Nature Theater

Now I step through the slender gate!
Promiscuous step in the avenues
Drifts away and quiet waft of words
From people, passersby.

I stand before a green stage!
Begin, begin again, you play
Of lost days, without crime and punishment,
Ghostly only, strange and cool!

To the melody of the early days
I see myself going up there again,
A child whose quiet, forgotten lament
I see weeping, strange to my understanding.

You wondering face turned to the evening,
Was I once this, that now makes me weep,
Like your still unfinished gestures
That point to the night mutely and shuddering.

poem by Georg Trakl
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Untitled: With rosy stages

With rosy stages the stone sinks in the moor

Song of gliding and black laughter

Figures go in and out of rooms

And death grins bony in black boat.

Pirate on the canal in the red wine

Whose mast and sail often broke in the storm.

Drowned ones bump purple against the rock

Of the bridges. Steely the call of the guards clangs.

But sometimes, the glance listens in the candlelight

And follows the shadows on decayed walls

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poem by Georg Trakl
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Devotion

Not lost from my young years

Is silent devotion to a sound of bells,

To all churches' dusking altars

And their blue domes heaven-wide.

To an organ's tune at evening,

To wide squares fading in darkness,

And to a fountain that splashes, softly and quietly

And sweetly, like unintelligible children's babbling.

I see myself dreaming silently, folding the hands,

And whispering prayers forgotten for a long time,

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poem by Georg Trakl
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In Wine Country

The sun paints courtyard and walls with autumn,

The fruit stacked in heaps all around,

Before them poor children cower.

A gust thins out old linden-trees.

Through the gate a golden shower rains

And the women blessed with child

Tiredly rest on rotten benches.

Drunkards swing glasses and jugs.

A hoodlum lets his fiddle sound

And smocks swell lustfully in the dance.

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poem by Georg Trakl
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Dusk

You are rumpled, distorted by every pain
And shake with the discord of all melodies,
You burst harp - a poor heart,
From which gloom's sick flowers bloom.

Who has ordered the enemy, the murderer for you,
That stole the last spark of your soul,
How he makes this scanty world godless
To a whore, ugly, ill, pale with putrefaction!

From shadows a wild dance still swings
To frizzily ruptured, soulless sound,
A round dance around beauty's thorn wreath,

Which witheringly crowns the lost winner,
- A bad trophy for that fought desperation,
And that does not reconcile the bright divinity.

poem by Georg Trakl
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Justice

Huts of childhood are in autumn,

Decayed hamlet; dark shapes,

Singing mothers in the evening wind;

At windows Angelus and hands fold.

Still birth; on green ground

Mystery and stillness of blue flowers.

Insanity opens the purple mouth:

Dies irae - grave and stillness.

Groping along green thorns;

In the sleep: blood-vomit, hunger and laughter;

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poem by Georg Trakl
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The Horror

I saw myself go through abandoned rooms.

- The stars danced crazily on blue ground,

And on the fields the dogs howled loud,

And in the treetops the foehn rummaged wildly.

But suddenly: stillness! Stuffy fever glow

Lets poisonous flowers bloom from my mouth,

From the branches like from a wound

Pale gleaming dew falls, and falls, and falls like blood.

From a mirror's deceitful emptiness

A countenance slowly lifts in the vagueness

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poem by Georg Trakl
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December Sonnet

At evening jugglers travel through the forest

On quaint wagons, small steeds.

A golden stash seems locked in clouds.

In the dark plain villages are painted.

The red wind billows linen black and cold.

A dog rots, a shrub smokes blood-doused.

The reed is flown through by yellow horror

And placidly a funeral procession pilgrimages to the cemetery.

The old man's hut dwindles nearby in the gray,

In the pond a brilliance of old treasures glistens;

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poem by Georg Trakl
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Fairy Tale

Rockets drizzle in the yellow sunshine;

What a mask-like throng in the old park.

Landscapes are mirrored in the gray sky

And sometimes one hears the faun scream dreadfully.

Its golden grin appears garishly in the grove.

In cresses the bumblebees' thick of battle clamors,

A rider trots past on a sallow white horse.

The poplars glow in vague rows.

The little girl who drowned in the pond today

Rests as a saint in the bleak room

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poem by Georg Trakl
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December

At evening jugglers travel through the forest

On quaint wagons, small steeds.

A golden stash seems locked in clouds.

In the white plain villages are painted.

The wind swings shield and billet black and cold.

A raven follows the morose comrades.

From the sky a ray falls on bloody gutters

And placidly a funeral procession pilgrimages to the cemetery.

The shepherd's hut dwindles nearby in the gray,

In the pond a brilliance of old treasures glistens;

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poem by Georg Trakl
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