As millions of displaced persons
with little lullage,
burdened by memory,
were forcibly resettled
in what remained of the fatherland,
many of the locals, feeling cramped
by their arrival, shouted:
Go back where you came from!
But they stayed, as did
the well-worn cry: Go, get out!
Soon it was aimed at foreigners
who came later, and later still
from far away,
speaking in strange tongues;
they too remained,
settled down, and multiplied.
Only when the natives
began to feel foreign too
did they also begin to see,
in all those foreigners
who'd slowly learned
to bear their foreignness,
their own selves,
and start to live with them.
______________________
GUNTER GRASS
Of All That Ends
translated by Breon Mitchell
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
2016
