The Nietzsche Women

or (The Hand of the Nietzsche Women)


Retreating to alpine hermitages, in lonely
visions, Friedrich saw that greedy Wagner,
playing upon the base instincts of the masses,
would lead a lost Germany to ruin: Dead ruin.
And Frau Nietzsche, said: ‘Jah, mein sohn.’
mopping his brow, as if he was the first of many.

Up there, he thinned: to love glaciers, icebergs, the
alpine Swiss chill… so the Cross of Christ became
a plot against all manhood, a damnation. Brotherhood
was curse! Care of the helpless: a weakness. And his
good Lutheran mother came and tended his fever, tucking
a blanket over to save him feeling a further chill.

Despairing man! lost from his boyhood anchor:
Belief! hardened to beautiful icicles of words more piercing
than a Swiss yodel, a frost speech - ridiculing Christian charity,
Christian compassion, Christian care; while his good Lutheran mother
came to him and eased his bodily suffering.

‘The founders of religion,” he said, 'are but
half-castes of sickness and the will to power”,
“ Zaruthustra is My greatest gift to humankind.”
Himself, taken with the sickness he scorned,
Still said:“kick down all that is meant to fall”
And his sister, Fraulien Nietzsche, a good Lutheran
girl, lifted and bathed his head with her warm balm.

The Female Nietzsches: their unwritten grief!
For his sake, his state, ceaseless in compassion.
And then these woman mourned him, buried him,
shed tears at the enemy’s cruel backhand. Him, a pastor’s
son, with so fatal a dose of the Illness, turned against
the hand… and went down, being Christians, extending
their touch, while near all Germany read Zarusthustra,
and got ready to live without compassion and die.

Last night I met a muso on a Met train in Melbourne,
Saying how his own faithless woman had betrayed him,
again. He said
“ I’m spending my last night on earth’
as if that goes by way of a greeting in Lygon Street.
... Brunswick is another country.

Carrying a backpack and a bottle of stout
Reading Hermann Hesse and Friedrich Nietzsche
and wanting to tell me of a faithless woman
the reason, the reason that he has no hope
as if that one was new ! I said: "Faith
is a gift of God you can recieve."

Catching a train from the city to Belgrave
With a bottle of Coopers stout instead of a ticket,
With a mobile phone, too low in battery to call
- it was his last night on earth - and then...

He pulled a copy of Zarathustra from his pocket,
saying: ‘It’s 2006! How can you believe in God?”

“His loss does not have to be yours.' I said.
“Nietzsche went to mountains as if up to God.
But he could not leap. he would not yield
to that risk. And, it is a mountain leap.” I replied.

“But, for Nietzsches like the women.”


17 November 2006 © Wayne David Knoll