The night swells.

Life shimmers so deeply precious.

Save, save, seeing god,

what you gave.

YOUNG WILLS WHINE

Young wills whine

like masterless spears.

Fear has hurled them

into space's spheres.

Trembling with battle

and strength in surfeit

they seek targets to strike

they seek powers to worship.

But wills that ripen,

they become trees and strike root,

ready to shield

a land at your foot,

a small stretch of ground,

but necessary, like life,

where something precious grows,

torn by the winds' strife.

If the glade seems narrow

against space without end

and the tree perhaps lifeless

against spears that blind,

then forget not the leaf

with its life-green colour,

and forget not the sap

that seethes through the marrow.

Be not afraid, be still

that harvest night,

when the voices say:

'Your bounds are set.

You too shall be silent

among the watching faithful.

You also shall strike root,

and become tree, and ripen.'

THE DOORWAY

Too many times have I passed through the doorway.

It rises so high and is erased in sunlight,

and under the arch one hears passing

eternal winds in eternal spaces.

The threshold is made of promise-stones, the staircase to an

altar,

to which he slips through who consecrates himself to a gift

with his past time and his time to come

and a will that is whole.

Too many times have I passed through the doorway.

And yet I pray:

Watchman at the door, lord of all beginning,

let me through! I still have strength.

As truly as I never hid anything away,

take, but take to the last fragment.

The day I divide, the day I reckon,

bar my way and cast me into the melting-oven.

All is a door. All is a beginning.

The axle of life is in your hands.

Whole I pass under the dizzying arch,

and eternal winds in eternal spaces

drink my gift.

IDYLL

Your voice and your footsteps fall soft as dew on my working

day.

Where I sit there is spring in the air around me from your living warmth.

You flower in my thought, you flower in my blood, and I wonder only

that my happy hands do not blossom into heavy roses.

Now the space of the everyday closes around us two, like a soft,

gentle mist.

Are you afraid of becoming a prisoner, are you afraid of drowning

in the greyness?

Do not be afraid: in the everyday's innermost depth,

in the heart of all life,

there burns with quietly humming flames a deep, secret festival.

FOR THE HOUR OF GREAT HUMILIATION

For the hour of great humiliation I would also give thanks,

the hour when one sees that one is naked

and without a muddying vestige of pride

lets oneself be arranged

like a speck of dust in the gleam from wondrous worlds -

wondrous everything, wondrous health and life,

wondrous shelter, bread and water,

and more than anything wondrous the undeserved favour

of a human being's eternally established trust.

PYRE

Transparent, bright and ardent,

beautiful mantle, flare,

slip your way close as water

round my body, waiting here.

I stand bound and quiet,

have no unshed defiance.

Have no resistance left,

no futile strugglings .

Thus in anguish without air

comes the peace that waiting brings.

Here all hope is laid over,

wants nothing other.

Like an aspen leaf my body,

my soul like a flickering flame,

and there far away inside

I am free all the same.

Great silence moves me

beyond all that destroys me.

INVULNERABLE

Invulnerable, invulnerable

is he that grasps the primordial saying:

There is no happiness and unhappiness.

There is only life and death.

And when you have learnt it and ceased to chase the wind

and when you have learnt it and ceased to be frightened by the

gale

then come back and teach me one more time:

There is no happiness and unhappiness.

There is only life and death.

I began to repeat it when my will was born,

and will cease to repeat it when my will has ceased to be.

The secret of the primordial sayings

we acquire until our death.

KNOWLEDGE

All the cautious ones with long nets

meet with the sea's giant laughter.

Friends, what do you seek on the shore?

Knowledge can never be captured,

can never be owned.

But if, straight as a drop,

you fall into the sea to dissolve,

ready for any transformation -

then you will awake with mother-of-pearl skin

and green eyes

on meadows where the sea's horses graze

and be knowledge.

DWARF PINE

Here in eternal gales

dwarf pine works its way up from the stone,

bends wearily,

knots itself defiantly,

creeps subdued.

Black against the evening's stormy sky

twisted ghostly outlines are drawn.

Monster is seized by loathing

for monster.

A groaning passes through the torn crowns:

Oh, to look one single time

straight towards the light,

to rise, a royal oak,

a boyish birch,

a golden virgin maple.

Hide your dreams, cripple.

Here are the outermost skerries . As far as the eye can see:

dwarf pine.

THE MOUTHS

Around me float terrible mouths.

The suburban train is thudding.

These are mothers.

Mouths of predatory fish,

locked and tensed in greedy fear:

to eat or be eaten.

Themselves eaten away (no one has noticed)

they lug their entrails in string bags.

Dead eyes, dead fear,

mouths of predatory fish.

This is the lover.

Paint-swollen mushroom mouth

sucks for prey.

The shame of having given herself, the shame of the cheated

sucks for revenge of a thousand triumphs,

is never sated,

settles in layers of tortured impudence

around a wet mushroom mouth.

This is the pious man,

who with holy pursing

hides and denies his lips.

They cannot be seen, do not exist -

God himself cannot see them.

Why is he afraid of his lips?

What do they look like when he is asleep?

This is the happy woman,

she who became a possessor.

Among all those who struggle

she is the one who prevailed.

No lever will ever force open those jaws,

screwed tight around life's prize.

But over there by the window,

half-open,

flowers a mouth that captures nothing.

What do you breathe over the wide world,

so world-estranged?

Yourself?

When will you be scared down there into the deep

to predatory fish

and sucking mouths,

snatch wildly after hunted prey,

slash desperately at the others?

Tomorrow,

if you want to live.

So I will take my staff and wander

and seek another world for you,

a world where mouths are allowed to be flowers

and breathe like flowers

their life's breath

and flow like flowers

from deep sources

and stand like flowers

happily open.

Around you snap our deep-sea mouths.

The suburban train is thudding.

SEA PRAYER

Sea swell, come washing,

let me taste that sound's round, salty flow,

the sound that was given me

as primordial name aeons and aeons ago!

Words that no mortal

lips can tell

lie hidden

in the fresh, cold swell.

Long, too long

I starved on human words too easily told.

I want to rise up,

I want to satisfy my mouth at my mother's board.

Like a child in loathing's remorse

lost far away to roam,

I turn hungrily round

to the songs of my home.

Let me drink

the speech of speech from a dull roar that never abates.

Let me clear

to your resting depth of light that creates.

Within soul and spirit

I hear your song.

Rise in my blood, and flower

in my tongue!

THE WAY IS NARROW

The way is narrow that two must go,

inhumanly narrow, it can seem sometimes,

and yet it is a human way, even so.

From buried things' primordial slime

rise monsters woken by the warmth,

and bar the way where you would climb.

No flight can make you free at last.

They appear again by new waysides.

You have no choice. You must go past.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

The way is steep that two must go,

a way of degradation, it can seem sometimes,

and yet is a way of victory, even so.

Lonely path goes round in rings,

the same mirage in the same sand,

the same thirst for far-off things.

For two that strive, one gain know I,

more solid, heavier than the hermit's dreams:

the difficult growth to reality,

yes, all the way in to the innermost core,

where the person grows out of splintered nerves

and becomes a root and a mountain there.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

The way is long that two must go,

a lost way, it can seem sometimes,

and yet has its goals and signposts, even so.

Has its angels, in lightning dressed.

They touch our dust with burning hand,

and heavy chains become breezes and mist.

With burning feet they touch earth's floor,

and create it anew in the morning glow

and full of health and solace and cure

and full of power over approaching fate

and intimate light, that two acquire.

THE WANDERER IN THE DESERT

You weigh with false balances

and measure with false gauges,

not before the qadi , who judges criminals,

but before Allah, Allah, blessed be his name,

he who has created life.

A thousand dates you buy for one small pearl,

but I, who hungered in the desert,

am weary of my pearl-sewn belt,

that gives no nourishment,

and I, who pined away in the sand,

will not recover the splendour in my dagger hilt,

decked with jewels

that slake no thirst.

Still in this city of minarets, far from the desert,

I will bow not before those proud portals,

those golden gates,

but before those lowly, those out-of-the-way wells

to where dusty herdsmen lead their herds,

when they bring milk in the evenings.

YOUR WARMTH

Your warmth, your tender warmth

I ask to share,

that streamed long before man

on earth was there.

In the deep primordial forest's

downy bird's nest

that same protective warmth bore

life's founding rest.

From anguish-burning heavens

we sink down where

in the nest's darkness, life

asks nothing more.

For the clouds' games are a mirage

and mirror spray,

but all that is born and bears

is what depths give away.

Day dawns, and the skies resound

with rushing of wings.

The soaring bird rejoices:

On light I live! he sings

But hidden in the silence rests

his weal and woe.

Your warmth, your deep warmth

gives me a soul.

LEGEND

Over the city's sighing towers

sank all the earth's distress:

fire, plague and hunger,

war and sudden, cruel death.

The people thronged in the churches,

bowed their knees in fear,

heard the priests pray to God

for strength his penance to bear.

The mothers by the well

despaired, and help they missed.

'For the children's sake, for the children

mercy must exist.

Though in sin they were born,

to us they are very dear,

they are much dearer to us

than heaven's glory in there.'

A white-haired stranger,

one step before the rest,

beckoned them to follow,

began to wander thence.

Swarming out through the gates

more and more followed on.

In the city's midst stood a house.

A staircase there led down.

Hard-trodden floor of earth,

stool and wooden bowl.

Clad in a cloak of hair

a man knelt in that hole.

Humble veneration

burned in every gaze:

'The city is wealthy yet!

Here a holy man lives and prays.

There in intercession

his face is upward-turned;

the marks in his careworn features

by our sins have there been burned.'

Bitterly the old one laughed.

'What is it you behold?

A great, holy love,

and beyond that, nothing more?

A face's open bowl

of patience, blessed, sane,

that rises up in hunger

towards the flood of pain -

an ardent spirit's chalice

of bleeding rubies that shine,

waiting here devoutly

for the Lord's wrath's wine -

a desire to suffer

the beloved's worst punishment --

and does no one see the lightning

down from heaven sent?

The city gave an echo

and in the same sound shook,

when he, the man strong in prayer,

his lord subdued.

Pull up all the poppies

that ask for springtimes of pain!

Cut down all the black trees

that yearn to bear tears' rain!'

Then from the crowd there stepped

a man full of fiery dread,

felled the old one to the ground -

she fell and there lay dead.

They crossed themselves, they crept away,

the daughters and sons of men.

And up to heaven's angry vault

the holy man's prayers rose again.

ETERNITY

An eternity long

our summer was then.

We roamed in sunny days

that had no end.

We sank in fragrant green

depths without floor

and felt no fear

of eventide's hour.

Where did our eternity go?

How did we forget

its holy secret?

Our day became too short.

In strife we form,

In spasm we rhyme

a work that shall be eternal -

and its essence is time.

But still timeless drops

fall into our arms

at a time when we're absent

from goals and names,

when the sun falls silent

over straws there alone,

and all our striving seems to us

like a game and a loan.

Then we sense that condition

we once received:

to burn in the moment

that living bequeathed,

and forget the temporal

that lasts and endures,

for creation's second,

that no gauge ever nears.

BLANK

[FRAGMENT OF ALCMAN

Sweetly singing maidens, my limbs can no longer

carry me - o would, would that I were merely the kingfisher,

when, carried across the foam of the waves by the halcyons,

he soars with sorrowless heart, the sea-dark, sacred bird!

Note. The aging chorus leader alludes to the legend that the

kingfisher, when he grows old, is carried by the females, the

halcyons.]

The Seven Deadly Sins (1941)

THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS

AND OTHER POSTHUMOUS POEMS

THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS

Fragment of a Cantata

Scene: Before God's Throne

INTRODUCTION

CHORUS I

How long, how long, how long?

Destroy us! Destroy us!

CHORUS II

A little time, a little time, a little time!

Have mercy!

THE ACCUSER (recitative)

It is time to speak. It is truly time to speak.

CHORUS II

Have mercy!

CHORUS I

Destroy us!

THE ACCUSER (recitative)

Out of the darkness I rise before your throne,

I, the Accuser.

From generation to generation we saved our madness's hope.

As a newly conceived child lies hidden and is scarcely there,

so you lay hidden in our inner being, O great madness.

From generation to generation we were ready to deny what we

heard and saw.

Who wants to be evil? Who wants to be what man in reality is?

From generation to generation we were nothing but our secret

madness,

our unborn.

O Lord, how near you are to that which does not exist!

But look after us! We cannot endure any longer.

Destroy the evil that does not care to deny itself.

Destroy our madness's dream that is not able to make itself

real.

Destroy us.

CHORUS I

How long, how long, how long?

Destroy us!

CHORUS I

We are your flock,

Lord,whom you failed -

Have trust! was your command -

and worse we fared.

From evil's mists

no light rose aloft,

out of the thunder

no murmur soft.

We quaked in the desert

abandoned, alone

with harsh commandments

written in stone.

They became our water,

they became our bread.

But around our piety

night lay dead.

We travelled the roads,

struck by God's ire,

messengers we.

laved in fire.

Judgement, expiation,

the voice bade thus.

And the judgement came true,

but never the trust.

We sang in the fields

in rejoicing turned

towards new stars

that like signals burned.

O dream, o hope,

hoiw richly you flowed,

O promise's promise,

so fraudulent, broad.

One prayer, one only

remains to us:

strike even harder,

you that cause pain to us!

Fold space together

and extinguish time,

annihilate all

and make peace come!

How long, how long, how long!

Destroy us!

SOLO (from Chorus I)

We know that the bitter fates

did not come to us first.

Who will say in suffering's flood:

ours is greatest!

Against times of plague and hunger's years

and the mothers' cry

in abandoned towns -

what do we weigh!

Oh, we were used to making

bolder demands,

but sensed that good was what life gave

with merciful hands.

The dead know, they rest in peace,

how much the heart can thole . - - -

But we despair of man

and of man's goal.

We believed that by its own power

the truth won through.

But a stronger lure is lies'

inciting brew.

The drunken souls maim themselves

for the idol State,

and trust drowns in mistrust

and love in hate.

So we are the shreds that were wasted,

the hammer that broke.

Come, sweep your smithy empty and clean

with broom and rake!

Light the forge again to create

that which is not us!

A gleam was your spirit in man,

a gleam - and gone past.

CHORUS I

Destroy us!

CHORUS II

A little time, a little time, a little time!

Have mercy!

It must not end so

cruelly unreconciled .

Not so long as on earth still

life is spared, used mild.

Grant one more brief term

for the world's wheel to turn!

So dark the night persists,

perhaps a new one may burn!

If this is said presumptuously,

then forget all words

but let us be silent and endure our way,

like grass close to earth's swards.

Too deep the shame we saw,

too meaningless the agony.

On expectancy we lived -

waiting let us die!

Have mercy!

SOLITARY VOICE (from Chorus II)

Lord of the macrocosm,

lord of the microcosm,

you who burst all measures,

great and small,

you alone know

how measures and figures defraud,

you know that life is

what life always was.

He that walks over battlefields

and hears distress's cry,

the more he sees and hears,

grows his agony.

But there is no sum to be had

of the world's woe:

he only slowly draws near to

the contents of one soul.

The world's life is no sum,

but the way that souls came,

no goal in sight,

but conquered in clear-eyed shame.

You smile at our numbers and figures.

Let earth's purgatory go on burning!

Let us preserve all all

for the joy of overcoming!

CHORUS I (dying away) CHORUS II (dying away)

Destroy us! Have mercy!

SLOTH

THE ACCUSER

To you first, you who believe you are innocent,

you slothful ones!

A heavy burden binds you to yourselves,

heavier than coarse bread and heavier than the earth can

manage.

On you the guilt for all the evil that was not prevented!

On you the guilt for all the good that was not done!

A heavy burden! Because of you

the world is going under.

CHORUS

By our own hearts we were forsaken.

By their steep walls is our bed for the night.

We are those doomed by life to a living death,

thirsting in trance for the springs' water bright.

Our arms we twine hard around our knees,

stilled by tension and not by repose.

Above the wall's crest float the fresh trees.

Beneath their roots we hear the springs ooze.

There are our lives. There are our souls.

You who come punishing, what will you do to deliver us?

If you know the way in, then all will be well.

But if we go away from the springs, the desert storm will

shrivel

us.

Bring no pitchers to those hot, dry mouths!

Never will we raise our hands for action,

never - until we drink from the innermost wells.

By our hearts' walls shall await transformation.

SOLO

You cry out. Within me echoes

an answer faint.

but deep in all my valleys

abhorrence remains.

Someone there is, one solitary

out of all my folk,

willing to serve you, crier,

to interpret, support.

But you see, I fear attack

in the soul's world,

the stupidity of the strong

who conquer by the sword.

Let my manifoldness

slowly heal away,

then one day perhaps each drop of blood

may answer your cry.

How inconquerable would he be

in self-clear belief,

who could grow into one

in ripening peace.

How powerless from his living skin

would the day's dust fall.

How mighty in silence he would glide

from the great noise of it all.

CHORALE

All that is split and scattered

yearns to be healed and made better

and asks for faithfulness yet.

You live in our midst, around us.

Yea, though our doubting bound us,

Lord, you were hidden in it.

LUST

CHORUS

The daylight land is the alien land.

There we go clad in mask and armour.

There we go wrapped in name and past,

the cloaks of shame and the crowns of honour.

Here in the only and most extreme act

we shed the nine skins of the ego,

rise with closed eyes in the spring,

naked as foetuses and gods we go.

Naked as foetuses. The transfiguring night

beneath the human we touch, shivering,

follow in the tracks of primordial ancestors

deep sea dim and phosphorous-glimmering.

The year-millions' copulatory hunger

swallows and carries all earthly fate.

Human forms and names are transient

drops from the ecstasies' spate.

MAN'S VOICE

Stunned, I awake - from what bosom's greeting?

What I perceived was no human meeting.

I led a life on my self's sediments,

and I belonged to the elements.

WOMAN'S VOICE

Darkness-blinded , in torpor I sank

violated by phantoms, not by any man.

They made me burn, the desires of earth's ghosts,

and I gave birth to myth's monstrous hosts.

THE CHORUS (continues)

Naked as gods. In formless dawn

risen from the sea on the shore they stand.

Without knowing their way and their realm

they take one hesitant step across the sand.

Without knowing what strength they possess

they breathe gently, stop and turn around quite.

The worlds awake from the touch of their breath,

the depths and the heights come flaming alight.

WOMAN'S VOICE

How humbly immense a pride can be.

I am a holy image, a mere sign to see,

but translucent because a Power needs me.

Your worship fills and far exceeds me.

MAN'S VOICE

What became of our earthly being's weight?

You reveal what life does not yet create.

I myself am fire. No one am I.

Our realm deludes. Behind objects we lie.

THE CHORUS

Do you mean to close the final way?

Do you mean to dam the final spate,

where our arid essence is watered by

the worlds beyond all earthly fate?

Do you mean to choke in names all nameless

timeless fire from the creative pyre

until the consuming miracle yields before

the will and the goal to which you aspire?

CHORALE

O Lord, how you will judge us yet

make never us forget,

how wide your kingdoms reach.

In crowding here and dearth

lust was, the same as death,

a sigh from depths that none can reach.

PRIDE

CHORUS

How could you exist without us,

you great, slow one.

Where had you space to rise up from,

if not in our pride begun.

Your shelter and your rock-grave

are here our hands, tight-wrenched.

And hear, we pray, though not for mercy,

with teeth together clenched:

I can manage.

Around us clinging tough and blind

are lives, swarming and riven .

To man alone, highest and lowest,

was empty despair given.

That made most wondrously

has much too easy to blast.

Oh, bless our pride,

that holds to the last:

I can manage.

What had we else, that would endure

in lifeless wastes

and solace dare itself create

from unreal mists -

from chaos compel form

born of burning homelessness,

give tones to tears and words to screams

and save itself in this:

I can manage.

Here weighs a scale to give justice

to life and death.

How heavy it hangs, the cup of pain,

with our mutilated fates.

How light the other, with what is worth

our aspiration's call.

Put our holy pride in it, O Lord,

then gently it will fall.

I can manage.

CONCLUSION

CHORUS

Not even evil

can you destroy,

O heart of ours,

but that you die,

not one base demon

to nothing lead,

but that you smite yourself,

eternal seed.

Eternal seed.

for no one has seen you flower,

only grow,

always and many times over.

All the way

to meaning in all the void!

Life's long yearning

grant to us unalloyed.

Grant to us unalloyed

the day's heaviest hour,

its stifling agony,

for you are the morning star,

gleaming solace cool,

within the mist a spark,

borne on seven clouds,

seven dragons dark.

A FORM AM I

A form am I,

but the stuff the primordial flame.

Fire is my gaze

and flames my hands.

In drunkenness that creates

twine the fire's tongues

insatiably around that play of lines

that is your being.

Form also you,

but form that is through-annealed,

etherealized

raised from the depths' sea of fire -

mirage and image,

half-created and growing

- like all gods -

bubble above chaos.

Of all things

the gods are most transient,

of all things

worship is most enduring.

O bubble bubble

moment and delusion

and through the fire

the goal of eternity!

ODYSSEUS AT THE MAST

Bind me, you warriors,

to the vessel's mast,

draw tight the ropes

secure and fast!

Commands nor prayers

shall none harken to.

Death's temptation for me,

The wax for you.

Wax in your ears,

the oar in your hand -

no songs can reach you

from danger's land.

Until you are past and you

set me free again,

you have no chieftain

and I have no men.

King Agamemnon,

hope of Hellas' dugs,

would have steered - with silent wave

and firm earplugs.

Ajax would have sailed

near the monsters' call

boldly among his bold ones

to his ruin and fall.

They all remain kings

for as long as they can.

None but me is a

lonely man.

Stronger than honour

and power and control

it lures me, the knowledge

I riskily stole.

It cannot be used

for every day's need,

it cannot be given away

cannot be bequeathed.

Bind me well, you warriors,

but leave my ears alone!

All that's heard, seen and felt

shall become my own.

BE SILENT, HAVE TRUST

In despair you cry:

Where is the wise word,

that alone will cure the world's

poisoned sores?

And where is the thought,

oh, give us the thought,

that leads out of time

where death's spirit soars!

Be silent. Have trust.

Our being is creation.

We are in a deep league

with that which wants to be.

Your great despair

Is not an empty dread

sometimes in the depths it has

a note of agony.

The blind dark suffers agonies

from secret dreams

that no one sees, and yet

they are near in all's storm.

They cannot be told.

They cannot be thought.

They must first be lived through

to being and form.

Do not ask for words,

do not ask for thoughts,

but ask for a share in the agony

from our root in earth interred.

The Silent is thinking

in flesh and blood and will,

and will hurl perhaps at last like fire

to you - your word.

THE TREES

Alive as we are

and far far away,

so our word 'understand'

becomes empty smoke and wind.

Deeply inaccessible

to thought and sense,

though against our cheeks

your bark feels harshly kind.

Eyeless you shine

in delight and flowers.

Through what instruments

do you know your magnificence?

Through what secret,

creating knowledge

have you a share in the power

of visions and scents?

Leaning against the trunk

we are hardly noticed,

do not slip in to your

inner world's ring.

Or reach you, mirrored,

a scrap of our being,

to ourselves unknown

and frightening?

Though no doubt we were born

of the same ancestors,

not a glimpse of shared hours

our eyes have found.

Too many adventures

have divided us since,

too unknowable

is our simple ground.

Perhaps we still have

a meeting to expect,

on the road where life

to soil has returned.

Yet one more hand outstretched

between divided kin.

And we thank death

because of that bond.

Our stuff, always borrowed,

we give it back.

Melt it down to your form,

and take and give!

Exchanged between us

like friendly gifts,

deep beautiful unknown

sister life!

HOW CAN RELIANCE LIVE?

Around us all collapses,

and more will collapse yet,

until no stone is left

to support our foot.

How can you still believe,

who have nothing to believe in?

How can reliance live

so lacking any root?

Is it itself a root?

Is it itself the seed?

and does the tree of the world itself

grow out of it, then?

Then our fate is stored

with taciturn hearts.

Because of their silence

it may be day again.

Because of their wholeness

chaos may flower

from miracles' power - that says nothing

but wants to be believed.

All things may be smashed asunder.

Again they may be healed,

as long as it is living,

our innermost seed.

Come, all that grows whole,

transparently self-evident,

to us, we who reckon

and are on watch each hour,

and learn that the day

we cease to reckon,

that is our lives' fulfilment

and our future power!

CHRISTMAS 1939

When Christmas Eve tautens

then creak floor and door.

The dead since times primordial

seek us as before.

In our homes they take their seats

and us they remind

that in that olden time

for them too Christmas was a feast,

'We come not with fear,

with solace we come.

We saw your desertion

one dark autumn long.

How good to be with you in here.

Sit by the fire with us a while

We knew the horror, we as well,

it was like yours, our despair.

We stood with frozen mouths

in the world's night at our post,

and the sky's stiffened wells

lay ice blue with frost.

Death's sting we came to know.

And death's snow lay wide.

Then someone said: Wait -

a morning star I saw.

We heard. We believed,

We lit flares in our distress.

And we stood up for the light-feast

in darkness and death.

You say: "Fools' flares!"

And if you can, then douse them.

But lift them rather and give them

from us to the new race!'

- - -

The empty winter skies

have smothered every cry.

But the souls listen endlessly,

the dead and we.

In some corner hidden away

by a world to destruction worn,

there is a child being born,

a promised child on straw and hay.

MAN'S MULTIPLICITY

Beautiful is a strong body,

that cleaves a hard wave,

Beautiful, beautiful is the child's sleep

after tension playing gave.

Beautiful is the day of work

- hard bread, broken and blest -

and beautiful an hour that forgets in wine

the future and the past.

We were born of mothers of heaven and earth

and of powers with no end in view,

nocturnal wills and wills of light

with names that no one knew.

May one of the many

not gain power over us,

though she be of heaven's race

and shine in magnificence.

In us a multiplicity lives.

It fumbles towards unity.

Its capturing, gathering burning-glass

we were born to be,

Great is man's striving,

great the goals it has set -

but much greater is man himself

with roots in universal night.

So give, that we shield a secret room

and never a flame do lack

on the altar of an unknown god,

that may tomorrow wake.

WE WHO DO NOT DARE TO SEE

The few who dared to be

- blessed may they be! -

have been maimed and slain all over again

by us who dare not see.

Darkened icons

equal, the same in size

hang images of the living who burn

cramped among much that is less.

The centuries have smoothed

their strange features away,

as we ourselves zealously smooth

day after day.

We file and embellish

as best we can and may,

until nothing distinguishes spirit now

from respectability.

The young go in search

of the fire that burned,

They go with empty eyes

that nothing have found.

They must suffer it all again.

Poor ones, they!

We squandered the gains of the holy - we

who did not dare to see.

THE AVENGING ANGEL SPEAKS

Give me the dead part of your life.

I will be sure to wake it.

The nights wait for our pastime.

We will be sure to break it.

Though your day was so bloodlessly empty,

I can compel it to bleed,

compel it, in shame and judgement,

to rise up from the dead.

So, when day dawns and again you take hold,

you will see what you have earned,

you will see the mark of a living night

into your temple burned -

witness that the time you wanted to cheat

from mercy back you have got

and got it full to its flowing brim -

whether torment or joy, matters not.

THEY STOLE YOUR THOUGHT FROM YOU

They stole your thought from you? - You frighten me,

blasphemer!

Who wants to own the mind is the mind's treacherous

schemer!

Deep must the soul bow down to enter the kingdom's doors.

Perhaps you can become truth's - but truth can never be

yours.

DRINKING SACRIFICE

Over rough red wine heavy foreheads bow.

It is not wine that weighs them down.

The wine that frees our thoughts the most,

it frees the least our tongue.

Like a secret blaze, sacrificial fire

is rough red wine.

I alone know before what powers

that smoke arises fine.

I alone know from what worlds

I derive my drunkenness.

Each and all stare past the rest

and listen to distant sighs.

Each and all raise their glasses to things

that none of the others see,

in dark lands where rejoicing and grief

scarce have meaning finally.

So in secret I raise here my red wine,

my sacrificial blaze,

to a pain that is mine and resembles most

the eternal consuming gale from the sea's waves.

MARSH WANDERER

Dark is my land.

Wanderer, who are you?

Marsh wanderer!

Blind lies my land.

Wanderer, who are you?

I feel footprints fill themselves

with blood from my inner self.

I would like to know your hands.

If they are of fire that burns,

let me feel it.

I would like to know your hands.

If they are like cool leaves,

then stroke them over the trees' pain

and let the dead awake.

THE FLOWER BITTERNESS

Flower flower Bitterness,

how stand you now so full

of ripe gold honey

for all your bitter pall.

How sag you now with gifts,

the meadows' almond flower

the modest, gently swathed,

could surely never bear,

Torment and blessing -

each has his own.

I do not know life's measure,

but know that you became mine.

Your cup was like fire.

Your drink was like gall.

You offered seven sorrows,

and I drank them all.

Flower flower Bitterness,

how rich at last you grow

in heat-golden honey

resembling sunlight's flow.

Here,sated with sweetness,

I stand in your clear gift's rays.

I will rejoice with Adam.

With Job I will praise.

NEVER IS THE FOREST HAPPY AS NOW...

Never is the forest happy as now in sun and rain,

never so overflowing with delicate scents and glitter,

never so playfully consoling - only me it does not reach,

though I seek and pray. My pain is too bitter.

Drink, my eyes, gold lights I myself do not see.

Breathe deeply, my lungs, the wet moss's vapour.

I am a dead stone. Forget me, live for yourselves,

gather in golden chambers all that you can capture.

Inaccessible that room where day's harvest will ripen

soft with shimmers and scents and sighs. When the hour is

here

a thickened splendour will burst its cell. Over me will

pour

fresh and wild as a waterfall, pain's memory.

WILD APPLE

How is it possible?

How did such a glorious multiplicity grow,

such a fresh and fine and airy cloud of flowers,

such a forest of twisted wild boughs,

such a rough bark with green lichen

all of it only

from one and the same dark little kernel?

There it lay, all of it,

trunk, branches, leaves and bark and airy flowers,

pressed together in a heart-shape.

But we are the wild apple's reflection in water.

From riches without boundary and bottom,

from young days' airy light fruit-blossom,

from a hundred roads' forest of clinging branches,

from the simple bark of a simple life,

we gather slowly,

until it all lies still, condensed, closed

within the kernel of a heart...

How is it possible.

NOW IS THE TIME OF IMMENSE WAITING

Now is the time of immense waiting

before the leafing time,

now the trees tremble in their inadequate glory,

the birches in purple, the aspens in green

and in gold-red the willows of the streams -

time of invisible forces,

when all is only bearing wombs -

souls go pantingly heavy,

and the twilight excites and wearies

like insatiable trysts.

Now creation crouches, yearning's leap in store -

before disappointment happens,

when the forest is as green as possible

and the world is as complete as possible

the trees and the people mumble as in sleep:

'We wish for more.'

HOW CAN I SAY...

How can I say if thy voice is beautiful.

I only know that it pierces

and makes me tremble like a leaf

and tears me into rags and pieces.

What do I know of thy skin and thy limbs.

It only shakes me that they are thine ,

so that for me there is no sleep or rest,

till they are mine.

TO YOU

You my despair and my strength,

you took all the life I controlled,

and because you demanded everything,

you gave back a thousandfold .

MY POOR YOUNG THING...

Afraid of the dark, my poor young thing,

who met spirits of another kind,

among the white-clad ever noticing

others of evil mind,

now I want to sing gentle songs to you,

they deliver from fear, cramp, coercion rude.

They do not ask that the evil should rue,

They do not ask for the fight of the good.

Then you shall know that all that lives

deep inside is of the same kind.

As trees and plants it can grow hesitantly,

by its own law upwards inclined.

And trees may be felled and flowers be broken

and branches die with their strength dried up,

but the dream is concealed - wills to be awoken -

in every living drop of sap.

YOU ARE THE RESURRECTION OF MY SOUL

You are the resurrection of my soul

to ecstasy in what is real,

so the air touches me hot as fire

like a sea of glass that I feel,

and the power of my eyes,

so that numbly they catch a glimmer

of how all the colours flame out

in a drunken shimmer.

You are the strength of my will,

you give me a fortitude

to wait and to act,

that I have never had,

Yes my senses' hunger,

that incite me and pursue,

becomes rejoicing every day

because it is for you.

You are the ripeness of my life.

You make me whole.

Out of my past now gathers

each thread and smallest dole.

On a hundred different roads

I have walked and strived.

Now they meet. It is towards you

That I have lived.

MANY VOICES SPEAK

Many voices speak.

Yours like water calls,.

Yours is like rain,

when through the night it falls.

Softly purls

in a fumbling dive,

slowly, hesitantly,

torturedly alive.

Trickles and strains,

trembling like a ground,

towards my skin,

behind every sound,

wraps itself softly,

closes me in,

fills my ears, whispering

memory's refrain.

I don't want to sit silent

where I can't come near you.

I want to dwell and live

where I can hear you.

Many voices speak.

Through them all

I hear only yours

like the night rain fall.

YOUR VOICE...

Your voice: in an old orchard a path half overgrown

with deep shadows and bright sun and birdsong sudden thrown,

a path of untamed secret life and breeze and

loneliness -

how strangely lone and wild, it is I alone who knows.

And when I wake at night, in it I waken then,

and I grow lost in green transparent shadow play again.

There I dwell for hours and hours and know that whom

you will follow and where you listen, here is my home.

Your voice: I have heard it for twenty years, and all that you have said

has lain sunk in me, but charged with power yet.

Now I hear it word for word as yesterday, it fills night and day.

It was the warmth of my veins. It was my heart, beating away.

What are these depths in us, where the past exists, all?

Or is it only your being, your voice I recall?

You were my life's fulfilment. How has its ripening passed?

A choked tree, a tree of agony, burst into leaf at last.

All say it: your time is short, I know.

I cannot imagine that you will ever go.

There is no world to live in, where you do not live.

My mind rejects the miracle. In my heart, belief.

ALL THINGS YOU CONTAIN...

All things you contain, more than a mortal can thole .

You are light and darkness in a double bowl.

How the one shimmers, naked and cool.

Mother-of-pearl air over water of pale opal.

Seeing, seen,

ready for day's gleam

dawns slowly open their mussel shell.

But dim and still does the other brood,

also a mussel, though deeply there, where the sea is mute.

Un-broken-up,

since creation closed

it protects the mother-sleep's secret room.

All things you are, the whole of my being's goal.

You are the day and the night in a double bowl.

LINKÖPING CATHEDRAL

February 1938

The Altar Painting

Do not seek here the silence of the dead.

The walls drip with the vigil of the ages.

The vaults tremble with living spirits

on their way back.

The centuries' ring

turns slowly around them.

All things are near. Past

is nothing.

The spirit that raised stone upon stone

like the driving sap of temple pillars,

has sprung a new bough.

From the images comes a flashing brilliance

of inexorable demand for sacrifice,

which our fathers heard and obeyed.

That man there with the narrow mouth

never sat happily by the evening well,

as the herds billowed wearily home

and a sorrow-dissolving twilight burned.

He is fire. The conflagration he bodes,

god as much as young man.

All that is secret he sees through

sternly as only the young can.

High in the bright arches of his purity

he offers war.

Over his forehead flame

Middle Ages, young and hard.

Centuries in kindred train,

prophet next to prophet,

darkly real towards skies

of silver air and nothing.

So solitarily essential

in the phantom of creation

man bears his heavy soul

to stone in the epochs' cathedral. -

And their gaze is distant

among what does not die,

and their features are closed shrines

with frozen passion for a lock.

III

So heavily strikes the light

that no dust can bear it.

Go hence, light! You crush

the clay you take as dwelling.

How many have you visited

since primeval days -

and all all

prayed the same prayer: mercy!

How many have you wrestled with

and triumphed over

and consoled only with visions'

confusing promises.

How many went in the dawn

from the Jabbok’s ford

with the sum of their life

in their maimed hips.

We saw their movements

of ugly deformity

and thought: Are they implements

for the light to use?

See, health's sunlight,

that gently cures the world,

is powerful in the healthy,

but these are sick. -

We saw their smile

and could not decipher it,

we saw their tracks,

which the legends relate.

Splendour of their heaven

and splendour of their hell

seized us like a drunkenness.

Who knows what he will choose?

Yes, who knows it still,

who knows the ways

that lead to the stone of the wise

and life's red kernels.

They risked their souls.

Then say, the Jabbok’s mighty one,

have you a cure for the race

under the stars of the fear of death?

The Tapestries

But as the plants unfold

where the fields of late lay empty,

the earth awoke in space's spring

and slowly began to flower.

From fern forests and lizard slime

life crept up the precipice.

There a human child kneels

and looks out over the depths.

How did wings grow there in the birds' feathers?

How was the chestnut's stick raised,

which carefully and proudly bore the finest candles

high above serpent and dragon?

We know of the spring, that the power of the depths

cannot have drained its source.

So let us perceive in all that is

the creating wellsprings' rising

and let go like Job on his torment's heap

of justice's tricks

and lean our sick and tough hope

against the miracle that is still a miracle.

PROLOGUE AT A SCHOOL PRIZEGIVING

There are courtyards and lawns that have rung so long

with cries and laughter and noisy games,

with shrill small voices and voices breaking,

that even in solitude the stones echo.

There are rooms where the walls themselves have absorbed

so much raw healthy young life that it will never go,

and perhaps some yawns and perhaps some fear,

and perhaps some of the excitement that makes the hours too short -

and perhaps the times of endless listening

and the joy of discovery at old new wonders.

There are staircases that have been worn by generations of feet

in countless schools in countless lands

What a torrent has run between the school's walls

like a river rushing mightily between resting shores!

A river of young spring energy and new opportunities,

still seething with unrest and fermenting questions,

goes forth between banks which itself did not form,

with the future's seeds in its rumbling waves.

And the walls ask: Are we only the past?

Are we the obstacle that makes the energy break and be checked?

Is the inheritance we leave so overwhelming

that perhaps the future itself lets itself be dammed?

But then there is a murmur from trees and grass and rain:

That which is truly future, nothing can dam!

What we have gathered of experience, of dream and hope and will

is too costly to die when our lives are over.

We bore it to the river, the young, strong river,

which will perhaps take it towards the coming time.

And among all that we leave and all that it takes with us

there is much that will sink to the bottom and be

forgotten,

but the best we found and the richest we lived

are the seeds that have energy and will be preserved and kept.

Thus in the great stream thought is bound to thought

and will to will, as the hours stride on,

until generation after generation lets go of hands they

held

and goes to take up its task at last.

So they are bound here among games and lessons and dreams -

like links in the great community,

that stretches out seeking towards all that we dare to hope -

the children of men to the whole of mankind.

SAVE THE CHILDREN

All too clearly, frighteningly clearly

we hear the crash of the Spanish shells.

Groaning in the wind, weeping in the rain

breaks the peace on silent evenings.

In the midst of self-sufficient states

people are bitterly forced to learn:

the earth has shrunk and become small;

never was all Europe so close.

From the unending horizon

space closes tighter and tighter.

Soon when our children have grown,

there will be no recesses or distances left.

Full of fear, with lips closed,

we wish luck on their future. - -

Children whose eyes have drowned in horrors

will grow to become their shadow and times.

Centuries of plague, times of pestilence

will one day roll across the lands.

Give that one day we may endure

where the health of our souls is concerned!

Terror and hate and the froth of the wild animal

creep like plague-poison over our minds.

He may be thankful who has managed to heal

some wound among the most painful memories.

Roof over the head, shelter against the cold,

the bread that relieves the naked distress,

the warmth in the hand, the light in the voice -

these are weapons in a struggle against death.

They are all like circles around a stone: they spread

far out across the water's surface.

No one can know how far he will reach,

only that he is fighting on the side of life.

THE CHILD

No worm, no seed in the wind

is armed more weakly against life's peril,

no baby bird is exposed

more helplessly to the mercy of the strong.

What daring of the hidden powers

to let themselves be born by human children

and pour the wine above all wines

into this bowl of thin temple-cork!

But in timid fear we approach

the eyes of the child, scarcely awake,

in which forms and colours are reflected

overwhelming, new, naked -

creators' eyes that will tame the visions

and slowly order the cosmos's home,

divide the waters from the vault above

and set earth's fastness between them.

And in fear and trembling we approach

those volcanic dawns

whose eruptions of fire and geysers

still rock us on slow swells:

then the day was deep and eternal,

strangely sated with a violent spring;

life burned intolerably,

like a sun in its blue veins.

Remorsefully they draw near to us,

the sunken lands, thoughtlessly abandoned,

that hide our royal sceptres

and all that the Mothers intended as a miracle -

the earth's magic healings,

spiders' webs in morning dew,

and the sacred energy of growth -

all buried under the slag of the years.

Among the blind who seek power

in dead destruction,

the child walks like a sorrowless smile

of what makes alive.

On the day when the steel fails

and the peoples cry for the Primordial Flood -

on that day the child will have won,

on that day fate will change.

THOSE QUIET FOOTSTEPS BEHIND ME

If I listen, I can hear life flying

ever faster now -

Those quiet footsteps behind me -

death, it is you.

Before, you were far away -

I held you all too dear.

Now, when I long no more,

now you are there.

Dear death, there is in your being

something that comforts strife:

what do you care if one's grown great,

or wasted the whole of one's life?

Dear death. there is in your being

something that clears the air:

all that's the same in the good and the bad

you lay open, naked and bare.

Follow me and let me hold your hand,

it calms one deep and well.

The beautiful you make indispensably great,

The ugly you make small.

It's as though you wanted something of me,

I present you want, I guess:

a strange, small curious key -

the little word 'yes'.

Yes, yes, I want to!

Yes, yes, I will!

My piety I lay down at your feet

so life may grow more, still.

AT THE BOTTOM OF THINGS

I read in the newspaper that someone had died, someone

I knew by name.

She lived, like me, wrote books, like me, grew old,

and now she is dead.

Think, to be dead and have left everything behind;

dread, terror and loneliness, and the unforgiving guilt.

But a great justice lies hidden at the bottom of things.

We all have a grace to expect - a gift of which no one can rob us.

WHERE THE DIVINING-ROD DESCENDS

Where the divining-rod descends

goes forth the water's vein.

a centre for fate,

a serious one.

Do not flee into dreams

of richer sward.

Here is your ground, and the powers

have said their word.

It may bcome to pass, if you dig here,

that the heather's mark

may be watered to a pleasure-garden

and leaf-rich park.

It may also come to pass

that your toil will be repaid

with a few dark cracks

that winter green has made.

The one and the other

have meagre weight

against your touching your own fate's

living plate,

where evil power is broken,

where creation takes place,

where you and the world grow

to a greater space.

Do not think your dreams

will come true at last.

Do not think you will regain

those meadows you lost.

Where the divining-rod descends

stern mystery dwells below.

There happens nothing of what

you expect and know.

Take the shoe from your foot.

Be still, and watch the earth.

Here you are granted a meeting

with the power of birth.

How deep the earth ferments.

Her soul is like yours.

Here a way is opened for you

into hers.

THUS DO WE DRIFT...

Thus do we drift, lost souls,

from camp-fire hole to camp-fire hole,

know nothing of our next rest

and nothing of the journey's goal -

know that night and day here alternate,

heavy eve and sunrise great in song,

and that our journey still seems short

and yet too mercilessly long.

Yes, we know more: one sleepless night

we listen quiet in fear unseen

to our inner being, to a murmur

as of a subterranean stream

or of a shell's faint roar

in which the whole sea's heard,

and in our trembling we cease

to ask which way we are led.

Thus do we drift, lost souls,

from camp-fire hole to camp-fire hole,

know nothing of our next rest

and nothing of the journey's goal,

but know that our hearts are drawn

inexorably, without choice

in towards the sea of an unknown home

that murmurs deep in the seashell's voice.

THOSE DARK ANGELS...

Those dark angels with blue glames

like flowers of fire in their black hair

know answers to strange blasphemous questions -

and perhaps they know where the bridge goes

from night's depths to daylight -

and perhaps they know the haven of all unity -

and perhaps in the father's house there is

a bright dwelling that has their name.

AFTER DEATH

'What does it feel like when one gets wings, when one is dead, say, mother?'

'First your back bends, it grows broad and great.

Then it grows heavier and heavier. It is as if one carried a mountain.

There's a shaking and breaking in ribs and backbone and marrow.

Then it straightens up with a jerk and bears all, all.

Then one knows that one is dead now and lives in a new form.'

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Complete Poems Read Online

The Seven Deadly Sins (1941)

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