Hong Kong 1997

American Poetry Review, The, Jan/Feb 2001 by Enzensberger, Hans Magnus

Have you seen the builders of this city,

these analphabetic acrobats

climbing on bamboo scaffolds into the sky?

Have you bought the cheapest pants in the world

and slept in its most expensive beds?

Have you coughed in the smoke of the temples,

smelled the floods of perfume

rising from the cesspools?

Have you heard the clatter at the gambling dens

and the howling at the stock exchange?

Have you seen the tourists,

rubbing their eyes,

exhausted with shopping, pink giant shrimps

behind the tinted glass of their buses?

No, this city, where a hundred flowers are fading,

can't possibly exist. It is a pipe dream,

it's a hallucination, a fraud,

a science fiction opera, a wobbly wonder.

HANS MAGNUS ENZENSBERGER is one of Germany's most distinguished men of letters. He has published some thirty books of poetry and nonfiction. Lighter Than Air, in which these poems appear, will be published in the spring by The Sheep Meadow Press.

REINHOLD GRIMM is Distinguished Professor of German and Comparative Literature at the University of California at Riverside.