Стихотворения

the magic of veiled thoughts that might
be blended by the outer light,
drowned in the noise of day, unheard…
take in their song and speak no word.

<Январь 1944>

466. LAST LOVE{*}

Love at the closing of our days
is apprehensive and very tender.
Glow brighter, brighter, farewell rays
of one last love in its evening splendor.

Blue shade takes half the world away:
through western clouds alone some light is slanted.
О tarry, О tarry, declining day,
enchantment, let me stay enchanted.

The blood runs thinner, yet the heart
remains as ever deep and tender.
О last belated love, thou art
a blend of joy and of hopeless surrender.

<Январь 1944>

467. DUSK{*}

Now the ashen shadows mingle,
tints are faded, sounds remote.
Life has dwindled to a single
vague reverberating note.
In the dusk I hear the humming
of a moth I cannot see.
Whence is this oppression coming?
I'm in all, and all's in me.

Gloom so dreamy, gloom so lulling,
flow into my deepest deep,
flow, ambrosial and dulling,
steeping everything in sleep.
With oblivion's obscuration
fill my senses to the brim,
make me taste obliteration,
in this dimness let me dim.

<Осень 1944>

468. THE ABYSS{*}

When sacred Night sweeps heavenward, she takes
the glad, the winsome day, and folding it,
rolls up its golden carpet that had been
spread over an abyssmal pit.

Gone vision-like is the external world,
and man, a homeless orphan, has to face
in utter helplessness, naked, alone,
the blackness of immeasurable space.

Upon himself he has to lean; with mind
abolished, thought unfathered, in the dim
depths of his soul he sinks, for nothing comes
from outside to support or limit him.

All life and brightness seem an ancient dream —
while in the very substance of the night,
unravelled, alien, he now perceives
a fateful something that is his by right.

<1944>

469. AUTUMN{*}

When Autumn has just come, there is
most brief a lull: brief but divine.
All day 'tis like some precious prism,