Poems Read online

  And one day gather even death

  Into its arms.

  Flowers, Too

  Flowers, too, suffer death,

  And yet they are guiltless.

  So, too, our own being is pure

  And suffers only grief,

  Where we ourselves do not wish to understand.

  What we call guilt

  Is absorbed by the sun,

  It comes to meet us out of the pure throats

  Of flowers, fragrance and the moving gaze of children.

  And as flowers die,

  So we die, too,

  Only the death of deliverance,

  Only the death of rebirth.

  Uneasiness in the Night

  The clock speaks uneasily with the spider web on the wall,

  The wind tears at the shutters,

  My flickering candles are

  Utterly dripped away and burned down,

  No more wine in the glass,

  Shadows in every corner

  Whose long fingers stretch out toward me.

  Just as in childhood

  I close my eyes and breathe heavily,

  Uneasiness clutches me cowering in my chair,

  But no mother comes any more,

  No kindly, scolding maid comes to me any more

  So friendly, she charmed the horrifying world

  Away from me and brightened me new with comfort.

  I stay a long time, cowering in the darkness,

  Hear the wind in the roof and crackling death in the walls,

  Hear sand running behind the wallpaper,

  Hear death spinning with his cold fingers;

  I force my eyes open, I want to look and to grasp,

  Look into the emptiness and hear him far off

  Whistling lightly out of his mocking lips,

  I edge into bed—I wish I could sleep I

  But sleep has turned into a frightened bird,

  Difficult to catch, to hold, yet easy to kill;

  Whistling he flies off, his voice full of bitter disdain,

  The rustling of a wing, away in the straining wind.

  All Deaths

  I have already died all deaths,

  And I am going to die all deaths again,

  Die the death of the wood in the tree,

  Die the stone death in the mountain,

  Earth death in the sand,

  Leaf death in the crackling summer grass

  And the poor bloody human death.

  I will be born again, flowers,

  Tree and grass I will be born again,

  Fish and deer, bird and butterfly.

  And out of every form,

  Longing will drag me up the stairways

  To the last suffering,

  Up to the suffering of men.

  O quivering tensed bow,

  When the raging fist of longing

  Commands both poles of life

  To bend to each other!

  Yet often, and many times over,

  You will hunt me down from death to birth

  On the painful track of the creations,

  The glorious track of the creations.