Vain the cruel hope
that the screams of the tortured
might pave the way for a brighter future:

observe whose voice trembles with emotion,
whose heart is stirred
when the rolls are changed
at twenty-eight minute intervals.

Greetings, cemeteries!

– Günter Eich, Angina Days: Selected Poems (trans. Michael Hofmann; Princeton/Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2010), 87.