A Little Lyrical Surprise at Year's End February 9, 2026
Shortly before Christmas, I received an email from Klausur Verlag. I had to look twice. Some time earlier, I had submitted something to a competition on the theme: Contradiction. This time it was about poetry. And poetry really isn't my home at all. I feel much more comfortable with prose. But that's exactly why I wanted to dare to try something new.
So I submitted a text... and then honestly forgot about it.
On December 21st came the surprise: Klausur Verlag informed me with great joy that my text not only ranks among the best submissions in the competition, but also received an honorable mention. I didn't win one of the seven prizes, but this recognition still made me incredibly happy, especially because I had ventured far outside my comfort zone with this genre.
On February 6th, at 7 pm in the Hölderlin 1 Cultural Center in Hannover-Kleefeld, the anthology "Contradiction" was presented. My text was also read aloud there. Unfortunately, I couldn't be there myself, as the distance was a bit too far. Still, it was a very beautiful feeling to know that my words found their place that evening.
The Contradiction anthology is available from Klausur Verlag and costs, as far as I know, about twelve euros.
And for anyone curious about my text, about my interjection... here it is:
I Am the Crack
I see the dust dancing,
when the light falls through me.
I am the crack. Not just a small fissure in the masonry, but the gap through which light falls and with it, pain.
I am the in-between, where words are born and in the same breath fall silent.
I am the whole, yet everything I touch crumbles into opposites.
I want unity and find movement. An endless back and forth, searching for itself.
Perhaps this is the truth: that nothing alive is one.
I say Yes and hear the No, like an echo from the depths. I say No — and feel the Yes, refusing to die. I go and stand still in going. I stay and move nonetheless.
I want to understand, but understanding flees like a bird that takes flight when I come too close.
I search for the point where everything rests. But it pulses, soft as life itself.
I build bridges from thoughts, and the water beneath me laughs at my effort. Because the water knows: everything is in flux — even stone.
I am the one who cannot comply. The one who shatters against himself and lives on from it.
I am the flicker that won't go out. It keeps me awake when the world dreams.
Two voices argue within me: one calls: Order, the other whispers: let go. Between them my heart stretches taut. It holds, and it tears. It beats, and it is silent.
Perhaps life is an attempt not to break — but to live.
Hölderlin said: "Near is — and hard to grasp, the God." But I believe contradiction is this nearness: too close to comprehend. Too true to deny.
I want to believe. Yet even belief doubts itself. I want to love. Yet even love knows its opposite.
So I walk through days of clarity, through nights of discord, through moments of light.
I am the one who loses himself again and again, to find himself anew.
And perhaps that is the only way to be true: to contradict yourself again and again; honestly.
Because what stands still lives no more. What is whole has stopped breathing. Only the broken resonates. Only the wavering moves.
I am the crack. And through me the world goes on.
