zerowitz:

Being a citizen of a small and insignificant country makes you wonder (from time to time) where your place in the cultural world is. What do you mean? What do they all know? What do they think of? There are a few people in the world who know my name, age, position in life, weight, height and whether I prefer vanilla ice cream to chocolate ice cream. But what do I... represent as a symbol itself when, for example, I speak English with that hard accent of mine? Do I represent anything at all?
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So you've got this book of poetry in German. And there's this poem, a kind of song I believe. The poet sings of his mother, of death and of loss, the Holocaust. Well, about everything every good poet should sing I suppose. And it's beautiful. (Like remembering snow falling both silently and melodiously at the same time when they were burying granny.)
And so you read it a few times. Remember it by heart (even if your German is so poor that you constantly mistake denn for dann and vice versa.) You read it and read it and there goes that line about his tender mother and then... BANG!.. the name of your country. There it is, right there. Can you see it now? There are only ten lines in the whole poem and one of them includes the name of your country. So it's big. Really big. Huge. How couldn't you notice it before? The greatest poet of the 20th century writes the name of your country next to "mother". You should definitely see it now.

And he also writes about dandelions and green colour and hair of his mom. All these words combined gently together. Constelations in the dark blue skies.
Don't you understand it? He thinks your dandelions are pretty, nice, green and fair enough to compare his mother's hair to them. She died, you know, that woman. Killed. "...was shot dead after being exhausted by forced labour".

And then these flowers, very small and very green indeed.
And then there are your dandelions.
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Who wouldn't give him their heart after all this? I believe cosmopolitanism to be a great thing and everything. But I ask... who wouldn't give him their heart? Who wouldn't?

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