Farewell to Hans Kasten, a Friend

Like the far horizon stretched for the setting sun,
The legionnaire lay languishing bedrugged in bed,
A soldier of old fading, whose days were but done,
A grand, tired legend horizontally spread!
Oblivious, at times, to all presence in the room
He lay, a confirmed atheist cradled by God
(Who had long salved his soul in a silken cocoon)
Now, but in fond farewell to his withering sod;
Yet, as the bright celestial orb shining of light,
But fast in its routine perennial ends the morn,
And we, but dimly prepare for the light of night,
The other side brightens by the birthing of dawn;
And so too, will rise this slow, setting son of old,
His life ever impregnated with splendid deeds,
Leaving family, friends and memories untold --
With a Farewell, Adios, Aloha, Godspeed!


Berlin: Wednesday, 19August 2007


Note: Johann Carl Friedrich Kasten IV: a Hawaiian born American of established German parentage, religious rebel and a confirmed atheist, distinguished soldier of the Second World War, protector of Jewish comrades-in-arms, victim of excessive Nazi torture as a traitor bearing a German name, but fighting for the enemy, twice an escapee – latterly from Berga, finally sent to Belsen just before its liberation by the Allied Forces, a War Hero of the USA, patron of the arts, and eventually a much married, much travelled, wealthy businessman settled down in the Philippines for nearly sixty years. On 26th July 2007, I left him and his family in the Makati Medical Hospital in the condition, as described in the above poem. He passed away at home in the Pacific Plaza, Makati, on the 9th August 2007; his ninety-first birthday fell, along with his wife’s, Florinda, on 18th August 2007.

 

I stared and stared at a very blank wall,

Till strange writings formed that I could not read;

I tried and tried to understand it all,

But I failed and failed, yet I learned to teach;

I taught what I thought I had understood

To those who understood what I could see;

Thus, with Truth imagined, firmly we stood,

Singing songs of freedom and liberty;

Well we sang in united brotherhood

And thought the rest were completely off-key;

Till one day it fell, that mighty big wall,

Ever burdened with thought and literacy;

And we returned -- all the short and the tall,

Divorced from thought, but living happily!

 

From The Unsung Log by Ronnie Patel (copyright Ronnie Patel 2007)

 

Let me your long sleep intrude like the first 

Ray of light that sunders the dark of night;

Let me whisper in your ear like the first

Birdsong that greets the dawning of the day;

Hardly harbinger of the scorching Sun,

Or the full melody of enchantment,

I am yet  as intensely made and done

As the bird and sun of timely portent;

I am the inner voice, alter ego,

The quiet, intrinsic part of the soul,

The quintessence of life never expunged,

Ever pointing of the path to your goal;

Heed me, but well in your meandering,

Oh, wandering self, away from the ways

Set within your earthly scope, and wandering

Still, find me beyond fear, beyond hope!

 

From The Unsung Log by Ronnie Patel (Copyright Ronnie Patel 2007)

 

As wispy, vaporous risings that

Permeate a patch of time and space,

To end, but banished into the vast

And  boundless void, all history of

Deeds and graces of  every man and

Hominoid will perish, with useless

Strife and struggle for all his beliefs, 

His shibboleths and spectral wraiths;

Such, indeed, is the embarrassment

Of human importance, fame and faiths!

 

From the Unsung Log by Ronnie Patel; (C) Ronnie Patel 2006

 

Show me the world with your eyes, for

I have been blind and paralysed,

Yet not of the grandest vision denied;

Hold my hand, but gently, and speak

With sense and voice of all the things,

So that in imagination,

At least, I would but freely move,

Be as rich, If not richer than the kings!

 

 

In the vast absolute of Time and Space,

In which everything moves, evolves, erodes,

Mutates, disintigrates, but prcisely,

Man, the insignificant, annotates,

Calibrates, invents words, and educates

Himself as God's gift to posterity;

Discovering merely what there is

He signifies all with meaningful words

Till material they become to his Faith:

That embodiment of embossed vapours

That flimsily rise high in time and space,

As banishment into the boundless void,

The absolute - the eternal trashcan

For the unending illusions of Man!

 

 

 

We imagine all the crosses we bear

And dare not go where The Great Bearer went,

Not for us the scuffed earth of dragging feet

And craters where He fell knees bent

 

 

Listen to the rumble of the cannons of war;

The undying conflicts of man in relentless

Pursuits of truth and justice, edifying days

Of nothing but the drudgery of dreaded souls,

And despatch of the deluded to unmarked graves;

Bathe in the rubble razed by the whirlwinds of war;

Coursing consortium of clouds of global havoc

That mock the misguided man, without a saviour,

Rise and hover over his soul’s parched, arid lands

And rain but the detritus of human failure;

See the ugliness in the willful wage of war,

Crying vengeance and retributions much provoked

By the sickening senselessness on either side;

Oh, most fond faith in pacts of priests and presidents,

For once, rid of them and ever in peace abide!

 

     From The Unsung Log by Ronnie Patel (copyright Ronnie Patel 2006).

 

Oh stop, but at once, this foolishness

Of senselessly staring into me

As though I were some strange oddity;

Come not any nearer, no further,

Lest, unready, you the mirror break

And step right into reality;

Not free of the life of illusions,

Not free of all the reasoned out truths,

Live on, make a lifetime of it yet,

Till the mirror but shatters itself,

And with rare grace into me you step

And cease to be your own creation;

We are nothing but by mirrors made,

And nothing to nothing we shall go,

When God, you and I shall cease to be

The wretched reflections anymore!

 

From The Unsung Log by Ronnie Patel (copyright Ronnie Patel 2006).