now”,
and eternity trembles in thin hands.
He no longer holds the horizons –
just silently wipes the thick lenses.

He sorts through worn-out playthings:
a chipped button, broken shop-window glass.
Once he molded epochs and nations,
now gone blind, alone among the ruins.
All around, dust and unlived affairs
that dissolved in the sands of hours.
Why preserve the losses of others,
when there is no one left to mend the world?

He wants to fix everything with a word,
to stitch a patch of dream onto the abyss.
He takes a stray needle of thorns,
and threads it with a frozen thread.
But instead of paradise he sews a harsh night,
weaves shadow and rain into the distance.
From fragments he carves out constellations
and hurls them into the void of dusk.

He turns faded photographs between his fingers,
where someone still smiles in the haze.
Is this, then, the purpose of a person –
to cherish these scratched sorrows?
And he grows still in the twilight of the cottage,
his palms clutching treasures at the edge of earth,
for our last rebellion against death:
to love what is meant to be erased.