In Red Foliage Full of Guitars
In Red Foliage Full of Guitars
In red foliage full of guitars
the girls’ yellow hair waves
at the fence, where sunflowers persist.
A golden chariot steers through the clouds.
In brown shadows the ancients
grow dumb, and dumbly entwine.
The orphaned ones sing vespers—sweetly.
Flies hum in the yellow haze.
In the stream the women wash.
The hung linen undulates.
The little girl, long dead to me,
returns throughout the dawning night.
From the tender sky sparrows fling themselves
into green holes pregnant with rot.
The hungry are filled
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poem by Georg Trakl
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To Angela
1
A lonely destiny in abandoned rooms
A soft insanity gropes on wallpapers.
Beds of geraniums flow by windows,
Daffodils also and more chaste in wasting away
As alabaster which gleams in the garden.
In blue veils India's mornings smile.
Their sweet incense scares away the stranger's worries,
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poem by Georg Trakl
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En-route
A scent of myrrh which roams in the twilight.
Plazas red and desolate sink in fume.
Bazaars circle and a golden ray flows
In old shops queerly and confused.
In the dishwater decay glows; and the wind
Evokes dully the agony of burnt gardens.
The possessed pursue golden dreams.
By windows dryads rest slender and dulcet.
The dream-addicted wander pined over by a wish.
Workers surge shimmering through a gate.
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poem by Georg Trakl
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Three Dreams
I
I think, I dreamed of falling leaves,
Of wide forests and dark lakes,
Of sad words' echo -
However, I could not understand their meaning.
I think, I dreamed of falling stars,
Of the weeping entreaty of pale eyes,
Of a smile's echo -
However, I could not understand its meaning.
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poem by Georg Trakl
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The Fall of the Deserted
The Fall of the Deserted
The dark fall swells with fruit and abundance,
the yellowed glare of garish summer days.
A pure blueness steps from the ruined husk.
Shadows flap from the ancient myth.
The wine is pressed, benign silence
fraught with the whispered reply to murkier questions.
And here and there a cross on a barren hill.
In the red woods a flock loses itself.
The cloud wanders into the pond’s mirror.
A peasant’s stormless gesture is put to rest.
Below one’s breath the evening wings of grief stir
the dry reeds of our rooftop, the black earth.
Before long the stars will nestle in his weary brow.
In the chilled room a mute humility turns back
and angels tread softly from the blue
eyes of lovers, that more gentle ache.
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poem by Georg Trakl
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To Angela (2nd Version)
1
A lonely destiny in abandoned rooms.
A soft insanity gropes on wallpapers,
On windows, reddish beds of geraniums,
Daffodils also and more chaste in wasting away
As alabaster which gleams in the garden.
In blue veils India 's mornings smile.
Their sweet incense scares away the stranger's worries,
Sleepless night by the pond because of Angela.
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poem by Georg Trakl
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Elis
Elis
1.
The absolute stillness of this golden day.
Under ancient oak trees
you appear, Elis, a dormant seed with round eyes.
Their blueness reflects the slumber of lovers,
whose rosy sighs
die on your lips.
At evening the fishermen drew in their heavy nets.
A good shepherd
leads his herd to the edge of the woods.
O, Elis, how just are your days!
Wordlessly, by barren walls,
the blue secrecy of olive trees descends.
An old man’s dark song dies away.
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poem by Georg Trakl
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Psalm
It is a light, that the wind has extinguished.
It is a pub on the heath, that a drunk departs in the afternoon.
It is a vineyard, charred and black with holes full of spiders.
It is a space, that they have white-limed with milk.
The madman has died. It is a South Sea island,
Receiving the Sun-God. One makes the drums roar.
The men perform warlike dances.
The women sway their hips in creeping vines and fire-flowers,
Whenever the ocean sings. O our lost Paradise.
The nymphs have departed the golden woods.
One buries the stranger. Then arises a flicker-rain.
The son of Pan appears in the form of an earth-laborer,
Who sleeps away the meridian at the edge of the glowing asphalt.
It is little girls in a courtyard, in little dresses full of heart-rending poverty!
It is rooms, filled with Accords and Sonatas.
It is shadows, which embrace each other before a blinded mirror.
At the windows of the hospital, the healing warm themselves.
A white steamer carries bloody contagia up the canal.
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poem by Georg Trakl
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Seven-Song of Death
Seven-Song of Death
So dawns the blue face of spring. Beneath the suckling trees
a darkness strays into evening and demise.
The blackbird’s feeble complaint is caught.
The stifled night appears, a wild bleeding,
dirge burrowing deeper into the hillside.
Flowering apple-branches sway in the damp air.
Tangles unhinge their silver,
death rattles over the night’s fluttering eyes, clatter of stars,
the whispered song from the cradle.
Down to the blackened woods the sleeper, arisen, descended,
and the blue spring, it wheezed its way through the valley,
that those bleached eyelids receded
wordlessly over his snow-covered face.
And the moon hunted the red beast
from its cave.
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poem by Georg Trakl
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Song in the Night
I
Born from the shadow of a breath
We wander in abandonment
And are lost in the eternal,
Like victims ignorant wherefore they are consecrated.
Like beggars nothing is our own,
We fools at the locked gate.
As blind people we listen in the silence,
In which our whisper is lost.
We are the wanderers without destinations,
The clouds which the wind blows away,
The flowers shaking in death's coolness,
Which wait, until one mows them down.
II
So that the last torment becomes complete with me,
I do not defend you, you hostile dark powers.
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poem by Georg Trakl
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