Still to
tell, still to
tell . . . my
memory
asks me, and I
stare at it.
Am I alive?
I ask my room, —
I ask
the space in the expanse
and lastly:
Are you, space,
what I know?
-
When we're
stripped right
down to
clay, then
the talk of
what's singable
is right.
The man who is born,
thought through to the end —
it echoes back.
-
Many
have no language.
Were I not myself
replete with misery, I
would not
move my tongue.
-
If we would once again
be given eyes
after some time
in the corpse, in death . . .
As we made love,
you examined
my cranium
very closely.
-
Look into the opened hand.
Departure
keeps showing up there.
A sound is present
and doesn't end
against the edges of the hills.
-
At the end of days,
what kind
of stammering will come
from mankind's mouth,
when difficulty
becomes a cripple,
if anything at all,
and the heavens' coldness
freezes the acts over.
Language formally,
this romance,
when the song already
lost its head.
-
Someday,
when the last ones
are doing well for themselves
above the ashes,
when love
is the most blind
since the times, when those
who themselves forgot,
children of untimed,
are completely forgotten . . .
we — you all
in the unstoppable
starry
misfortune.
-
Think, in the
quintillionth year
you won't
be allowed to be homesick
for person and Earth.
THIS, that you
were a child
of the universe,
is gone,
and where
is the unholy one,
the mother with her
wits about her,
and where
the star that shone for us?
I'm reeling.
I also wished,
before it ended, I'd see
a dream.
-
Wisdom, the idle wise,
might even a cut go
sharply across the eyes.
Unable —
all that love and guilt, all
that honor.
Also never to be ashamed,
as on days that
taste good.
———————————————
Ernst Meister
Of Entirety Say the Sentence
Wave Books
translated from the German by
Graham Foust, Samuel Frederick
