Poem: ‘To Botho Strauss in Berlin’
Michael Hulse, 30 March 1989
Your cool high-ceilinged life is naked as a stage,
as if you’d taken an apartment where the set-designer of your dreams
had recently moved out. It is a theatre after the première,
filled up to emptiness with applause. I think of God the Almighty after the ball,
sitting as you imagined him on the palace steps, asleep in his slippers and topper.
Let there (he mumbles in his slumber,...