Am meisten gelesen ▸
Frank Horne
My little stone
Sinks quickly
Into the bosom of this deep, dark pool
Of oblivion ...
I have troubled its breast but little
Yet those far shores
That knew me not
Will feel the fleeting, furtive kiss
Of my tiny concentric ripples....
Open your eyes and you see me.
Take off your disguise and so will I.
Look around and see the world.
It's not perfect harmony but it works.
With every decision you must risk something.
Till there is nothing left but to risk yourself.
Put your heart in a blender and watch it spin into a beautiful oblivion.
Through the breath of perfume,
(O music of musics !)
Down creeps the moon
To fill my cup of song
With memory's wine.
Across the song of night and moon,
(O perfume of perfumes !)
My soul, as a wind
Whose heart's too full to sing,
Only roams astray . . .
Down the tide of the sweet night
(O the ecstasy's gentle rise !)
The birds, flowers and trees
Are glad at once to fall
Into Oblivion's ruin white.
From the French of Massillon Coicou (Haiti)
I hope when I am dead that I shall lie
In some deserted grave--I cannot tell you why,
But I should like to sleep in some neglected spot
Unknown to every one, by every one forgot.
There lying I should taste with my dead breath
The utter lack of life, the fullest sense of death;
And I should never hear the note of jealousy or hate,
The tribute paid by passersby to tombs of state.
To me would never penetrate the prayers and tears
That futilely bring torture to dead and dying ears;
There I should lie annihilate and my dead heart would bless
Oblivion--the shroud and envelope of happiness.
I am less of myself and more of the sun;
The beat of life is wearing me
To an incomplete oblivion,
Yet not to the certain dignity
Of death. They cannot even die
Who have not lived.
The hungry jaws
Of space snap at my unlearned eye,
And time tears in my flesh like claws.
If I am not life's, if I am not death's.
Out of chaos I must re-reap
The burden of untasted breaths.
Who has not waked may not yet sleep.
I do not ask for love, ah! no,
Nor friendship’s happiness,
These were relinquished long ago;
I search for something less.
I seek a little tranquil bark
In which to drift at ease
Awhile, and then quite silently
To sink in quiet seas.
No, now I wish the sunshine would stop,
and the white shining houses, and the gay red flowers on the balconies
and the bluish mountains beyond, would be crushed out
between two valves of darkness;
the darkness falling, the darkness rising, with muffled sound
obliterating everything.
I wish that whatever props up the walls of light
would fall, and darkness would come hurling heavily down,
and it would be thick black dark for ever.
Not sleep, which is grey with dreams,
nor death, which quivers with birth,
but heavy, sealing darkness, silence, all immovable.
What is sleep?
It goes over me, like a shadow over a hill,
but it does not alter me, nor help me.
And death would ache still, I am sure;