Gunter Grass: Final Words & From The Diary Of A Snail

Been reading Gunter for a while now. His Last Goodbye went pretty fast (mostly short poems & sketches), the Snail is going snail slow (my fault as much as his: I'm caught up in school again).

Anyway, two poems (one about some handcrafted caskets, the other the title and final poem) from Of All That Ends.

 [[[Excuse Kindle. They are "lined" poems but Kindle doesn't care. You can mentally "lineate" if you like, I'm not doing it.]]]

*

Stolen Goods
They’re back again, both boxes, oblong and inviting. Stolen last winter, they stood undamaged in the cellar, covered in blue tarp, one summer day when we returned from a trip to Poland. Only the dahlia bulbs were missing, having bloomed elsewhere, perhaps. What moved the thieves, at no small effort, to return our nearly forgotten boxes— one made of pine, the other of birch— to the place from which they came? No letter or note explained their return, but lying in my box, side by side, cushioned in tissue paper, were two dead mice of delicate beauty: their finely outlined empty skulls, their dainty rib cages. We puzzle over it still.


 Of All That Ends
All finished now. Had enough now. Done and dusted now. Nothing stirring now. Not even a fart now. No more trouble now, and all will soon be well and nothing remain and all be at an end.





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