Why do the dead want hearts
İf they’re keeping on barefoot,
stealthily, sunken in a bottle?
Why the need to proclaim themselves, write up manifestos,
raise barricades upon the very shifting sand
if they’ll never be able to see or hear or speak?
Why feel hunger when now the sowing
has spread to the hills of dim purgatory?
How is it they’re obsessed with knowing their future
if they’re only granted what’s final?
Why cry out for company if the sentence is irrevocable?
Why ask to see one other, dialogue, make after dinner conversation
if spiders copulate behind their portraits?
Why are arrows so pressing when arrows were what
changed them to eternal poplars and statues?
Why ask for a ceasefire when they don’t disagree,
aren’t alternatives, don’t aspire to power?
Why yearn so for incidences of spring?
What more do the dead want?
What more do they want to know?

translated by Katherine M. Hedeen