sea-wind of the night:
you come for no one;
if someone should wake,
he must be prepared
how to survive you.
Timeless sea breezes,
that for aeons have
blown ancient rocks,
you are purest space
coming from afar…
Oh, how a fruit-bearing
fig tree feels your coming
high up in the moonlight.
Translated by Albert Ernest Flemming
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His vision, from the constantly passing bars,
anything else. It seems to him there area thousand bars; and behind the bars, no world.As he paces in cramped circles, over and over,the movement of his powerful soft stridesis like a ritual dance around a centerin which a mighty will stands paralyzed.Only at times, the curtain of the pupilslifts, quietly–. An image enters in,rushes…
Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels’
pressed me against his heart, I would perishin the embrace of his stronger existence.For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terrorwhich we are barely able to endure and are awedbecause it serenely disdains to annihilate us.Each single angel is terrifying.And so I force myself, swallow and hold backthe surging call of my dark sobbing.Oh,…
Again and again, however we know the landscape of love
and the frighteningly silent abyss into which the othersfall: again and again the two of us walk out togetherunder the ancient trees, lie down again and againamong the flowers, face to face with the sky.
What birds plunge through is not the intimate space,
(In the Open, denied, you would lose yourself,would disappear into that vastness.)Space reaches from us and translates Things:to become the very essence of a tree,throw inner space around it, from that spacethat lives in you. Encircle it with restraint.It has no limits. For the first time, shapedin your renouncing, it becomes fully tree.Submitted and Translated…
Whom will you cry to, heart? More and more lonely,
mankind. All the more futile perhapsfor keeping to its direction,keeping on toward the future,toward what has been lost.Once. You lamented? What was it? A fallen berryof jubilation, unripe.But now the whole tree of my jubilationis breaking, in the storm it is breaking, my slowtree of joy.Loveliest in my invisiblelandscape, you that made me more knownto…
O you tender ones, walk now and then
Upon your cheeks let it tremble and part;behind you it will tremble together again.O you blessed ones, you who are whole,you who seem the beginning of hearts,bows for the arrows and arrows’ targets–tear-bright, your lips more eternally smile.Don’t be afraid to suffer; returnthat heaviness to the earth’s own weight;heavy are the mountains, heavy the seas.Even…