Ostalgie

May 10, 2026
Spring Thoughts

Stephen Komarnyckyj is a British Ukranian poet who is now living in what was previously East Germany.

The guy 

who keeps a Cayman island crocodile 
in a garden pond in his living room 
asks you to call round some time,
it is midday and he already reeks of beer.
“It is the house with a statue of the Virgin Mary
and a unicorn in the windows.
And Jesus and his family.” 
An old sandstone building like a small factory,
now flats, where German stoners sip hash tea. 
The crocodile barely fits in the pool
it is over two metres long
and eats a frozen chicken once a week.
The guy, who looks like Kojak,
says “sometimes he climbs onto the bed
and we have a little cuddle”
(what the fuck? is your internal subtitle).
His father rescued Billy from a bankrupt zoo
and this is his only inheritance
but it is love. That could kill, 
but remains gentle and true.

Horses

My way is to begin with the ending the drive
Past a swan in a culvert drinking its reflection

Shingled cottages where gravel from the coast
Smooths with rain through knuckled nothingness

There were the horses, of course, the water tank
We saw on the walk. Those I held inside my head

Between those who know each other truly you say
There is no need to talk sometimes only hear and look

How the river threads its mercury and the apricot
Bombs the earth with summer's orange blood

And perhaps my mind and yours wheels back
To the horses, no racers they, beautiful, sturdy

Roan, black and cream eyes deep beyond sea
The stilt-legged foal who came to the fence

Being from another universe still walking into our
Three dimensions. We saw them and we spoke

Equine with silence as they turned back:
The swan now takes off almost awkwardly

Copulating with the lower altitude then glides
Beyond beautiful and all I am with you

Is more than I can have its bladed wave.

Pruning

The plum saplings down the slope
Of the garden that grew wildly while I was sick – 
This summer feels brutal
The saw cutting through their soft grey bark

For they seem human, or is it we who seem
Like trees: their skin, though they are young,
Already knotted and scarred,
And I sense too that they dream 

Through the slow creep of light at dawn
And when the wind lisps over them,
As a horsehair bow teases song, 
From a violin so they speak

But I cannot decrypt their tongue,
Even as my hand curls round a branch 
I sense their blank pain
But still I saw

I am untangling growth dark and diseased,
Letting light in:
How we must wound that which we love.
To abandon

Is to let it go rotten.
The branches will grow back, spring
Will happen, as now birds repeat 
Always the song

Heard before, yet each note always unique:
My hand rests on the tree,
My saw, and all I am, 
Is the silence after music when the room

Itself is heard. I listen with my skin.

Stephen Komarnyckyj writes:

I have ended up living in a German village in what was previously East Germany after leaving the UK a decade ago. It is a strange place; there is a guy keeping a crocodile rescued from a zoo in a garden-pond liner in his front room. The ruins of the old agricultural collective had a red star looming over them. Crows used it as a perch until one day it collapsed. We moved into a dilapidated cottage and found that, under the linoleum in the kitchen, there were communist newspapers. They had printed themselves backwards on the concrete floor creating a ghostly effect, the inverted ghosts and headlines of a communist past. I found a ten-pfennig coin from the DDR but the guys in the village were dismissive: it was alloy, now if it had been a coin from Das Reich… they were silver! Many here long for the old East Germany, a feeling they call ostalgie (from the German words for east and nostalgia), and the Nazis still lurk. But I can only see how beautiful the landscape is and write about it, and them. And the garden that is my personal Eden.

Poetry

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