For No Reason at All - a poem by Ulrich Wendt.

For No Reason At All

I am a bit techie which is lucky

because it is the fourth month of the plague year of 2020

and everything is all electronic nowadays ­- 

the age of miracles and wonders like somebody said.

So here I am alone by my wild garden

and I can hear my grandkids very clearly

far away though they are in their fear-jangled city

and I can see them as though they are right beside me

on the yellow sofa and they are holding hands

and they are talking quietly about the future

just to each other.

And suddenly for no reason at all

 ­- it is 1945 and the war just over ­-

I remember my cousin Siegfried aged 14 who stole himself 

out of the Red Cross camp to walk alone the length of what was left

of a Germany ruined by its own hatred.

He wanted to find his mother which he did

and to grow up which he also did but not too successfully

as it turned out.

And outside my window the snow is about done

and the wild cranes are calling with their strange clattering cry

as they feed in the yellow grass along the riverbank

and ­- still 1945 ­- I think about the broken Windermere children

who were rescued from the death camps and brought to Britain

by some very kind people who had hoped

successfully as it turned out

that the waters and the trees of the Lake District

held some kind of miraculous healing power.

Which they did.

Ulrich Wendt: A Nature Poet from Kaministiquia

Both our hatred and love

however textured and rich

unleavened by reason

are nectar or poison

and we cannot know which.

Ulrich Wendt currently lives and writes at his berry farm on the Birch River an hour east of Winnipeg. But his most productive period as a poet began during the early 1970's when he lived in the countryside near the Kaministiquia River just west of Thunder Bay. His poems tend to be anchored in the northern and western landscapes of Canada but also echo the cataclysmic events of mid-century war-torn Europe.

He was born in 1946 in northern Germany to refugee parents from East Prussia and came to Canada with them when he was five. Together with five brothers, he grew up in the wilds of the Annapolis Valley of Nova Scotia. His love of poetry stems from his mother (Ursula Komm) and his older brother (Karl Wendt) both of whom were poets in their own right.

In addition to this blog, Literary Thunder Bay, his poems have appeared over the years in such Canadian magazines as Canadian Forum, Dimensions, Squatchberry Journal, Grain, Quarry, Axiom and others. He is still living with and smitten by the woman he married more than 50 years ago. They have one son, a beautiful daughter-in-law and two awesome grandchildren who occasionally appear obliquely in his current poetry.