Song in the Night
I
Born from the shadow of a breath
We wander in abandonment
And are lost in the eternal,
Like victims ignorant wherefore they are consecrated.
Like beggars nothing is our own,
We fools at the locked gate.
As blind people we listen in the silence,
In which our whisper is lost.
We are the wanderers without destinations,
The clouds which the wind blows away,
The flowers shaking in death's coolness,
Which wait, until one mows them down.
II
So that the last torment becomes complete with me,
I do not defend you, you hostile dark powers.
You are the road to great stillness,
Upon which we stride in the coolest nights.
Your breath makes me burn louder,
Patience! The star dies down, the dreams glide
In those realms not named to us,
And which we may only walk along dreamlessly.
III
You dark night, you dark heart,
Who mirrors your holiest ground,
And your malice's last abysses?
The mask stares before our pain -
Before our pain, before our lust
The empty mask's stony laughter,
On it the earthen things broke,
And ourselves not deliberately.
And a strange enemy stands before us,
Who jeers, about which we struggle dying,
So that our songs sound cloudier
And what weeps in us remains dark.
IV
You are the wine that makes drunk,
Now I bleed in sweet dances
And must wreath my suffering with flowers!
So your deepest mind wills, o night!
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poem by Georg Trakl
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