Mest lästa ▸
Katherine Mansfield
Into the world you sent her, mother,
Fashioned her body of coral and foam,
Combed a wave in her hair’s warm smother,
And drove her away from home.
In the dark of the night she crept to the town
And under a doorway she laid her down,
The little blue child in the foam-fringed gown.
And never a sister and never a brother
To hear her call, to answer her cry.
Her face shone out from her hair’s warm smother
Like a moonkin up in the sky.
She sold her corals; she sold her foam;
Her rainbow heart like a singing shell
Broke in her body: she crept back home.
Peace, go back to the world, my daughter,
Daughter, go back to the darkling land;
The day that I come home,
What will you find to say,--
Words as light as foam
With laughter light as spray?
Yet say what words you will
The day that I come home;
I shall hear the whole deep ocean
Beating under the foam.
A little while when I am gone
My life will live in music after me,
As spun foam lifted and borne on
After the wave is lost in the full sea.
A while these nights and days will burn
In song with the bright frailty of foam,
Living in light before they turn
Back to the nothingness that is their home.
The waters seem to rise
To meet that little sprawl,
That splash of resolution,
Of joyous legs and arms:
The waters catch and play with her.
From out the foam a face blooms,
Pink and wet —
Bud of my heart! —
And there floats to me.
Widening,
The ripples of her smile!
Now I am a plant, a weed,
Bending and swinging
On a rocky ledge;
And now I am a long brown grass
Fluttering like flame;
I am a reed;
An old shell singing
For ever the same;
A drift of sedge;
A white, white stone;
A bone;
Until I pass
Into sand again,
And spin and blow
To and fro, to and fro,
On the edge of the sea
My hands are motion ; they cannot rest.
They are the foam upon the sea,
Borne with a wave to a fleeting crest,
Hurled back, borne on, unceasingly.
They are existent and made whole
In their unrest, as the entity
Of foam is spun where waters roll
Back, and on, eternally.
The stone falls, the bird flies, the arrow goes home,
But we have no motion, we scatter like foam.
O, give me a song to sing for your sorrow,
A song that will lift, like a wave from the reef,
You and myself, that will fling like an arrow
My poor scattered words to the target of grief:
I want to forget, to remember no morrow,
To go with the petrel, to go with the leaf. . . .
We would fly with all things to the goal of their flying,
We would turn with all things to the magnetic star,
But we never can live, because of our dying,
And we never can be, for the things that we are.
We alone of all creatures — the stones more than we —
Have no end, no motion, no destiny.
If I could hang all the foam of the sea in my hair,
If I could sing all the songs that were ever invented,
If I could kiss all the pebbles that ever there were,
If I could hang all the foam of the sea in my hair,
If I could drink all the waves as they break over there,
Should I then be contented?
If I could hang all the foam of the sea in my hair?
If I could sing all the songs that were ever invented?