Surrender to Night

The Ravens
Above the black nook at noontide
Hasten the ravens, with harsh cries.
Their shadow streaks past the doe
And sometimes they are seen in surly repose.
O how they disturb the brown silence
In a field enraptured with its being,
Like a woman bewitched by a dark foreboding,
And sometimes you hear them scolding
Around a carcass, somewhere they sniff out,
Then suddenly they change course northwards
And die out like a funeral cort.ge
In air that quivers with lust.


The Young Maid
Dedicated to Ludwig von Ficker
I
Often by the fountain at dusk
You see her as if enchanted
Drawing water, in the dusk.
The pail rattles down, back up.
In the beeches jackdaws flutter
And she appears as if a shadow.
Her yellow hair it flutters up
and in the yard rats are shrieking.
Caressed by decay
She lowers feverish lids.
Grass withered by decay
Inclines at her feet.
II
Silence she creates in the room
And long the yard is abandoned.
In the elderberry before the room
Sad piping of a blackbird’s tune.
Silver her reflection in the mirror glass
Alien to her in the twilight glow
And wanly fades in the mirror glass
And her dread before its purity.
Dreamily a farm hand sings in darkness
And she stares, shaken by pain.
Red trickles through the darkness.
Suddenly the south wind rattles at the gate.
III
Night upon the bare pastureland
She flutters there in fever dreams.
Sullen whines the wind over the pastureland
And the moon listens from the trees.
Soon the stars around turn pale
And exhausted by grievance
Her waxen cheeks turn pale.
Putrefaction wafts from the earth.
Sorrowfully rustles the reed by the pond
And cowering she suffers the cold.
Cock crow far off. Above the pond
Morning shivers grey, unyielding.
IV
In the forge rings the hammer
And before the gate she scurries.
Glowing red the farm hand wields the hammer
She looks across as if dead.
As in a dream she is struck by laughter;
And she reels into the forge,
Crouched coyly before his laughter,
Hard and coarse like the hammer.
In the room radiate shining sparks
And with a helpless gesture
She tries to grasp the wild sparks
And in a daze drops to earth.
V
Stretched out, slender, on the bed
She awakens heavy with sweet fears
And she looks at the grubby bed
Veiled with a golden light,
The mignonettes there by the window
And the blue radiant heavens.
Sometimes the breeze wafts in the window
The timid tinkling of the bell.
Shadows slide over the pillow,
Slowly the noon hour sounds
And she breathes heavily into the pillow
And her mouth is like a wound.
VI
At evening floats the bloody linen,
Clouds above the silent woods,
That are draped in black linen.
The chatter of sparrows in the fields.
And she lies all white in darkness.
Beneath the roof a cooing wafts.
Like a carrion in bush and darkness
Flies whir about her mouth.
Dreamlike sounds in the brown hamlet
To an echo of fiddles and dances,
Her countenance drifts over the hamlet,
Her hair blows in bare branches.