This poem comes across as harmless. From the design: three quatrains, each with two cross rhymes, which gives the whole thing a nice corset and is catchy for the reader. A large part of the folk songs and almost all of the nineteenth-century poetry that was considered popular rhymed in this way. That gave and gives the quatrain this familiar, solid structure. And what about the content? Here, too, familiar territory at first: A lonely person is speaking. He envisions a reunion with the beloved. He is restless. What Gustave Flaubert once said - that anticipation is the best that life has in store for us - does not seem to be true.

The one who speaks here to the absent lover cannot stand without her, cannot remove her from his imagination, nor can he forget what she said.

But the whole thing is tricky.

Because he's often gone a long time.

He sings “The Most Beautiful Songs” when he is alone, although he can hardly stand being alone.

It's about the antinomies of love.

The intensification of the poem is the love poem

The lover wants to imagine what it is like when they find each other again, “for what will be”, but no words.

In this inability to imagine, in this “nothing”, he cannot “perish”.

Passing away in the sense of being outside of oneself?

Of dissolving?

The situation is not very clear.

Just the run of love.

This poem is in the most recent volume of poetry by Volker Sielaff, published in 2019. He followed the prose volume “Überall Welt. Ein Journal ”from 2016 and the volume of poetry“ Glossar des Prinzen ”published the year before. In the new volume, the poem can be found in the second part. It bears the title "The light and the dark side" and forms a bundle of seventeen love poems in total. In contrast to many poems in the other, very different chapters, these seventeen poems have said goodbye to free verse, have returned to end and inner rhymes and embroider us with ease and wonderfully playful lacony.

Over the years, Volker Sielaff has made himself independent of fashions and common language handicrafts and has thus gained a great deal of freedom. Quietly pleasurable coincidences succeed, even pictures that surprise because they are commonplace (for example, the mutt that turns his round), but also take on a different color in their context. One has to think of Christian Morgenstern, of Nikolaus Lenau, of Heinrich Heine's easy verses. But it is a lightness that boldly looks at even serious confusions of love.

What does the lonely one want to tell us with the enigmatic line “whoever pays with his pain pays home”? That those who stay away for a long time, i.e. who deliberately stay away, punish themselves? Or do the two lines that follow explain this enigmatic saying? The singer pays for the “most beautiful” poems with the pain of being alone? Much is addressed here. The uncertainty as to whether you really want to see the other person. Love that flares up, then fades away again. The painful love. There is little reliability. Feelings are questioned, prone as they are, to change, to a shaky mind.

The almost forgotten big old lady of the Suhrkamp Verlag, Elisabeth Borchers, editor and poet at the same time, once said that the intensification of the poem is the love poem. We are far from an increase here. Is it a love poem at all? Maybe it's an artist poem? The artist as narcissus? Because it is less about the beloved, much more about the description of the dire situation in which the poet has got himself. If, however, the self-reflection of a lover is a love poem, then we are dealing with a particularly lively, because not all that tragic, specimen of the genre.