BOISTEROUSLY

In the path of motor-cars the frozen vapour would still be wasted: To shards of shimmering stars the human breath with deliberate slowness is broken! - Here the street's wailing wail may never wail again. Morning hangovers frolic and revel in their revelry! The humming vapours of foul and foul speech, - the silence is shattered to splinters in our land!

And now the darkness is uncertain enough: in thin, scaly membranes, armour-hard, the frost chases on the smooth asphalt carpet! - Here now the street's wail no more is wailing. The fireflies in the dusky blind are glowing. The trees have exchanged their love for thorned icicles! Like a clod, my clamp-legs prick, tormented by the staggering pain!


The skeleton-arms of the trees: ice-cold losers. Crows rest on them, fluttering death-stones. The soul now tightens still more, To reassemble the earthly reckoning, unfolding again: What have I done, and what more could I have done?! - Of my sins unforgotten thou shalt recall, I never laughed with abandon, for I did willfully

I saw my own shadow grow old beside me as a faithful, unforgiven cellmate: yet I am but twenty-nine years old! With a scowl, and standing on a pike, I protested against the wolf-house of multitudes, and my shrieking tears, like barbed-wire prisoners, I cast out

against the envious haters! Wiping from my face the helmet of my heels, Wearing the scarlet stamp of the spit of the eye, I yet rose in one piece! Whenever fairies of ladylike countenance, women of angelic compassion, passed before me, - I bowed in vain with excessive courtesy, before starry eyes...