Poetry as work of mourning - In between, of course, there were literary interests. I even wanted to study German, but the whole story was a little too tedious for me, because I had been writing poetry since childhood, my first poem at the age of eight. When my mother died, I wrote my first poem a year later and it was then published in the Burgenland newspapers. I can even do that today. Today my mother's face appeared to me in my dreams and she kissed me so tenderly, but she wasn't allowed to talk. When I woke up in the morning, her love came to mind as I remembered this dream. Whenever the night wind whispers and speaks of a grave, tears fill my eyes, but I cannot speak. () Pause, laughter) I was a primary school student and then my father noticed that I had something literary, that I had something in me and then he encouraged me a little bit and from there I always wrote poems and poetry For me it was initially in a rhymed form, then later unrhymed. Poetry has always been a second avenue of life for me. When I was feeling really miserable, when I was under the worst stress, I wrote a poem and it was so liberating, it was therapy for me. Even now that my wife has died, I also wrote a lot of poems and that was also important for me. It was a work of grieving or coping with crises and so on, which I always did with poetry and now have a total of seven, the eighth volume of poetry, which is currently still in its infancy. Yes, that's the case during the Corona period, for example, I wrote 130 poems because people were in barracks and that was the last year that my wife and I were together. We didn't know that, didn't we.