It has been many years since I visited the church, but curiously just this past Friday [28 April 2017] my wife and I were driving from Houston to Austin on Highway 290 and I saw the sign to Serbin. It was the first time that I had been on 290 in I don’t know how long. Naturally I thought of my poem, and now here you are asking for permission to reprint it. You are certainly welcome to do so. You may know that it was reprinted once before in Texas Co-op Power in 2002. Thank you for contacting my publisher. I might mention that I saw the church because my late friend Gene Wukasch of Austin invited me to drive out to Serbin with him. It was a wonderful experience. All the best, Dave Oliphant
Eugene Wukasch, Texas Architect
by Dave Oliphant
Seton Hospital coming down:
photos he took tell the story
of steel girders & cement walls
crumbled. doubled, pounded to dust-
collapsed windows, where twilight rays
floated motes over janitored floors,
his mother rolled from delivery
to a maternity ward & the further relief of sleep.
Knows the blueprints, the materials,
how substantial they were,
in their way strong as the memory.
Why were they not reused, remembered?
Speaking with quiet rage
of the waste, of energy expended,
of the halls held those hours
where & when he entered the State,
a tear forms in his foreign eye,
streams down his Austin cheek:
Damn it, I was born there!”
Texan, yes, as any,
though by name & blood a Wend,
his Spreewald, his Slavic race
poling their boats like gondoliers,
laden with cabbage & engravings
of the very scene he paints.
His tale, mortar to our luncheon talk,
glides us through those shadowy waters,
disappears us down basement plumbing,
into her screams at his coming
on a table splintered to smithereens,
the vacant block for sale,
its sidewalks still intact
outlining the emptiness of weeds,
the trees, spreading elms, rooted yet,
though reaching about as exiles
missing landmarks on childhood maps,
the pale smear down to his mouth
seeking a forgotten Sorbian word
would house the lumber of loss.
(1977)
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