Is it possible to write poetry in a language other than one's mother tongue? The English Poems of an Unknown German Poet are the attempt. Written in the years 2015 to 2022, after phases of intensive reading and working with English texts, they lie in the tension between the foreign and the familiar, one's own world entering a foreign one and a foreign world touching familiar spheres. Mutual interaction between understanding and incomprehension, as an exercise to focus on real truthfulness. And of course in these poems always a companion: a smile. Present in its whole range from a soft warm smile only as a guess on one's lips to a sometimes even bitterly sarcastic ironic grin, may be the only answer in a confusingly unusual time.