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Georg Trakl: Poems
(published in 1913 by the Kurt Wolff publishing house, Leipzig)
Translated by Jim Doss and Werner Schmitt, unless otherwise indicated.
leads to the German originals.

and the
German version of the Trakl-Site.  

The Ravens

Over the black corner at midday

The ravens rush with hard cry.

Their shadow streaks past the doe

And sometimes they are seen in sullen rest.

O how they disturb the brown silence

Of a field lying ecstatic with itself,

Like a woman ensnared by heavy intuition,

And sometimes one can hear their nagging

Around a carcass scented out somewhere,

And suddenly their flight bends northward

And disappears like a funeral procession

Into winds that tremble with lust.

The Young Maid
   Dedicated to Ludwig von Ficker

1

Often at the well when it dawns

One sees her standing spellbound

Scooping water when it dawns.

Buckets go up and down.

In the beeches jackdaws flutter

And she resembles a shadow.

Her yellow hair flutters

And rats scream in the yard.

And enticed by decay

She lowers her inflamed eyelids.

Parched grass in decay

Bends down to her feet.

2

Silently she works in the chamber

And the yard lies long desolate.

In the elder trees by the chamber

A blackbird flutes pitifully.

Silverly her image in the mirror

Looks at her strangely in the twilight-glow

And dusks sickly in the mirror

And she shudders before its purity.

Dreamlike a farm boy sings in the dark

And she stares shaken with pain.

Redness trickles through the dark.

Suddenly at the gate the south wind shakes.

3

Nightly over the bare meadow

She totters in feverish dreams.

A morose wind whines in the meadow

And the moon listens from the trees.

Soon all around the stars pale

And exhausted from complaints

Her waxen cheeks pale.

Putrefaction is scented from the earth.

Sadly the reeds rustle by the pond

And cowering she freezes.

Far away a cock crows. Above the pond

Morning shivers hard and grey.

4

In the smithy clangs the hammer

And she scurries past the gate.

In red glow the farm boy swings the hammer

And deathlike she looks over there.

As in dream she's struck by his laughter;

And she tumbles into the smithy,

Shyly cringing before his laughter,

Like the hammer hard and coarse.

Brightly in the room sparks

Spray and with helpless gestures

She snatches after the wild sparks

And falls dazed to the earth.

5

Lankily sprawled out on the bed

She wakes filled with sweet tremblings

And she sees her soiled bed

Hidden by a golden light,

Mignonettes there at the window

And the bluish brightness of sky.

Sometimes the wind carries to the window

A bell's hesitant tinkling.

Shadows glide over the pillow,

Noon strikes slowly

And she breathes heavily on the pillow

And her mouth is like a wound.

6

In the evening bloody linens float,

Clouds over silent forests,

That are wrapped in black linens.

Sparrows fuss in the fields.

And she lies completely white in darkness.

Under the roof a cooing wafts away.

Like a carrion in bush and darkness

Flies swirl around her mouth.

Dreamlike in the brown hamlet

A sound of dance and fiddles echoes,

Floats her countenance through the hamlet,

Blows her hair in bare branches.

Romance in the Night

The lonely one under the tent of stars

Goes through the still midnight.

The boy woozily awakes out of dreams,

His countenance decays grey in moon.

The foolish woman with unbound hair weeps

By the window's gazing trellis.

On the pond passing by in sweet journey

Lovers drift most wonderfully.

The murderer smiles palely in wine,

Death's horror grips the sick.

Excoriated and naked, the nun prays

Before the Savior's agony on the cross.

The mother sings quietly in sleep.

Peacefully the child looks into the night

With eyes that are completely truthful.

In the whorehouse laughter rings.

By candlelight down in the cellar hole

The dead one paints with white hand

A grinning silence on the wall.

The sleeper whispers still.

In Red Foliage Full of Guitars...

In red foliage full of guitars

The girls' yellow hair blows

At the fence, where sunflowers stand.

A golden cart drives through the clouds.

In the rest of brown shadows

The old grow silent, embrace dim-wittedly.

Orphans sing sweetly for vespers.

Flies buzz in yellow steams.

At the brook the women still wash.

The hung-up linens billow.

The small child, whom I have long liked,

Comes again through evening's grayness.

Sparrows fall from mild skies

Into green holes filled with rottenness.

A smell of bread and harsh spices

Feigns recovery to the hungry one.

Music in Mirabell

A fountain sings. Clouds stand

In clear blueness, white, delicate.

Silent people wander thoughtfully

Through the old garden in the evening.

The ancestors' marble has turned grey.

A line of birds streaks into the distance.

A faun with dead eyes looks

On shadows that glide into darkness.

Leaves fall red from the old tree

And rotate inside through the open window.

Firelight glows in the room

And paints dim specters of anxiety.

A white stranger enters the house.

A dog leaps through decayed lanes.

The maid extinguishes a lamp.

At night the ear hears the sounds of sonatas.

Melancholy of the Evening

-- The forest, which widens deceased --

And shadows are around it, like hedges.

The deer comes trembling out of hidden places,

While a brook glides very quiet

And follows ferns and ancient stones

And gleams silverly from tangled foliage.

Soon one hears it in black gorges -

Perhaps, also that stars already shine.

The dark plain seems endless,

Scattered villages, marsh and pond,

And something feigns a fire to you.

A cold gleam shoos over roads.

In the sky one anticipates movement,

An army of wild birds migrates

Towards those lands, beautiful, distant.

The stirring of reeds rises and sinks.

Winter Twilight
   To Max von Esterle

Black skies of metal.

In the evening hunger-mad crows

Blow crosswise in red storms

Over parks sorrowful and sallow.

In the clouds a beam freezes to death;

And before Satan's curses

Those spin within the circle and go

Down sevenfold in number.

In putrefaction sweet and stale

Their beaks mow noiselessly.

Houses threaten from mute nearnesses;

Brightness in the theater hall.

Churches, bridges, and hospitals

Stand gruesome in the twilight.

Blood-stained linens billow

Sails upon the canal.

Rondel

Flown away is the gold of days,
The evening's brown and blue colors:
The shepherd's soft flutes have died,
The evening's blue and brown colors;
Flown away is the gold of days.

Blessing of Women

Walking among your women

And you often smile uneasily:

Anxious days have come.

The poppy withers white along the fence.

Like your belly so beautifully swollen

Wine ripens golden on the hill.

Far away the pond's mirror glimmers

And the scythe rattles in the field.

Dew rolls through the bushes,

The leaves flow down red.

To greet his beloved lady

A moor approaches you brown and rough.

The Beautiful City

Old plazas remain in sunny silence.

Deeply spun in blue and gold

Soft nuns hasten dreamlike

Under the sultry beech trees' silence.

Out of the brownly illuminated churches

Death's pure images look,

Mighty princes' beautiful emblems.

Crowns shimmer in the churches.

Steeds plunge out of the fountain.

Flower-claws threaten from trees.

Boys play woozy from dreams

Quietly in the evening there at the fountain.

Girls stand at the gates,

Look timidly into the colorful life.

Their moist lips quiver

And they wait at the gates.

Bell-sounds flutter trembling,

Rhythm of march and the guard's call resonate.

Strangers listen on the stages.

High in the blue are organ sounds.

Bright instruments sing.

Through the garden's borders of foliage

The laughter of beautiful ladies whirs by.

Quietly young mothers sing.

Secretly at flowery windows

Scent of incense, tar and lilac wafts.

Tired eyelids flicker silverly

Through the flowers at the windows.

In a Deserted Room

Window, colorful flowerbeds,

An organ plays herein.

Shadows dance on wallpapers,

Fantastically a mad succession.

Ablaze the bushes wave

And a swarm of gnats sways.

Far away scythes mow in the acre

And an ancient water sings.

Whose breath comes to caress me?

Swallows draw insane signs.

Quietly there in the boundlessness

The golden woodland flows out.

Flames flicker in the flowerbeds.

Woozily the mad succession ecstacizes

On the yellowish wallpapers.

Someone looks in through the door.

Incense smells sweet and like a pear

And glass and chest dusk.

Slowly the hot forehead

Bends toward white stars.

To the Boy Elis

Elis, when the blackbird calls in the black woods,
This is your decline.
Your lips drink the coolness of the blue rock-spring.

Cease, when your forehead bleeds quietly
Ancient legends
And dark interpretations of the flight of birds.

But with gentle steps you walk into the night,
That hangs full of purple grapes,
And you move the arms more beautifully in the blueness.

A thorn bush tinges,
Where your moon-like eyes are.
O, how long, Elis, have you been dead.

Your body is a hyacinth,
Into which a monk dips his waxy fingers.
Our silence is a black cavern,

From which a soft animal steps at times
And slowly lowers heavy eyelids.
On your temples black dew drips,

The last gold of expired stars.

The Thunderstorm Evening

O the red evening hours!

Glimmering by the open window

Vine leaves sway woozily curled in the blue,

Inside specters of fear nestle.

Dust dances in the stench of the gutters.

Rattling the wind knocks at the panes.

A herd of wild horses

Thunderbolts drive garish clouds.

Loudly the pond-mirror bursts.

Gulls cry near the window frames.

A fiery horseman gallops from the hill

And smashes to flames in the firs.

The sick screech in the hospital.

Bluish the night's plumage whirs.

Glistening all at once rain

Roars down upon the roofs.

Evening Muse

Again at the blooming window the church tower's shadow

And golden shape return. The hot forehead burns down in rest and silence.

A fountain falls in the darkness of chestnut branches -

There you feel: it is good! in painful exhaustion.

The market is empty of summer fruits and garlands.

Harmoniously the gates' blackish pageantry attunes.

In a garden the tones of soft play sound

Where friends find each other after the meal.

The soul likes to listen to the white magician's fairy tales.

Roundly the corn swishes, cut by mowers in the afternoon.

The hard life is patiently silent in the huts;

A stable lamp shines upon the dulcet slumber of the cows.

Eyelids soon sink inward drunk with air

And quietly open to foreign constellations.

Endymion rises from the darkness of ancient oaks

And bends down over mournful waters.

Dream of Evil

Fading away of a gong's brown-golden sounds -

A lover awakens in black rooms

The cheek near flames that flicker in the window.

In the river sails, masts, and ropes flash.

A monk, a pregnant woman there in the crowd.

Guitars strum, red smocks gleam.

Chestnuts shrivel sultry in golden shine;

The churches' sad pageantry towers black.

The spirit of evil watches from pale masks.

A square dusks gruesome and somber.

In the evening whispers stir on the islands.

Lepers read confused signs from the flight

Of birds, perhaps decay during the night.

In the park siblings meet trembling.

Spiritual Song

A fluttering flowerbed

Paints symbols, rare embroideries.

God's blue breath blows

Inside the garden hall,

Cheerfully inside.

A cross towers in wild vines.

Hear the villager's rejoicing,

The gardener mows by the wall,

Quietly an organ goes,

Mixes sound and golden light,

Sound and light.

Love blesses bread and wine.

Girls also come in

And the cock crows to the last.

Placidly a rotten trellis goes

And in rose wreath and rows,

Rose rows,

Mary rests white and fine.

The beggar there on the ancient stone

Seems to be deceased in prayer,

Softly from the hill a shepherd goes

And an angel in the grove,

Nearby in the grove,

Sings the children to sleep.

In Autumn

Sunflowers shine near the fence,

Silently sick people sit in the sunshine.

Women strive singing in the acre,

Into which monastery bells chime.

Birds tell you a far away tale

Into which monastery bells chime.

From the courtyard the violin sounds softly.

Today they press the brown wine.

Now man appears glad and dulcet.

Today they press the brown wine.

The chambers of the dead are open wide

And beautifully painted with sunshine.

Toward Evening My Heart

In the evening one hears the cry of bats.
Two black horses leap in the meadow.
The red maple rustles.
To the wanderer the small inn appears along the way.
Glorious taste the young wine and nuts.
Glorious: to stagger drunk in the dusking forest.
Through black branches grievous bells sound.
Dew drips on the face.

The Peasants

Before the window sounding green and red.

In the smoke blackened, low hall

The farm boys and maids sit with the meal;

And they pour wine and they break bread.

In the deep silence of midday

Sometimes a meager word is spoken.

The fields glimmer constantly

And the sky leaden and wide.

Grotesquely the glow flickers in the hearth

And a swarm of flies buzz.

The maids listen dim-witted and mute

And the blood hammers their temples.

And sometimes looks meet full of greed,

When animal vapors blow through the room.

Monotonously a farm boy says the prayer

And a cock crows under the door.

And again into the field. A horror seizes

Them often in the roaring bluster of corn

And the scythes swing clanking

Back and forth in a ghostly rhythm.

All Souls' Day
   To Karl Hauer

The little men, little women, sad companions,

Today they scatter flowers blue and red

On their crypts, which light up shyly.

They act like poor dolls before death.

O! how they appear full of fear and humility,

Like shadows standing behind black bushes.

In the autumn wind the weeping of the unborn complains,

Also one sees lights lose their way.

The sighs of lovers breathe in the branches,

And there the mother with the child rots.

The round dance of the living seems unreal

And fantastically scattered in the evening wind.

Their life is so confused, full of dim plagues.

God take pity on the women's hell and agony

And these hopeless lamentations of death.

The lonely ones walk silently in the hall of stars.

Melancholy

Bluish shadows. O you dark eyes,

That gaze long at me gliding past.

Guitar chords softly accompany autumn

In the garden, dissolved in brown lyes.

Nymph-like hands prepare

Death's serious somberness, decayed lips

Suck at red breasts and in black lyes

The sun-youth's moist curls glide.

Soul of Life

Decay, which gently darkens the foliage,
Its wide silence dwells in the forest.
Soon a village seems to incline ghostly.
The sister's mouth whispers in black branches.

The lonely one will soon slip away,
Perhaps a shepherd on a dark paths.
An animal steps quietly from the arcade of trees,
While the eyelids widen before divinity.

The blue river runs beautifully past.
Clouds appear in the evening;
The soul also in angelic silence.
Transient shapes go under.

Transfigured Autumn

So the year ends enormously

With golden wine and fruit of the gardens.

All around the forests silence wonderfully

And are the lonely one's companions.

Then the countryman says: it is good.

You evening bells long and quiet

Still give glad courage to the end.

A line of birds greets on the journey.

It is the mild time of love.

In the boat down the blue river

How beautifully image is strung to image -

That declines in rest and silence.

Corner by the Forest
   To Karl Minnich

Brown chestnuts. Quietly the old people glide

In the more silent evening; beautiful leaves wither tenderly.

At the cemetery the blackbird jokes with the dead cousin,

The blond teacher gives escort to Angela.

Death's pure images look from church windows;

However, a bloody ground appears very mournful and somberly.

The gate remained locked today; the sexton has the key.

In the garden the sister speaks friendly with ghosts.

In old cellars the wine ripens into gold, clarity.

Apples smell sweet. Joy shines not too far away.

Children gladly hear fairy tales through the long evening;

Also gold, truth often come out in soft insanity.

The blue flows full of mignonettes; candlelight in rooms.

For the modest their place is well prepared.

Down the edge of the forest a lonely destiny glides;

The night appears, the angel of rest, on the threshold.

In Winter

The acre shines white and cold.

The sky is lonely and immense.

Jackdaws circle over the pond

And hunters climb down from the forest.

A silence dwells in black treetops.

Firelight flits from the huts.

Sometimes a sleigh rings far away

And slowly the gray moon rises.

A deer bleeds to death softly at the field's edge

And ravens splash in bloody gutters.

The reeds tremble yellow and upraised.

Frost, smoke, a step in the empty grove.

In an Old Family Album

Always you return melancholy,

O the meekness of the lonely soul.

A day glows golden until the end.

Humbly the patient one knuckles down before grief

Resounding with harmony and tender insanity.

See! It dusks already.

Again night descends and a mortal laments

And another commiserates.

Shuddering under autumn stars

The head bends deeper every year.

Transformation

Along gardens, autumnal, red-seared:

Here a strenuous life comes out in stillness.

The hands of man carry brown vines,

While the soft pain subsides in the glance.

In the evening: steps go through black land

Appearer in the silence of red beeches.

A blue animal wants to bow before death

And gruesomely an empty vestment decays.

Peacefulness plays before an inn,

A countenance has sunk intoxicated in the grass.

Fruits of the elder, flutes gentle and drunk,

Mignonette-scent, which washes around females.

Small Concert

A red, which dreamlike unsettles you -

Through your hands the sun shines.

You feel your heart crazy from blissfulness

Silently prepare itself for an act.

Yellow fields stream into noon.

Barely you still hear the cricket's singing,

The mowers' hard scythe-swings.

Simple-mindedly golden forests silence.

In the green pool rot glows.

The fish stand still. Placidly God's breathe

Awakens string music in the vapor.

The flood beckons recovery to lepers.

Daedalus' ghost floats in blue shadows,

A scent of milk in hazel branches.

One still hears the teacher's violin playing long,

The cry of the rats in the empty yard.

In the inn cooler violet colors

Bloom on hideous wallpapers.

Dark voices died in quarrel,

Narcissus in the final chord of flutes.

Mankind

Mankind placed before fiery gorges,

A drum roll, dark warriors' foreheads,

Steps through blood-fog; black iron resounds,

Despair, night in sad brains:

Here Eve's shadow, hunt and red money.

Clouds, through which light breaks, the Last Supper.

A gentle silence dwells in bread and wine

And those are gathered twelve in number.

At night they scream in sleep under olive branches.

Saint Thomas dips the hand into the stigmata.

The Walk

1

In the afternoon music hums in the woods .

Serious scarecrows rotate in the corn.

Placidly elder bushes are blown over along the way;

A house flickers away fantastical and vague.

In gold a scent of thyme floats,

A humorous number stands on a stone.

In a meadow children play ball,

Then a tree begins to circle before you.

You dream: the sister combs her blond hair,

Also a far-away friend writes you a letter.

Yellowed and askew a shed flees through grayness

And sometimes you float lightly and wonderfully.

2

Time trickles away. O sweet Helios!

O image sweet and clear in the toad pool;

In sand an Eden sinks wonderfully.

A bush cradles yellowhammers in its lap.

A brother of yours dies in an execrated land

And steely your eyes behold yourself.

There in gold a scent of thyme.

A boy sets a fire in the hamlet.

The lovers with butterflies glow anew

And swing cheerfully around stone and number.

Crows flutter up around a nauseous meal

And your forehead roars through the soft green.

In the thorn bush a deer gently dies.

A happy day of childhood glides after you.

The gray wind, flighty and vague,

Swills decayed scents through the dusk.

3

An old lullaby makes you very anxious.

By the wayside a woman piously suckles her child.

Sleepwalking you hear her fountain well up.

A sound of consecration falls from the apple boughs.

And bread and wine are sweet from hard labor.

Silverly your hand fumbles for fruit.

The dead Rachel goes through farmland.

With peaceful gestures the green beckons.

Blessed also are the flowering wombs of poor maids,

Who stand dreaming there by the old fountain.

The lonely ones go gladly along silent paths

Among God's creatures without sin.

De profundis

It is a stubble field, in which a black rain falls.

It's a brown tree, that stands alone there.

It's a hissing wind, that circles empty huts.

How sad this evening.

Past the hamlet

The soft orphan still gathers sparse ears of corn.

Her eyes graze round and golden in the dusk

And her womb awaits the heavenly bridegroom.

On the way home

Shepherds found the sweet body

Putrefied in the thorn bush.

I am a shadow far from sinister villages.

I drank God's silence

From the fountain in the grove.

Upon my forehead cold metal steps

Spiders seek my heart.

It is a light that extinguishes in my mouth.

At night I found myself on a heath

Covered with rubbish and the dust of stars.

In the hazel bush

Crystal angels sounded once more.

Trumpets

Under pruned willows, where brown children play

And leaves drift, trumpets sound. A churchyard's shudder.

Flags of scarlet fall through the maple's sadness

Horsemen along rye fields, empty mills.

Or at night shepherds sing and stags step

Into the circle of their fire, the grove's ancient sadness,

Dancers rise from a black wall;

Flags of scarlet, laughter, insanity, trumpets.

Dusk

In the courtyard, bewitched by milky twilight,

Through autumn-bronze gentle sick people glide.

Their waxy-round gaze ponders golden times,

Fulfilled with daydream and rest and wine.

Their wasting illness shuts itself in ghostly.

The stars spread white sadness.

In grayness, fulfilled by deception and ringing,

See, how the frightful ones scatter in confusion.  

Formless figures of ridicule they shoo, crouch down

And flutter on black-crossed paths.

O! mournful shadows on the walls.  

The others escape through darkening arcades,

And at night they fall from red showers

Of the star-wind, like raging Maenads.

Cheerful Spring

1

Beside the brook, which flows through the yellow fallow field,

The dry reed from last year still moves.

Through grayness sounds glide wonderfully,

A whiff of warm muck blows by.

From willows catkins placidly dangle in the wind.

Dreamily a soldier sings his sad song.

A strip of meadow rushes blown and dull,

A child stands in silhouette gentle and dulcet.

The birches there, the black thornbush,

Also shapes flee dissolved in smoke.

Brightly green blooms and another rots

And toads slept throughout the young leeks.

2

I love you truly rough laundress,

Still the flood carries the sky's golden burden.

A small fish flashes past and fades;

A waxy countenance flows along through the alders.

In gardens bells sink long and quiet

A small bird warbles like crazy.

The soft corn swells quietly and ecstatically

And bees still collect with serious diligence.

Come now, love, to the weary laborer!

Into his hut a lukewarm beam falls.

The forest streams through the evening harsh and sallow

And now and then buds crackle cheerfully.

3

Yet how all that is being born seems so ill!

A feverish whiff encircles a hamlet.

Yet from branches a soft spirit beckons

And opens the mind wide and anxious.

A blooming outpour trickles away very placidly

And the unborn maintains its own rest.

The lovers bloom toward their stars

And their breath flows sweeter through the night.

So painfully good and true is, what lives;

And quietly an old stone touches you:

Truly! I will always be with you.

O mouth! that trembles through the white willow.

Suburb in Foehn

In the evening the site lies deserted and brown,

The air pervaded with a horrid stench.

The thunder of a train from the bridge curve -

And sparrows flutter about bush and fence.

Cowering huts, paths scattered woozily,

In the gardens confusion and movement,

Sometimes howls swell out of stuffy stirring,

In a group of children a red dress flies.

By the rubbish a rat's choir whistles amorously.

In baskets women carry entrails,

A vile procession full of filth and mange,

They emerge from the twilight.

And a canal suddenly vomits fat blood

From the slaughterhouse down into the still river.

The foehn winds tinge meager shrubs more colorfully

And the redness slowly creeps through the flood.

A whispering, that drowns in dim sleep.

Shapes juggle up on the drains,

Perhaps the memory of an earlier life

Which rises and sinks with the warm winds.

From clouds gleaming avenues surface,

Fulfilled with beautiful chariots, daring riders.

Then one also sees a boat failing on cliffs

And sometimes rose-colored mosques.

The Rats

In the courtyard the autumn moon shines white.

From the roof edge phantom-like shadows fall.

A silence dwells in empty windows;

There the rats plunge quietly up

And shoo whistling here and there

And a grayish whiff of vapor smells

After them from the toilet,

Through which the moonlight trembles ghostly

And they nag as if mad from greed

And crowd house and barns,

Filled with corn and fruits.

Icy winds whine in the darkness.

Doldrums

World misfortune wanders ghostly through the afternoon.

Shanties flee through small gardens brown and deserted.

Sparks totter around burnt muck.

Two sleepers stagger homeward gray and vague.

On the withered meadow a child runs

And plays with his eyes black and smooth.

The gold drips from the bushes turbid and weary.

An old man turns sadly in the wind.

In the evening over my head

Saturn again mutely guides a wretched fate.

A tree, a dog scratches behind itself

And God's sky staggers black and defoliated.

A small fish glides fast down the brook;

And quietly the dead friend's hand stirs

And lovingly smoothes forehead and robe.

A light rouses shadows in the rooms.

Whispered in the Afternoon

Sun, autumnal thin and apprehensive,

And the fruit falls from the trees.

Stillness dwells in blue rooms

A long afternoon.

Dying-sounds of metal;

And a white animal breaks down.

The rough songs of brown girls

Have blown away in the falling leaves.

The forehead dreams God's colors,

Feels the soft wings of insanity.

Shadows rotate on the hill

Fringed blackly by rot.

Dusk full of rest and wine;

Sad guitars trickle.

And as if in a dream

You turn to the calm lamp within.

Psalm
   Dedicated to Karl Kraus

It is a light, which the wind has extinguished.

It is a village inn, which a drunkard abandons in the afternoon.

It is a vineyard, burned and black with holes full of spiders.

It is a room, which they have whitewashed with milk.

The lunatic is dead. It is an island of the South Pacific,

To receive the sun god. One beats the drums.

The men perform warlike dances.

The women sway the hips between climbing plants and fire flowers

When the sea sings. O our lost paradise.

The nymphs have left the golden forests.

One buries the stranger. Then a glimmering rain begins.

The son of Pan appears in the guise of an excavator,

Who sleeps away the midday near the glowing asphalt.

There are small girls in a courtyard in little dresses full of heartbreaking poverty!

There are rooms fulfilled with chords and sonatas.

There are shadows that embrace before a blind mirror.

By the windows of the hospital convalescents warm themselves.

A white steamboat in the canal bears bloody epidemics along.

The strange sister appears again in someone's evil dreams.

Resting in the hazel bush, she plays with his stars.

The student, possibly a double, looks long after her from the window.

His dead brother stands behind him, or he descends the old spiral staircase.

In the darkness of brown chestnuts the figure of the young novice grows pale.

The garden is in evening. In the cloister the bats flutter about.

The children of the caretaker stop to play and search the gold of heaven.

Closing chords of a quartet. The small blind girl runs trembling through the avenue,

And later her shadow gropes along cold walls, surrounded by fairy tales and holy legends.

It is an empty boat, which drifts down the black canal in the evening.

In the somberness of the old asylum human ruins decay.

The dead orphans lie by the garden wall.

From gray rooms angels step with excrement-splattered wings.

Worms drip from their yellowed eyelids.

The plaza before the church is sinister and taciturn, like in the days of childhood.

On silver soles former lives glide past

And the shadows of the damned descend to the sighing waters.

In his grave the white magician plays with his snakes.

Taciturnly over the place of skulls God's golden eyes open.

Rosary Songs

To the Sister

Where you go becomes autumn and evening,

Blue deer, which sounds under trees,

Lonely pond in the evening.

Quietly the flight of birds sounds,

The gloom above the arches of your eyes.

Your narrow smile sounds.

God has bent your lids.

At night stars seek, Good Friday's child,

The arch of your forehead.

Nearness of Death

O the evening, which goes into the sinister villages of childhood.

The pond under the willows

Fills with the contaminated sighs of gloom.

O the forest, that quietly lowers the brown eyes,

When from the lonely one's bony hands

The purple of his ecstacized days sinks down.

O the nearness of death. Let us pray.

During this night on tepid pillows

Yellowed by incense the lank limbs of lovers release.

Amen

Putrid shape gliding through the rotten room;

Shadows on yellow wallpapers; in dark mirrors

The ivory sadness of our hands arches.

Brown beads run through the dead fingers.

In the stillness

The blue poppy-eyes of an angel open.

The evening is also blue;

The hour of our dying, Azreal's shadow,

Which darkens a brown garden.

Decay

In the evening, when the bells ring peace,

I follow the wonderful flights of birds,

That in long rows, like devout pilgrim-processions,

Disappear into the clear autumn vastness.

Wandering through the dusk-filled garden

I dream after their brighter destinies

And hardly feel the motion of the hour hands.

Thus I follow their journeys over the clouds.

Then a whiff of decay makes me tremble.

The blackbird complains in defoliated branches.

The red wine sways on rusty trellises.

Meanwhile like the death-dances of pale children

Around dark fountain edges that weather,

Shivering blue asters bend in the wind.

In the Homeland

Mignonette-scent strays through the sick window;

An old plaza, chestnuts black and wasted.

A golden ray breaks through the roof and flows

Over the siblings dreamlike and confused.

In the dishwater decay drifts, the foehn

Quietly coos through the small brown garden; very still

The sunflower savors its gold and flows away.

Through blue air the call of the guard rattles.

Mignonette-scent. The walls dusk bleakly.

The sister's sleep is heavy. The night wind rummages

Her hair, that is washed around by moony brilliance.

The cat's shadow glides blue and narrow

From the rotten roof that borders near mischief,

The candle flame, which rears up purple.

An Autumn Evening
   To Karl Röck

The brown village. A darkness is often reflected

By striding along walls that stand in autumn,

Figures: both man and woman, deceased walk

In cool rooms to prepare the bed of those.

Here boys play. Heavy shadows widen

Over brown manure. Maids walk

Through moist blueness and sometimes they look

Out of eyes fulfilled with night-chimes.

For the lonely there is an inn;

It waits patiently under dark arches,

Where golden clouds of tobacco move around.

Yet always the self is black and near.

The drunk ponders in the shadow of ancient arches

After the wild birds that are drawn far away.

Human Misery

The clock that strikes five before the sun -

A dark horror grips lonely people,

In the evening-garden bleak trees swish,

The dead one's countenance stirs at the window.

Perhaps this hour stands still.

Before dull eyes blue images flutter

To the rhythm of the ships, which rock in the river.

At the wharf a row of nuns blows by.

Pale and blind girls play in the hazel bush,

Like lovers, who embrace in sleep.

Perhaps flies sing around a carcass there,

Perhaps also a child weeps in the mother's lap.

From hands asters sink blue and red,

The youth's mouth slips away strange and wise;

And eyelids flutter fear-confused and quiet;

Through fevered blackness a scent of bread blows.

It seems one also hears horrible screaming;

Bones shimmer through decayed walls.

An evil heart laughs loudly in beautiful rooms;

A dog runs past a dreamer.

An empty coffin gets lost in the darkness.

A room wants to light up palely for the murderer,

Meanwhile lanterns are smashed in the night's storm.

Laurel adorns the noble one's white temple.

In the Village

1

A village, a field step out of brown walls.

A shepherd rots on an old stone.

The edge of the forest includes blue animals,

The soft leaves, that fall in the stillness.

The peasants' brown foreheads. The evening bell

Sounds long; beautiful are pious customs,

The Savior's black head in the thornbush,

The cool room that death reconciles.

How pale the mothers are. The blueness sinks

On glass and chest, which their mind proudly preserves;

Also a white head bends highly aged

Over the grandchild, who drinks milk and stars.

2

The poor one, who died lonely in spirit,

Rises waxen over an old path.

The apple trees sink bleak and calm

Into the colors of their fruit, which blackly spoiled.

Still the roof of dried straw arches

Over the sleep of the cows. The blind maid

Appears in the yard; a blue water laments;

A horse's skull stares from the rotten gate.

The idiot speaks in dark mind a word

Of love fading away in the black bush,

Where she stands as a slender dream-figure.

The evening sounds forth in moister blue.

3

At the window branches knock defoliated by foehn.

In the womb of the peasant woman a wild pain grows.

Black snow trickles through her arms;

Golden-eyed owls flutter around her head.

The walls stare bleak and gray-soiled

In the cool darkness. In the fever-bed

The pregnant belly freezes, insolently goggled by the moon.

Before her chamber a dog has died.

Three men step sinisterly through the gate

With scythes broken in the field.

Through the window the red evening wind rattles;

From it a black angel steps out.

Evening Song

In the evening, when we go on dark paths,

Our pale figures appear before us.

If we thirst,

We drink the white water of the pond,

The sweetness of our sad childhood.

Deceased, we rest under the elder bushes,

Watch the gray gulls.

Spring's clouds rise over the sinister city,

That silences the monks' nobler times.

When I took your narrow hands

You quietly opened round eyes.

This is long ago.

Yet when the dark harmony visits my soul,

You appear white in the friend's autumnal landscape.

Three Gazes into an Opal
   To Erhard Buschbeck

1

Gaze into an opal: a village wreathed in dry vines,

The stillness of gray clouds, yellow cliff,

And the evening springs' coolness: twin mirrors

Framed by shadows and by slimy stone.

The way and crosses of autumn go in evening,

Singing pilgrims and the bloodstained linens.

The lonely one's figure turns inward

And goes, a pale angel, through the empty grove.

Out of blackness the foehn blows. Slender women

Are together with satyrs; monks, pale priests of lust,

Their insanity adorns itself beautifully and somberly with lilies

And lifts the hands to God's golden shrine.

2

Moistening, a drop of dew hangs rosy

In the rosemary: a whiff of grave smells flows away,

Of hospitals, woozily fulfilled by fever-screams and curses.

Skeletons rise from the family vault rotten and gray.

In blue slime and veils the woman of the old men dances,

The dirt-stiffen hair fulfilled with black tears,

The boys dream woozily in dry strands of willows

And their foreheads are bleak and rough from leprosy.

Through the arched window an evening sinks dulcet and lukewarm.

A saint steps out of his black wound stigmata.

Purple snails creep from broken shells

And spew blood in thorn threads stiff and gray.

3

The blind sprinkle incense into ulcerating wounds.

Red-golden robes; torches; singing of psalms;

And girls, who embrace the Lord's body like poison.

Figures walk rigid as wax through glow and smoke.

A fool leads lepers' midnight dance

With dry bones. Garden of fantastical adventures;

Distorted; flower grimaces, laughter; monsters

And rolling stars in a black thornbush.

O poverty, beggar's soup, bread and sweet leek;

Daydreaming of life in huts before the forests.

The sky above yellow fields hardens into gray

And an evening bell sings according to old custom.

Night Song

The breath of the unmoved. An animal face

Grows stiff in blueness, its holiness.

Enormous is the silence in stone;

The mask of a nocturnal bird. The soft triad

Fades into one sound. Elai! your countenance

Bends speechless over bluish waters.

O! you still mirrors of truth.

On the ivory temple of the lonely one

The reflection of fallen angels appears.

Helian

In the lonely hours of the spirit

It is beautiful to walk in the sun

Along the yellow walls of summer.

Quietly the steps sound in the grass; but always

The son of Pan sleeps in the gray marble.

Evenings on the terrace we got drunk with brown wine.

The peach glows reddish in the foliage;

Soft sonata, glad laughter.

Beautiful is the stillness of night.

On a dark plain

We meet ourselves with shepherds and white stars.

When autumn has come

A sober clarity appears in the grove.

Calmed we stroll along red walls

And the round eyes follow the flight of birds.

In the evening the white water sinks into funeral urns.

In bleak branches the sky celebrates.

In pure hands the countryman carries bread and wine

And peacefully the fruits ripen in a sunny chamber.

O how serious is the countenance of the beloved dead.

But righteous viewing delights the soul.

The silence of the ravaged garden is immense,

When the young novice wreaths his forehead with brown leaves,

His breath drinks icy gold.

The hands touch the age of bluish waters

Or in cold night the white cheeks of the sisters.

Quiet and harmonious is a walk along friendly rooms,

Where solitude is and the maple's rustling,

Where perhaps the thrush still sings.

Man is beautiful and appearing in darkness,

When marveling he moves arms and legs,

And the eyes roll silently in purple sockets.

At vespers the stranger looses himself in black November-destruction,

Under rotten branches, along walls full of leprosy,

Where before the holy brother had walked,

Rapt in the soft string music of his insanity,

O how lonely the evening wind ends.

Dying away the head bends down in the darkness of the olive tree.

Devastating is the decline of the race.

In this hour the eyes of the beholder fill themselves

With the gold of his stars.

In the evening a glockenspiel sinks down that no longer rings,

The black walls by the square decay,

The dead soldier calls for prayer.

A pale angel

The son steps into the empty house of his fathers.

The sisters have gone far away to white old men.

At night the sleeper found them under columns in the hallway,

Returned from sad pilgrimages.

O how their hair stiffens with excrement and worms,

When he stands into it with silver feet,

And those step deceased from bleak rooms.

O you psalms in fiery midnight rains,

When servants smite the mild eyes with nettles,

The childlike fruits of the elderberry

Bend astonished over an empty grave.

Quietly yellowed moons roll

Over the youth's fevered linen,

Before the silence of winter follows.

An exalted destiny ponders down the Kidron,

Where the cedar, a gentle creature,

Unfolds under the blue brows of the father,

Over the meadow at night a shepherd leads his flock .

Or there are screams in sleep,

When a brazen angel approaches man in the grove,

The saint's flesh melts on the glowing grate.

Around the clay huts purple vines climb,

Resounding sheaves of yellowed corn,

The humming of bees, the flight of the crane.

In the evening the resurrected meet on rocky paths.

In black waters lepers are reflected;

Or they open their excrement-tainted robes

Weeping to the balmy wind, that blows from the rosy hill.

Slender maids grope through the alleys of the night,

If they may find the loving shepherd.

Saturdays a soft singing sounds in the huts.

Let the song also commemorate the boy,

His insanity, and white brows and his passing away,

The decayed one, who bluishly opens the eyes.

O how sad is this reunion.

The stages of insanity in black rooms,

The shadows of the aged under the open door,

When Helian's soul looks at itself in the rosy mirror

And snow and leprosy sink from his forehead.

On the walls the stars are expired

And the white figures of the light.

Skeletons from the graves rise out of the carpet,

The silence of decayed crosses on the hill,

The sweetness of incense in the purple night wind.

O you shattered eyes in black mouths,

When the grandson in soft derangement

Ponders alone the darker ending,

The silent God lowers blue eyelids over him.

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