Poesie und Lyrik
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Poesie in der lauten lauten welt fordert einmal sie zur ruhe auf und im schnellen schnellen lauf hält einmal sie das tor der stille auf Poesie ist eine Kunstform, die vom Leser ein hohes Maß an Mitwirkung erfordert. Wer sich jedoch darauf einläßt, gewinnt ein hohes Potential an Konzentration, an Stille und Muße für neue kreative Gedanken.
The Mill
A story telling of the life in the Bavarian Forest For Lea Written by her father I was born on a mill. It was a water mill. A tiny river, running down from a small stony moun-tain, called The Lusen, was divided into two small creeks. The right side one was flowing his usual bed downhill between meadows, going under an old wooden bridge and crossing a small bosk of trees and bushes. The little creek on the left side was going through a tiny watergate, gains height by running aside the barns in a narrow wooden bed, perforated by holes over holes, with clear water pouring out and creeping over a broad splashy meadow, where geese and hens were chasing after thousands of earthworms, polliwogs and small frogs. This wooden channel was carried by a lot of flimsy pillars, underpinned with dozens of thin slats. Its end then was marked by something like a giant wooden hut, blackened with pitch, hiding a not minor giant wheel, also heavy black and made of pitched wood, whose centre was based on the level of the earth and whose edges were running three meters high as well as three meters deep into the ground. This big wheel was driven slowly but con-stantly by one part of the water in the wooden chan-nel, while the other lot of water was falling down a white and foggy cascade in front of the wheel-house. It falls down to the ground again, forming there a pool of tumbling and misty water, rich in oxygen, full of trouts and the mist forming a small rainbow, when the early morning sun was sending beams of sunlight through it. In cold and chilly winter times, the cascade got frozen to a mighty column of bright white ice, bearing inside still the falling water, while you could see everywhere on the channel and the wheelhouse lots of long and thin icicles, gleaming in the winter sunlight. On late evening, when we children were ex-pected to go to bed, even on hot summer days a mood of coolness and darkness fell over the mill house, which was built by adding part to part over centuries. There were dark and endless corridors running through the house, with suddenly appearing wooden stairs, leading up or down to even darker rooms and more frightening to us children. You ex-pected witches, spooks or gnomes after every corner or behind every wardrobe and every door. When we finally reached our bedrooms, safe and tired, we jumped into our chilly beds with heavy blankets and thick pillows. We were allowed to leave the electric lights switched on during the night, because it was powered by an antiquely old light-ning dynamo, powered – like nearly everything in the mill house – by the steadily flowing water. The light of the electric bulb was pale and flickering, following gently the rising and ebbing of rhythm of the falling waters. It put the narrow bed-room into a yellow twilight, shadows going up and down the walls and windows. But the everlasting sound of the rushing wa-ters, mixed with the monotonous noise of rotation wheels and millstones, made us children finally sleep well at night and woke us up with the early sunshine – not to forget the loud and strong cock-a-doodle-doo. The bathroom for the morning rituals was a small and damp washhouse between the barns, where all the laundry was done together with the washing of all the farm staff. Outside of the wash-house the small creek was going by, from early fall till late spring there was broken ice swimming in it, resulting from the long lasting and heavy frosts and snowfalls up in the hills. With freezing fingers and cold blood running through every vessel, we got our teeth brushed and our faces washed. Back in the big and comfortably warm living room, we lined up before the heated tiled stove to get back our normal temperature. The living room was a spacious room for eve-rything. Children were playing, grown ups working and elder ones gossiping about everything under the sun. But most important and exiting were lunch times. Big bowls and plates were brought in from the kitchen for so many people – the farmer, his wife, his children and mother, two younger sisters, his menial staff and even sometimes neighbours, rela-tives or friends, all the lot sat around the big and massive dining table. Waiting hungry for their food, they squatted before flat holes, carved into the thick and mighty wooden board of the table, made to absorb floods of milky potage and masses of meaty food. With spoons and forks the community took its meals and clay jugs served for its drinks, mostly fresh and clear water from a dwell or a wellspring nearby. After the meal, especially on the evening, the whole family and staff stayed on their old and nagged chairs to listen to the stories of the farmer and maybe to one of the older menials. They told stories of the life in the dark and gloomy forests, stories of lumberjacks and charburn-ers, of hikers and climbers, of hunters and poachers, of tollkeepers and smugglers, of witches and fairies, of giants and midgets, of bears and wolves. Often the stories told of the poorness of those, living in the hostile environment of the dense woods, sometimes they ended up in strange fights between deadly ene-mies or with the last and straight breath of a brave and lawful man, killed by the wrongful hand of a perfidious murderer. We children couldn’t even shut our mouths by listening to these fascination tales and stories, hop-ing they would never end and not send us on our dangerous way through the nightly house, where we got more and more afraid of meeting the one or the other frightening guise out of a story. An old widow was living in one of the flats, black clothed and sometimes roaming shy through the narrow chambers. She once was the wife of the former Landlord, selling the whole property after his death to my grand father. We thought her a witch in her black and mostly rugged dresses, she never speaks a word or losts even a greeting. With her cane as buckled as her scabby back she could be heard shuffling over her wooden floor, maybe back and forth, maybe in circles. Lonely for an eternity she might have lost her voice and even more her sense of hearing. Nobody knows even if she could see anything or if she was only walking the same way day by day, counting her steps or orientating herself by the bare smell of the wooden, spotted walls or the tattered carpets. My grandfather – I guess – always dreamed of running a mill instead of an usual farmhouse. Born himself on an old and humble farmhouse, build on a tiny spot surrounded by this Bavarian kind of dark woods, composed of high and compact spruce trees, filled with scrubs over scrubs with fruits and berries, the bottom littered with moss, blueberries and mush-rooms, always dark cold and dusty with little sun-beams ever reaching the ground. Maybe by running this technical house, he feels himself some kind of an engineer or a master. Looking after the millstones and all the varied mechanism for milling, beating, grinding and kibbling the wheat, the oats, the barley and the rye, he reigns over his own operating and rotating Empire. I never really saw him working. Maybe I don’t remember, but this small lank man for me never was to be seen between the working farm staff. Maybe he was guarding his machines instead or working on new innovations for them, when he was out of sight, I think, nobody really knows what he was doing. Even meal was seldom seen on the mill, not regarding the white, floury and powdery air going through the building, filling nearly every space with its dry and droughty smell and leaving adamant liners on the edges of floors, walls, stair, handrails, on the few furniture and the battered draperies. But we rarely were confronted with this smooth, white and bulky powder, coming out of these high-rise refining machines, which were reaching from basement to the top of the roofs. ©08 Reinhardb 2
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