Ragged Claws

Dreaming,
cold and beautiful,
winter is back home again
in Prague,

like ghosts of lovers,
cigarettes and smiles,
the smell of beer
in crowded cellar bars,

the darkening rooms
and shadow time -
everything now reaching
for this sleepy, soft embrace.

The bridges rise in magic shapes
of rounding dreams
and coming back to where
the one you want is waiting.

My love, all of my dreaming
must be like the river,
dark and murmuring,
bearing swans

and all of our tomorrows;
turning like the earth,
carrying our stories
and reminding us

of all the things we want
and tell our children -
all our dreams and all
our longing coming home.

I wake up from dreams
I half remember.

All I know
is you were there.

Some childhood stuff,
some broken toys

served as background
to these songs of need.

Where do we go,
eyes closed,

if not to find some meaning
and blind images of hope?

I crawled upon a beach,
trailing bits of you and bits of me

and building up
this shadow of a soul,

waking up from dreams
I know I half remember;

eyes closed and waiting -
hoping for more.

Tu es si belle, comme le soleil
qui marche dans les rues d’hiver,
qui touche la neige
et les arbres nus et dormants,

qui est là chaque matin,
chuchotant à moi:

Je suis içi…
et je t’attendrai
quand tu reviendras
à la maison du printemps.

Wolf to your forest,
moss to your dreaming of trees -

I await,
all teeth and all feeling;

both wild and tamed -
and unreal

till you call me.
Call me: I’m there

to be nothing or breathing.
Call me: I’m yours,

to live or to drown.
All must be yours to decide now:

who lives and loves
or will die.

The hangman shakes the hand of the convicted,
measuring his weight.
The priest who has no stomach for these things
holds tightly to the shaking holy Bible in his hands.

Last night the murderer confessed his sins;
confessed to him.
There was not one he hadn’t heard
so many times before,

from the judge who summarized the trial
or the members of the jury,
delivering the guilty verdict
with such pride.

The priest has heard it all before and lost
his faith in God and justice many deaths before.
So tired of the solace that he sought,
when he was young;

so tired of these rituals of retribution
and the hangman’s work,
when all is said and done,
the holy Bible closed -

till next time calls for bitter comfort
and sweet vengeance.
There will be nothing there;
no explanations or redemption.

The empty pages whisper,
‘Man is the cruelest animal
and works God’s bloody acres;
that is all.’

The tip of your cigarette
dances through the air:
quick-quick-slow & ready to go.
The rising smoke’s just hovering,
happy to hang around
for another short while.

Today was not a good day.
The buzzards were circling low.
I only came in here to drink
and drink,
give up on thought for now.

(The tip of your tongue
now tasting every sentence
you will not pass on the world.)

I only came in here to hide
till day or something break.

(I was eight or nine years’ old.
The pebbles I took from a beach in July
I touched and carried back to the fall,
to a pond some minutes away from my school.
Those flattened stones skimmed the surface of the world -
shivers going through me,
through the water,
breaking up the silence of the pond.)

Your face,
Wrinkling in the broken light
of these smoke-filled hours,
forever moving like a Chet Baker song,
taking pleasure in all.

Look at you…
Now your hand holds your head,
lifts your chin.
Rodin: eat your heart out.

I love the way you smoke
in holy concentration,
your eyes just a twinkle out of focus;
the parting smoke between your lingering lips.

To realize,
I almost gave up on today,
almost gave up on seeing you
at the other end of the bar.

Now, will I go over and speak to her:
tell her I long to breathe in her hair,
to touch those temples,
move on to her lips -
draw out in charcoal longing
all the blissful skin;
kneel in awe before her and
with trembling fingers
write goose-flesh poems;
undo all the damage of time?

Will I go over and speak to her?
She has seen me look at her and scribble:
stop breathing,
look at her and scribble…
Will I -
will she rest her eyes on me,
attend to the night and its needs;
succumb to her kindness and generous flesh?

I don’t know.
I could -
I just don’t know
but I can pray.

 

Storm the night and break the Gates of Heaven.
This the whisper in the trees
that turn their leaves to the rumours of spring.
Now done with death
and done with grieving,
they drive their roots into the waiting soil.

Hold her, hold her tight.
This the clamour of the cranes,
returning from the sun,
the shores of Lake Manyara.
Hold her to the light of all your dreaming,
all your coming homes.

And I hold you, hold you
like a martyr holds his death.
I paint your flesh with morning song,
with all these dreams I share with God.
I enter you like smoke,
like angels dying.

And I sing to you, now sing to you:
naked as the arms and armour
of a virgin heart,
I move through you like prayers,
now rising to the Heavens,
coming home.

(For C: Each day you do become more beautiful to me)

What hand

What tremors raised these mountains,
filled these seas?

What forces tore my clay apart;
remade it into something new -

something strange,
and raw, and bleeding?

The hand that made you
made my bed

from broken stars
and fractured light.

The nails of the tree scrape the window at night.
The clouds are keeping very still
and the face of the moon
will soon fill out
with promises of angry blood.

Cats fight in the dark
over souls that dared not seek new territories.
Like mice they flee and are disassembled.

In bedrooms blankets are the key
to a safe passage through the dark:
tucked in – do not show the naked skin.
Beast and ghoul cannot devour you
if soft sheets cover all of you.

The lukewarm air is now so still
that you could almost be forgiven to forget
that in the next few seconds

it will be inhaled again by night -
and all your thoughts
and hopes and dreams
sucked quietly
into its humid mouth.

The night’s so ravenous and still,
dressed in a million breathing corpses,
waiting for the magic of new light.

The nails of the tree scrape the window.
It’s not exactly a tattoo of hope
but it’s all you’ve got now
to remind you of the soil
where all will come and gather in the end.

Enola Gay,
deliver us from madness.
Cleansing fire from Heaven,

take our Sodom hearts
and our Gomorra tongues -
and make us pay.

For we have sinned;
oh, how we’ve sinned
against our jealous Lord.

Tear up the Covenant:
we are not worthy of the rainbow
and Your light.

Send us Your son,
Your only child:
Enola Gay,

deliver us Your Little Boy.
Engulf us in Your flames,
for we have sinned.

For R.

It’s four in the morning. The square is empty; the snow lies untouched. I see your breath: a white glow that almost enfolds me. Your hand warms my hand. I look up, from the green-moulded statue of Jan Hus, past the chimneys on the rooftops and the spires of the cathedral, to the low sky that slowly breaks under the weight of stars. I whisper my ‘I love you’ through the deep and almost holy silence of this winter night.

So full of you, so full of this strange and beautiful night, I feel like I am tip-toeing closer, maybe too close to the loadstone of the world:

I am the colony of half-feral graveyard cats, a few blocks from where we live. I’m the squirrels sleeping in their trees that guard the graves. I am the slow, weighted movement of all the tower clocks of Prague. I am the sound of trams and ambulance.

I am the reeking derelicts, half-frozen in the alleys – and the young Ukrainian hookers in their low-cut summer dresses, giving blow jobs for two Euros in public lavatories. I am the laughter and the jukebox and the sound of glasses spilling out of the pub, whenever someone enters or leaves.

For this one strange moment I am this whole angel and monster soaked city. I carry all the centuries and all the tired stones of Prague inside my head, my lungs, my heart.

Four in the morning – the square still empty – and now soot, like the ashes of burnt-out stars, falls softly on the snow. The smell of blackening, burning flesh hangs on the branches of winter trees. Before my eyes Jan Hus is burning. Next to him Jan Palach raises a jerrycan. Men with swords, men in priests’ robes slowly transform into hammer and sickle and tanks. The night is an open grave. Everything that ever was is now an indictment of all that followed.

“What’s wrong?” you ask.

I close my eyes in a free fall moment. I feel my heart moving like a lamp in the mast of a storm-held ship.

“Ah…”

Devils roast doves. Strange Gods break open graves. Insanity and loathing rise up from the throats of sewers in black tidal waves.

“Ah.”

I’m sinking. You hold me. You whisper now – concerned, but also strong; so strong, so self-assured, as only a woman can be: certain of her love, and of her strength.

“Look at me.”

Just for a moment longer the skeletons dance. For a few more heartbeats the cancer rides me. Then the square is just a square again. The night feels as safe, and intimate as your hand that still rests in mine. I whisper – like a penitant, a midnight mass, a revelation:

“God, I love you.”

You laugh: relieved but not in the least surprised. You open your coat (you open my heart) and you hold me, for a moment and forever, close to you – and I, I am like Rick, the king of his café, while the Marseillaise plays: Casablanca with a happy ending. And you, you are Chet Baker – the trumpet: unearthly beautiful, almost too much for me to hold.

It’s four in the morning. The old square lies empty. The clouds have conquered the sky for the moment and the snow dances, flutters and falls. The city is merely city again, a breathtakingly beautiful set piece for all our dreaming.

I will try to remember the half-frozen derelicts, the shivering, young hookers, the squirrels and graveyard cats – all of them can have a place in my heart. The despair and loathing though, the arrogance which like a perverted Saviour or spoilt Dali sits on the top of the Mount of Skulls as on a throne; the dumb drum beat of doubt and fear that turn to madness, when love threatens solitude: enough of that – no, never again that senseless void.

For yes, I love you – and you hold me.

And yes, it is still so very hard for me to trust and to believe that you have chosen me, that you are here with me. So, bear with me – forgive me, please. I am still learning to trust my senses.

A few minutes later we’re standing on Charles’ bridge. Below us the sleeping swans; above us the low, snow-dressed sky. Prague yet again the dream that brought us together and will never leave us, wherever we go. The sleepy water of the Vltava whispers round the pillars of the bridge, like your hand holds my hand, like your breath enfolding me.

Too numb now for poetry and clever phrases, I hold on to you. There’s only one whisper, shaping  my world:

“Renata…”

You smile.

Rebirth is a bitch. It hurts like Hell and it would be quite simply the most humiliating thing that could ever happen to a person, were it not for the fact that it gets worse with each new incarnation. There is, quite frankly, nothing worse than being reborn.

What was that you said? Death? You think death must be worse? Ah, thank you, child: it’s been a long time since I even came close to smiling. No, death is easy – and it’s a pity it can’t last.

So, you’ve just died – again. It may have been quick, like a heart attack or a bullet through the head. Or it may have been miserably slow: cancer, Alzheimer, watching American Idols. Hm? No, I didn’t say that dying was fun…It’s just that being reborn is much, much worse. Do pay attention, please.

Anyway, when you die all of you gets scrunched. I don’t mean your body but your essence. Imagine a soft drink can. The can is filled with all of your memories, conscious and unconscious; all the things you tasted and saw and heard; the things and people you loved, or hated. You call this filled soft drink can your soul. Which is as good a lie as any of the other weird stuff people tell themselves. Now, imagine a fist – a very strong and hairy fist. It’s scrunching the soda can. As I said: not nice. Happily, it goes very, very quickly.

Rebirth doesn’t come with a big hairy fist. It’s much more twiddly than that; much more messy too. The newly born creature, animal or vegetable, also needs one of those soft drink cans, in order to store its essence. Only problem is, before that can happen the old can needs to be un-scrunched – and that, subjectively speaking, takes a very painful eternity. What makes this process infinitely worse yet is the fact that during the un-scrunching this twisted and pathetic soft drink can remembers all the other times that this has happened to it. So, the more incarnations you have gone through, the more insufferable the entire process becomes.

The only good thing you can say about this whole sorry system is that the victims don’t carry this information with them while they live their short lives and while they are filling those soft drink cans again and again and again.

Hm? Ah, good question, yes. The first good question, in fact. How do I know about all of this…? Well, I’m not one of you, strictly speaking. You could call me a demon, if you like. Like ‘soul’ it’s a reference you can understand – or misunderstand, to be honest. It will do though.

So, what happens was, I answered a certain classified ad: ‘Don’t be desk bound! See the world! Be your own boss…’ Etcetera, etcetera. I fell for it; oh, how I fell for it. I signed the contract, accepted all the terms – including the one that said I could not join a union, or quit…; and that’s how I became a comptroller. I work the line, so to speak. Management always want to know if all the systems are working.

So, yes, that’s me: a bloody soft drink test can.

Just like any one of you I get born again and again and again – and yes, I also die again and again and again – and get reborn again and again and again…; and because I have to report back to Management, I get to remember all the bloody and extremely painful details: all of them, yes, again and again and again and again and again… Well, you get the drift, I’m sure.

Of course, there are some small compensations. Right now, for instance, I’m swimming in a bowl, with another damn fish. Yes, I’m currently a fish. What kind of fish? How the Hell should I know? I’m inside the bloody thing, so I don’t have a clue. Fish are not born thinking, ‘Wow, I’m a halibut – how fascinating!’ What I do know is that the other fish is weird. It’s always hanging upside down, against an awful-looking bit of greenery. Don’t ask me why – and it’s almost always asleep.

Not that I care about the other fish. I am much more interested in the view – and what a view it is. It’s my mistress, I presume. The one who feeds us and talks to us, and sometimes sings to us. (When she’s not walking into walls, that is. She is incredibly beautiful and all but also rather clumsy, I’m afraid.)

She also falls off the couch, laughing like a loon, whenever she watches Borat – and she spends too much time in the gym… Well, I didn’t say she was perfect – but she comes pretty close, mind you. The most beautiful part though is that she really, really likes clothes – she’s got tons of them and she likes to put them on just for the sheer fun of wearing them and seeing how they look on her; and she does look lovely in all of them (apart from an old and tattered, red & white & polka-dotted pair of pajamas. They look awful but for one reason or the other she seems to really adore them.)

Anyway, I love looking at her, when she’s parading through the room again, in ever changing outfits (and occasionally walking into walls, or stumbling over a pair of high-heeled shoes…) Of course, the part I really enjoy is when she undresses again, to change into yet another lovely dress or, pure bliss, one of her many, many swimsuits… Like the one she’s wearing right now.

Yes, I have to admit, there are compensations for all the discomfort and all the pain that comes with being reborn – and watching my mistress in that sexy bathing suit of hers… the one she will take off again any moment now… Yes. now that’s, as they say, to die for.

Ah…! Yesss…! There she goes. That’s one shoulder strap… Encore, encore…!

But…

No, no, no, no, no…

Watch that bloody shoe box…

No…!

No, no, no, NOOOOOOO…!!!

Oh, bloody, bloody, bloody Hell! How bloody clumsy can you bloody well bloody get…??!! You broke my bloody bowl, you stupid, stupid girl…!

Ah shit…!

Here comes that hairy fist again…

Bye bye, babyyyaaaaaiiiiiiiiyyyeeeeecccchhhh…. .

No suffering is unimportant.
There is no greater good;
no units more important
than the individual soul.

Not need.
Need is a myth invoked to tell us
there are ends to meet,
that disregard the others.

Not love (not necessarily.)
What most of us call love
is too self-centred to be trusted
and too vain.

It can’t be fear.
It can’t be hope, whispering
its stories in the night
but disregarding now.

The only thing I know:
Heaven can’t be reached,
while one child cries from hunger,
dies from thirst.

No suffering is unimportant.
There is no greater good;
all dots are equally important
on that pointed line into infinity.

In slow, slow motion the stick comes down:
a man lies bleeding in the street.
Soon the blood will stop its desperate running.
It’s not a sight or sound uncommon to the city.

Cars go by and sirens call for witnesses,
who need not carry red-striped canes
to tell the cops they didn’t see a thing.
No angels coming down to fetch the body.

Someone called the press.
Two rookie journalists are talking to a priest,
who stopped for a few moments
but has nothing much to say.

The priest is in a hurry.
He needs to lock the church doors for the night.
Faith is keeping office hours now
and God ain’t into house calls anymore.

Then the ambulance is gone.
The blood is wiped away.
Life of a sorts goes on.
Somewhere in the city food gets cold

to a cop’s wife’s lonely curses.

1

The lone bird flies too high
to cast a shadow on the land.

The desert down below lies still,
lies simmering.

A stone clad in a haze of white and heat
leans into a wind that doesn’t show.

2

The branches of the tree hang low
and almost touch the river.

A stone breaks through
the surface of the stream.

Diamond-fractured, reaching
for the evening light, it glistens.

That evening,
the shadow of the olive tree
came down from the hill,

where bits of cork
and crumbs of bread
were carried away by ants.

Our revenant embraces,
knotted and dry as wood,
flickered in the ashes of some fire.

Places to go (a chorus whisper)
places to go -
in haste and time.

That evening,
the olive branch was swaying in the wind.
Ants ate the carcasses of doves.

(For Renata)

“Come.”

I can hear you but I am so far away…

(…I am Columbus on the foredeck, listening to the sound of an unfamiliar surf. Seagulls draw lazy circles in the sky. I think of all the things that are so far away from here and from this moment:

the carts that moaned under the weight of timber, the many new and ugly, empty spaces in the forest; the horses and the men who collapsed during this transformation from living wood into these mighty ships; the begging letters and the long months of waiting for a royal decree; the recruiting and press-gang of sailors, the many holy masses and processions; the last confession.

I think of all the things that do not matter anymore. I am that stray message that somehow arrived; the camel that unexpectedly and undeservedly easily jumped through the needle’s eye. I am Columbus and a whole new world is waiting…)

“Come now.”

By the light of my monitor, at the open window, all I can see and all I touch comes in the form of prayer. Outside, the stars are drilling deep holes into the night. Yellow-eyed trams rattle the gates of this sleepy, stone town. All sounds – all of the outside world – now seem so far away, and almost inconceivable. The trees in the courtyard, where the bird’s nests are waiting for spring, shiver and creak like masts, tied to a fleeting image, to a ship that dreams of sailing for new worlds. My fingers on the keyboard move in a silent staccato, always reaching for you – always searching for new words to tell you what your smile has known for all these years:

The night is a fever of stars,
each sound a train,
a sweet, birth-sweat whisper:
there, and there, and there…

(And here: my body,
darkening,
still,
a waiting for you.)

Ah. Useless. It always is. My words will never be enough, or even close to what I want to say. Why can’t I, like Robert Graves, tell you ‘with half-words whispered low’ what you really mean to me – how all my dreams reside in you?

I’m lucky though: you don’t demand perfection. You trust me with your body, your waking days, your dream-filled sleep – and you know me. You know me so well.

“Come.”

For a few moments longer I sit there in my chair, by the open window, hunched over my keyboard, brooding and resentful as a God, who stumbled over the husks of words that were meant to shape a universe.

“Come here.”

Then my fingers dance like crazy sparrows, while you slowly stretch, your shadow lazily reaching for me. Ah, still no good…; but before I delete all the nonsense that I wrote, before I take off my ego and put it it on the shelf for now, before I find myself and all that I hold dear back in your arms again, I say:

“Enough; enough already. I have outrun all of my sentences.”

You laugh, and you whisper, for the last time – so sure and with the quiet perfection of a Chopin nocturne:

“Come here.”

The next morning you kiss me awake. Your hands stroke my hair. I hesitate on the border of two perfect continents. Now, to die in this momentous bliss or bury myself alive in your warm and welcoming flesh? Yet then, in that half-way moment, the words rise again and fill me. Absurd and naked I jump out of bed and search for pen and paper. You laugh – with the soft roar of leopard in your throat, but also forgiving. After all, you know me so well.

“Now what?” you ask, quite indulgently.

I wave myself and our bed and your glorious, naked body impatiently away. You start to hum the theme song of the Twilight Zone.

Ten minutes later I’ve returned to earth and I crawl back into bed. You look at me with the half-closed and tolerant eyes of a big mother cat. I kiss you on your still sleepy, night-coloured, half-swollen lips. Much later, at the breakfast table, you read what I wrote for you – what earlier, for just a moment, had seemed to be so right, so perfect even. I read over your shoulder and now, as always, I’m disappointed and dissatisfied with the result:

Opening my veins,
these words spill out.
Warm and wet,
all surface true,
they stick to paper,
walls and ceiling.

Such simple graffiti:

I love you, love you, love you
and I need you here with me.

You destroy a last piece of toast, take another sip of tea and then again you comprise all that exists for me into one single word:

“Come.”

Just in this moment – not looking at you
I can see the things that I would love to do:
to kiss a naked shoulder,
touch and tremble – trembling lips:
my lips would never be
at home with yours.

Forever strangers,
they would meet
in moist, exotic places.
So easy, again,
to get carried away -
so Goddamn easy.

Not looking at you
I can see everything -
but let’s forget all lust.
Let us be friends.
I want you – yes,
that much is obvious:

I want you -
but I also want your trust,
for you to be at ease with me.
That’s hard – too hard
at times, I know
but I’ll keep trying.

(Things I’ll never say. Things I’ll never do…)
I’ve seen your nipples through a T-shirt.
I would not even care to touch
upon such a common observation,
but for the ease of shivering lust,
raised blood, raised hairs and me.

These are (unclean, unclean)
the unsaid and unthought things:
your eyes so amazed -
your eyes forever in awe.
I saw my praying eyes so many times
in your enlarging pupils;

your tongue, your teeth,
so fucking perfect
in their smelly, unmade bed
of breathing flesh;
your breath like waves
all over me.

(Things I’ll never say; things I’ll never do.
Things that will not matter much to you.)
Unsaid, unthought – unclean
but I know guilt.
For I still want to set my teeth
into your lower lip;

Your nipples swollen now
against my chest -
my breath, now moving
like the hull of some old ship;
your fingers crying for a tune,
hammering and groping for my flesh.

Oh yes, I know of guilt.
Not of these innocent pleasures;
not of the needful flesh
but of the hurt to others,
to your friend – to all our friends
who wouldn’t understand.

(And yet, what can I do?
I know what I must do: I must be silent.)
That is easy – easy as all sinking ships must
move beneath the waves.
Easy yes – but still I want you.
These unsaid, unthought things still haunt me.

I know the strings of guilt and lust.
Oh yes, my friend,
I do know lust.

(The picture accompanying the poem I found on this site.)

Ink becomes crude oil;
my thoughts like seagulls,
coated in this thick black waste.

What makes it
so damned hard
to say I love you?

Fuck the seagull and the sea,
the tanker split and bowing
like a dream come true.

(Now would be the perfect time
to quote a bit – give rein: well-educated
and performing to the needs of poetry.)

Fuck that; I love you  -
and besides: piss stinks.
You can try and hide it with chemicals,

called Brook or Woods or Tropical Fruit.
All to the sound of violins
but piss still stinks.

Love cannot be coated,
cannot be guarded well.
It’s kind of ugly in its need;

It’s kind of fearsome
in its greed.
It is not nice.

So fucking beautiful its shell:
the soft flesh open
to all kinds of Hell.

And yet, so fucking beautiful
these simple words:
I love you.

The elders were inside, deep down in their bunkers. They couldn’t bear to watch the sky during this week. However broad and deep this new sky was, all eyes would always travel to that one small pinpoint of bright light: the latest star to join the endless, silent choir of night’s bright passengers.

The children called this new arrival ‘The Cradle’.

The elders couldn’t bear to watch it, or think about it, or call it by its older name. Those who had survived the Days of Reckoning and had survived the journey, stayed deep under the ground and tried not to remember.

Outside, a new and fearless generation watched the sky. They smiled. They remembered.

Not the days of old. None of them had lived through those days. A few of them had been born on board the handful of ships that had made it to this new home – but most of them had never known another place, another environment. None of them shared the grief of the elders.

“Almost” one of the children whispered; “Almost time now.”

Inside their bunkers, the elders did their slow and grievous dying, second by second, hour by hour, day by day. None of them had truly survived the Days of Reckoning – not in any meaningful sense of the word. They only seemed to go forward in time but they did not. The past’s strong gravity was slowly claiming them as its last victims. They were dying – and they knew that they were dying, and they did not care.

Outside, the children were waiting impatiently for the dance to begin.

“Why are they so sad?’ one of the youngest asked.

“Because they’re stupid.” another child answered.

The rest of them laughed at this. Most shook their heads in quiet bemusement. It was stupid. It was a beautiful day, on a beautiful world. A world not touched by old wars, old hunger, old evils.

“But they gave us these!” one of the older children said, stretching her arms and raising them as high as she could.

The others followed her example.

“Yes!”

“Yes!”

“Yes!”

Inside their bunkers, deep under the ground, the elders sat silently. They didn’t need to see that bright new star to feel its weight, its intolerable weight, upon their shoulders. They were slowly dying and if they still could have felt any of the normal, old emotions, they would have felt glad to do so. This was not their world and they had no future here. So, they were returning to a past, however dark it may have been. The past was theirs and they would reclaim it in the only way left to them – by dying slowly, second by second, hour by hour, day by day.

Outside, the children had begun to dance. A solemn dance: a dance of mourning. Even if they didn’t feel the grief, they did want to honour their parents. The elders who had given them these wings, that now grew from their shoulders – forever part of them, forever part of this new world.

While the elders hid inside their bunkers, their children flew and danced upon the air of this new, and forgiving, and much lighter world. They flew; they danced; they sang their solemn songs – and they ignored the newest star, that burnt so brightly: the place the elders, before the Days of Reckoning, had called Earth.